A Middle Eastern Perspective | Jasmin Faulk
Jasmin Faulk grew up under Saudi Arabia's strict gender apartheid before moving to the United States. In this episode she connects those formative experiences of surveillance and enforced conformity to the cultural battles now unfolding in the West — arguing that religious fundamentalism and gender ideology share a horseshoe dynamic: opposed in politics, identical in method. For British listeners still absorbing the Cass Review's findings, her outside perspective on how institutions silence inconvenient voices is both clarifying and unsettling.
Jasmin Faulk grew up in Saudi Arabia before eventually moving to the United States, an experience she explores in her memoir The Last Sand Storm. In this episode she speaks with the Beyond Gender hosts about what it meant to be a girl in a society built around rigid gender segregation — where there is a specific, unremarked moment when girls must cover themselves in public, and where informal surveillance by neighbours shapes daily life as surely as any formal law. Her account is vivid and particular, but the questions it raises translate directly to the British context. She describes the mechanisms of control in detail: the legal restrictions on women's movement and conduct, the quiet rebellions available within those limits, and the way fear of being reported gradually internalises into self-censorship. Jasmin also considers the pressures placed on men inside such a system — a dimension of gender-segregated societies that rarely surfaces in Western commentary. For listeners familiar with Britain's own recent history of silenced clinicians and disinvited speakers, the portrait of a society that makes dissent too costly to voice is uncomfortably recognisable. The most striking argument in the episode is what Jasmin frames as a horseshoe: her contention that religious fundamentalism and progressive gender ideology, though politically opposite, converge in their methods. Both demand conformity on questions of sex and gender, both marginalise those who dissent, and both subordinate women's material interests to a higher ideological claim. Having lived under one form and then encountered the other in American academic life, she is placed to make the comparison from experience rather than theory. That comparison lands with particular force in Britain. The Cass Review revealed a clinical culture at the Tavistock where expressing caution about gender-related treatments for children could damage a career. Across the NHS, in schools and in many workplaces, raising questions about gender-identity ideology has attracted professional and social penalties disproportionate to the act of simply asking. Jasmin's account of living under explicit censorship — and then recognising its softer counterpart in liberal institutions — makes this pattern harder to dismiss as paranoia or exaggeration. Biological sex, she argues, remains materially significant for women's safety and health — not a philosophical position but a lived reality. That claim sits at the centre of debates currently unfolding in Britain: over the Equality Act's protections for single-sex services, over NHS guidance on gender-related care, and over what children are told in school. The episode closes with a discussion of the Bret Weinstein flashpoint at Evergreen State College, a reminder that British universities navigating their own free-speech conflicts are not operating on entirely new terrain.
