When Dr Bret Alderman and I interviewed Jasmin Faulk some time ago, she asked us to delay posting the interview as she feared the pushback she would receive. Sadly, in the time since that conversation, Jasmin has lost her job as a result of this issue.
Yet everything Jasmin said was true. She isn’t incendiary. She speaks with clarity, composure, and conviction about her life, her values, and her understanding of women’s rights.
The daughter of an Italian mother and an Arabian father, Jasmin Faulk’s early experiences of oppressive gender norms in her childhood home of Saudi Arabia made her keenly aware of the salience of sex differences.
In this interview, Jasmin tells her story of growing up as a girl in a repressive Islamic society. Even though her family were quite progressive, Jasmin explains how she concealed the start of her periods in an effort to delay the time when she would have to start wearing the hijab, a full body covering women are obliged to put on under Islamic modesty laws. Sexist double standards were everywhere, and Jasmin describes feeling trapped by laws and customs that made her dependent on a male guardian’s permission to do everything, from leaving the house to travelling abroad.
When she finally ‘escaped’, fleeing Saudi Arabia for America in 1999, she embraced the liberal values she found in the USA. Naturally curious about different experiences, she welcomed the culture of free speech, tolerance of difference and the freedom to question ideas. She spoke out about women’s rights, drawing on her own experiences to highlight the challenges faced by women in authoritarian Islamic societies.
During the COVID pandemic, Jasmin became aware of a tone shift. Always instinctively respectful of transgender identities, she slowly became aware of the dogmatic mantra that “transwomen ARE women”. When she politely tried to question this idea, she was met with overwhelming hostility and a culture of ‘no debate’ that was completely at odds with her values. In this interview, she explains how feminists in Western societies have lost sight of the sex based differences that are the basis of women’s oppression in many non-Western society.
Follow Jasmin Faulk on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jasmin.faulk/
Visit Jasmin Faulk’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@jasmin-faulk
Read Jasmin Faulk’s book, The Last Sandstorm: A Memoir
