By Umme Kulsoom Arif
Seattle, Washington. March 15, 2024. 9:00AM.
The presentation room is small and its audience even smaller, with just about six or seven seated in a space meant to fit thirty listeners. I count myself as apart from them, seated nervously at the front of the room with my fellow panelists and professors all with fascinating and powerful subjects of interest — true scholars, honored in academia, years of experience and dedicated research behind them.
And then there’s me — an interloper.
Existing on the outskirts of spaces is not an unfamiliar feeling to me. At the 2024 Association for Asian Studies Conference, I was a non-academic, a formerly practicing attorney now working at a university as an academic counselor. This may have been fine to me, were I a mere attendee, a voyeur on the outside of the conversation, observing and learning. Barely noticed, but not enough to be spoken to.
Unfortunately for me and my imposter syndrome, I had a paper to present.
I chose to write Boxed-In: Considering the Impact of FGM/C on Queerness and Sexuality in the South Asian Diaspora in America as a scholarly personal narrative because — in truth — I wasn’t sure what Queer perspectives were out there for FGM/C survivors and did not have the emotional courage to put out a call for voices. I was familiar with activist artist and writer Dena Igusti, whose work and open existence as a non-binary survivor was what gave me the courage to attach non-binary to myself and my survivor status, and though our experiences mirrored each other, I found myself struggling to find academic research surrounding what it meant to be the victim of a very gendered act while simultaneously wanting to reject being seen as that gender.
FGM/C happened to me because someone else decided I was a woman long before I was old enough to understand what womanhood and girlhood meant, much less able to process what it meant for me. As a result of it, I will always be associated with my “dead” womanhood, further denied my agency and reminded of such every time “she” and “her” are used in association with me. Therefore, selfishly, I wrote my paper to reclaim my identity and make myself whole.
It sort of worked.
The day before our scheduled panel presentation, as we rehearsed our various speeches, I corrected the panel moderator — my speaker bio had “they” and “their” in it, instead of “she” and “her” — and then stood to practice my speech before my fellow speakers.
I anticipated it — strict adherence to (incorrect, outdated, prescriptivist, cruel) “rules” of grammar pretend that the singular “they” is an impossibility in English — but anticipation certainly doesn’t stop that low-grade invalidation from hurting. My speech even called this out, promising, “I can even guarantee you this — once you leave this room, once I am done talking — you will forget. You will perceive me — surrounded by the trappings of my assigned womanhood — and you will forget. So you will fall back on that old familiar violence — she and her.”
I was right.
The day of the presentation, my speaker biography is read aloud and — despite the words they and their written on the page — she and her pour out from the moderator presenting me. Looking back, I imagine the audience saw me wince before I began speaking.
Dena Igusti called this experience — this perpetual association with cis-womanhood — a “quiet violence.” They aren’t wrong. As a non-binary survivor, I have to weigh my physical safety every time I enter a survivor space, or engage in anti-FGM/C activism. Will my identity be respected? Will gender-affirming care once more be equated to FGM/C, forcing me to out myself in non-affirming company in an effort to defend the rest of my trans and non-binary community? Will the push to ban FGM/C on the state level be co-opted by hate the way it nearly has been in Texas through bills like SB249 or similar bills in many other states?
On some level, this feels intentional. In survivor spaces, womanhood is elevated because of FGM/C’s attack on it. My imposition in these spaces is allowed as a courtesy, and I reluctantly accept “she” as a courtesy in return, accepting the violence that erases my identity in an effort to receive solidarity and support for the violence that granted me it.
At the conference, I am both unable and unwilling to make this concession. Accustomed to butchery as I am, I speak to a teary-eyed audience of the ways I — as an example of non-binary survivorship, should more than I exist — carve my many identities into pieces to make myself more palatable to the disparate communities I am desperate to belong to. I call out this indifference to queer survivorship — likely the reason so few exist publicly, unable to comfortably come out and seek necessary support — and the way the movement to end FGM/C quietly includes trans-exclusionary voices, both because TERFs (defined by Oxford Languages as: a person whose views on gender identity are considered hostile to transgender people, or who opposes social and political policies designed to be inclusive of transgender people.) love to co-opt the term “genital mutilation” to make the case against gender-affirming care and because the inherent attack on womanhood that is FGM/C leads to many forgetting that those who don’t identify as women can still be victimized.
Make no mistake — I am grateful for the opportunity to attend the AAS Conference and the support given by Sahiyo to make that possible. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak and make even the slightest effort at raising awareness and using storytelling as activism. That does not erase the profound loneliness and struggle of being a minority within a minority, double-marginalized and forced to choose between identity and activism.
It can be annoying. I get it. Being publicly corrected, interrupted mid-thought by someone correcting your use of pronouns. But annoyance should weigh less when the other option is invalidation and the acceptance of that invalidation.
Pride is coming. Pride is here. I want to take pride in myself, my whole self — and I know other survivors do as well. Queerness is as much a part of me as survivorship, an intersection that should open more doors than it closes. Let us keep those doors open, and be seen in this community of survivors — moving forward not just for one but for all.
