Ameera Sultana Khan
she/he, United States of America
(FROM AN INTERVIEW CONDUCTED OVER EMAIL IN 2020)
Ameera Sultana Khan (she/he)
Q: Who is Ameera Sultana Khan (she/he)?
concretely:
a transfemme bigender Bengali-American Midwestern Muslim who loves her wife, uncommon scents, God or the lack thereof, and the gays. You can wrest her children's cartoons and Owl City playlists from her dead hands. She works in tech, deals with his trauma through laughing about it, and loves learning human and coding languages.
a girl trying to find her place in a world where she fits into very few places and systems. official and unofficial student of Islamic law and tradition. keenly interested in borders.
favorite scents: petrichor, frankincense, cave mineral, madras curry, and the pheromones of people she finds hot.
cosmically:
a body recycled from stardust and shit. a hopelessly romantic lover. a once ruthlessly logical engineer. a child of living ancestors whose transphobia pushed me out from under their care, and a child of dead-but-still-here ancestors who protect and guide and affirm me in the most radical ways. one who seeks to die before her death, and one who seeks rebirth. one who sees divinity in all life, and revelation in personal experience. holder of at least one sacred story. a countdown of breaths.
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Q: Who is “One who seeks to die before her death, and one who seeks rebirth”?
a mantra in muslim sufi tradition is "die before you die." that is experiencing the death of the ego, to see your microscopic place on earth juxtaposed with the vastness of the universe, to see that vastness replicated within the miraculous body we denote the self, before your actual physical death. it can get more formal than that, but that's the gist.
rebirth is the awakening after this death. it is a shock to the status quo of your life so that you may rise from your own ashes.
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Q: Has your faith given you a unique understanding of your identity as transfemme?
my faith is one of many that affirm the holiness of trans people, rejecting the colonial infections of patriarchy and white supremacy. i am sustained by teachings of history and theology which span different centuries, different cultures, different creeds. they are all testament that we are here, we have always been here, and we shall always stay.
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Q: What has your trans experience meant to you?
it's meant i've lost the world to gain the universe. i lived through hating myself because of the myopic, homophobic way i was taught my faith, and bounced back from it to love myself endlessly and unapologetically by evolving my theology. it's meant i've endured social death upon coming out of the closet and lost many of my closest friends and my community.
but in exchange, i have gained community with far more people. activists who shake the earth and speak truth to power, people thriving like roses on concrete while fully well knowing the vast breadth of the oppression they face, fiery lovers and passionate laughers and bulwarks for cultivating justice on earth before it is done in heaven.
i've lost the world to gain the universe. perhaps we must all destroy our attachment to this world so that we may be given the universe, death before death.
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Q: What is spirituality to you?
it is to walk with a grounded understanding of where divinity lies and how it should be worshiped. it is to respect the divine being above the seven heavens and her rules and guidance, as well as to worship the divine within myself and those humans around me. it is recognizing that as "kings" on top of the food chain of animals, it is we who are the most dependent upon Mother Earth and everything on her. recognizing the divinity in the ground we walk upon, the divine spirits of every tree and mountain and river, the divinity within all the cells forming our limbs and specialized organs and the miracle of a mind conscious of itself, the divinity of pain and joy and love and betrayal, the divinity in birth and death and spring and winter. it is seeing all religions as snapshots into the divine consciousness which surpasses all intellectual or bodily or understanding.
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Q: What would you suggest people who want to be allies but struggle against internalized transphobia can do to grow?
as paraphrased from Lama Mingyur Rinpoche, if you are drowning in the river, you cannot see the river for what it is. and as a reminder, the gender binary itself is a white supremacist structure.
the first step requires people to calm themselves, remove themselves and their emotional investments in the status quo, and look at the situation with clarity of thought, accuracy of information, systemic analysis of structures, and divested of desire for control.
then, you must see how unconscious biases perpetuate the system. in the example of white supremacy in the medical industry, we can see how white doctors are likely to not prescribe pain medications to black bodies because of the presumption that black bodies can tolerate more pain than a white body. in the case of transphobia, we can use the example of the “trans broken arm syndrome”, where a doctor will assume the reason for any unrelated medical problem (like a broken arm) is related to someone being transgender or on hormones. the examples can go on.
then, once you see the structure, you must examine how you are an actor in this structure, how your own unconscious biases perpetuate the white supremacist, and how your tendency to center yourself and your own feelings in discussions about structure or systems is a symptom of you lacking in either your awareness or your own ability to confront the white supremacist in you.
you must repeat this process of mediation upon structures frequently if you are invested in seeing the truth, be it because you are in pursuit of a Truth outside yourself, or because you have a loved one who is BIPOC or incarcerated or unhoused or, in the case of this question, transgender.
