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I’ve been going back and forth on posting anything rebloggable about Eden Knight, because simply posting something feels like…such a non-action. But it’s worse to say nothing at all, and the people who loved her clearly want her story to be known. So I’ll try.
A Saudi trans woman named Eden Knight died by suicide after her parents hired two American “fixers” and a Saudi lawyer to traffic her back to Saudi Arabia and forcibly detransition her. Her loved ones have put together a document about this tragedy in hopes that something can be done:
I feel like the cultural piece of this hasn’t get discussed, and i understand why; I’ve seen plenty of utterly sickening commentary from people who can’t be normal about the idea of a trans Saudi, but I feel I’m in a position to break the silence around this, as being a queer Arab myself, the nuances aren’t lost on me. So I’ll try that too:
Arab culture is patriarchal (like most cultures are), communal, and honor-based, which contributes to many Arab parents wholeheartedly believing that they own their children and that they need to control them to prevent any “dishonorable” behavior, even at the cost of death. This is not unique to Arab culture, and I’m really simplifying here, but this is why honor killings happen, and I think it’s remiss to not name the honor-based violence at play in what happened to Eden. She threatened her family’s honor by not adhering to the gendered role coercively assigned to her, and so they inflicted the conditions that led to her death upon her. And I can guarantee that, had her parents not had the money to hire some of their fellow monsters to destroy their daughter, they’d have recruited extended family to stalk her or found another way instead. Honor culture is self-policing.
It’s also remiss to not name the other forces that killed Eden: transmisogyny in both the United States and Saudi Arabia—the latter obviously being worse than the former, but fleeing to the former DID NOT PROTECT HER, so USAmericans can hold off from being smug about her being Saudi, thanks—and her migrant status. The State, capital-S, and its borders assisted Eden’s parents in this.
We need support networks that can actually help trans people with complex cultural/legal situations like this. We need support networks to prevent honor-based violence, which primarily impacts women and LGBT people of any gender. “Just cut off your parents” isn’t helpful when you’ve been raised to internalize this level of guilt and shame, and it especially isn’t helpful when your parents are willing to find you and abduct you to protect their image. There needs to be SOMETHING to prevent tragedies as horrific as this. I can’t say I have the answers. But there needs to be some understanding of how far this honor shit can go, how it can cross borders, and how even people who have found community outside their abusive families can still be very vulnerable to it.
I’m so sorry, Eden. You deserved the world. Rest in peace.