Permanently Deleted
Let me reframe this for you.
You’re a very religious young man, fighting age. You have followed the Quran and the hadiths to the best of your ability. You safeguarded your sister’s chastity from leering goatherders all her life. And then: your family has been killed by western interventionism. You have no support system.
You find yourself in a refugee camp, and a few white people gathered are talking about socialism and defying the west. You listen closely.
You realize that they are referring to each other as deer. At first you assume this is some kind of code, but then you notice that they insist everyone call them deer.
Baffled and disappointed, you lie down on your cot. You listen for the buzz of a drone overhead, and fall asleep because you don’t care anymore.
Your version is accurate, yes, but it doesn’t address the point: are highly religious people from unindustrialized areas of the Middle East going to readily accept people that want to be referred to–not, from their perspective, as a man or woman, but as a cervid?
The answer is no. So the next question is: you have people who can be radicalized leftward or rightward due to the precariousness of their position. Do you turn them away because they do not follow our norms?
Look, if during the American Civil War we got rid of every single Union soldier who wasn’t on the cutting edge of progressive abolitionist and feminist thought, the north would’ve lost. The fact of the matter is that you’re going to have to include a lot of people who are at different stages of moving towards that intersectional egalitarian thinking.
