It’s difficult to be queer. It’s even more difficult to be queer and Muslim, especially if you’re a person of color. Yet Trump claims that his blanket ban on travelers from Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Libya and Iran does queer people a favor.
Trump cited LGBT rights as one of his reasons for the ban. He claimed that people from those seven countries “would oppress members of [marginalized] gender or sexual orientation.”
The assumption is, of course, that all people coming from these countries are Muslim, and that all Muslims are intolerant of LGBT people. He is completely erasing the growing population of Muslims who openly identify as transgender or queer.
The Advocate puts it well:
What happens now to the lesbian asylum seeker in search of a semblance of safety in the U.S.? What happens to the bisexual student who came here on a visa and now does not know if they can return? What happens to the parents of a transgender child, who can no longer come to the U.S. even to visit?”
In short, Donald Trump is not doing us any favors. He’s hurting members of the LGBT community hoping to find freedom in the United States, and he’s tearing apart the families of queer Muslims by barring them from entry.
Trump acts as if all non-Americans are heathens swarming on the United States in order to steal our resources, bomb our cities and impose their beliefs. He ignores the reason why so many people from these countries are traveling to the U.S. – the United States has destroyed many parts of their countries.
The U.N. recently confirmed that in Yemen, U.S. drone strikes have killed more innocent civilians than al Queda has. And the U.S. has been dragging the Iraq War out for nine long years, which makes it the third-longest war in U.S. history after Vietnam and Afghanistan.
What happens when you go to war with a country for a decade? You leave that country in ruins and force the citizens to become refugees – refugees that the U.S. is now denying entry.
So what can you do? Find a protest near you and fight back!