A Middle Eastern Perspective | Jasmin Faulk
Jasmin Faulk grew up in Saudi Arabia, where biological sex was a legal fact enforced by the state, and later encountered what she describes as parallel silencing dynamics in American progressive institutions. In conversation with the Beyond Gender hosts, she argues that ideology — religious or secular — uses the female body as the site of control, and that biological sex remains fundamental to women's safety. For European audiences navigating debates about gender identity, free speech and institutional conformity, her comparative perspective offers a searching and rarely heard frame.
Jasmin Faulk was born in Saudi Arabia and grew up in a society where biological sex was not a social construct but a legal fact, enforced by the state. Her memoir, The Last Sand Storm, documents that upbringing. In this episode of Beyond Gender she speaks with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman about what it meant to be a girl in a country where sex-based rules governed almost every aspect of daily existence. She describes the specific moment in girlhood when girls are required to cover themselves in public, and the mechanisms by which that requirement was imposed and monitored. The fear of surveillance was constant; informal networks shaped behaviour as surely as written law. Women's freedom of movement, dress and association were curtailed by codified legal and social structures. Faulk recounts these experiences not as distant testimony but as a framework for understanding how ideology — whether theocratic or secular — uses the female body as the terrain on which power is exercised. That framework is what makes her contribution to current Western debates distinctive. Faulk draws a parallel between the silencing mechanisms she experienced in Saudi Arabia and those she encountered in American progressive institutions, including events at Evergreen State College involving Bret Weinstein. She describes a horseshoe dynamic in which polarised reactions to dissent — from the religious right and the identitarian left — converge on the same outcome: voices questioning the dominant ideology are not engaged with but removed. European listeners who have watched similar patterns play out across universities in the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and France will recognise the shape of it. For Europe the conversation arrives at a charged moment. The tension between defending women's sex-based rights and maintaining the coalitions that progressive politics depends on has become harder to manage across the continent. In Scandinavian countries that pioneered reforms to youth gender medicine, the debate has entered the mainstream. In France and Germany, academic freedom and the limits of identity-based campus culture are live political questions. Faulk's experience of moving between a theocratic society and a liberal one gives her a rare vantage point on both the freedoms Europe takes for granted and the ways those freedoms can be quietly narrowed. At the core of her argument is the insistence that biological sex is not incidental to women's safety and health but central to it. European clinical, legal and political institutions are currently renegotiating that question in ways that will have lasting consequences. From someone who has lived under a system that weaponised biological sex as a tool of control, the warning that erasing its legal recognition carries its own harms is not easily set aside.
