Officials at a Tempe mosque have come under fire after deciding one of its members, a transgender woman, could not pray in her facility of choice, barring her from a prayer space where she felt most comfortable.
Leaders at the Islamic Community Center of Tempe recently told Sumayyah Dawud, a 30-year-old transgender woman and well-known Muslim rights activist that she could not pray in the women's prayer section during prayer services.
After attending services at this location for two years, Dawud said she was first approached by Nedal Fayad, chairman of the ICC Board of Directors, about her gender on July 7.
She said she told Fayad that she is a woman and even offered her Arizona driver's license and U.S. passport as proof, but he did not accept those documents and continued to push for more evidence.
"This meeting kept going on and on, where nothing that I really said was good enough," Dawud said. "He kept wanting more evidence. In this meeting, it eventually came up where he said, 'Well, actually, I've done a public records search or a background investigation.'"
Dawud said Fayad had mentioned that he paid $35 to complete the background investigation and found personal information such as her birth certificate and two former arrest records, one where she was listed as male and one as female. The medical community accepts Dawud as a female, she said, and her transition is complete "medically and otherwise."
"He still wanted some kind of proof," Dawud said. "That's where this whole medical document came in. I said, 'OK, I have this medical document from the doctor from several years ago,' just a document from my primary care physician at the time that was real simple, real short, that basically acknowledged that I had gone through this transition and am now a female."
Dawud's said her legal documentation has identified her as female since 2011. She converted to Islam in 2013, a community where she has not had a problem with her gender expression until recently.
Dawud said Fayad then accepted her primary physician's medical documentation and assured her that their meeting would remain confidential and that he would ask for her permission before disclosing any information to the other board members.
"I asked him, 'How are we going to resolve these rumors?'" she said. "(Fayad) said if anyone else continues to complain, saying I'm not a woman or anything like that, he's simply going to say that he did his due diligence, he met with me, I am a woman, and that's it. No one's going to know any private, medical matters."
Dawud said that was the last she heard about the issue until Aug. 21, when members of the mosque gathered for Jumu'ah, their Friday noon prayer. Afterward, a fellow Muslim came up to Dawud and began confronting her about her gender expression.
"After the prayer is over, they're making announcements and this lady comes up to me and she said, 'You can't be here,'" Dawud said. "I had this confused look and she's like, 'With the women.' I was like, 'What are you talking about?' and she said, 'Yeah, we had a meeting about this.'"
Dawud said after the prayer she was immediately drawn into a private and spontaneous meeting with four male leaders, one of whom began making serious accusations about her.
"This board member I didn't know said (I) had agreed to stay out of the women's section," she said. "I never said that to anyone. He goes, 'Yeah, you had this meeting back in July with Nedal, and you had promised to him that you'd stay out of the women's section.'"
Dawud continued to deny the allegation and said she knew Fayad broke their confidentiality agreement by sharing details — real and alleged — of their meeting in July.
Fayad said several doctors on the board had seen the primary physician's document and did not approve because it only mentioned a mental transformation, not a physical one, Dawud said.
Until she could provide proper medical documents, board members said she would have to dress and pray with the men, actions Dawud said she did not feel she had to take because she is in fact a woman.
"(Fayad) said, 'Either you do this or I call the police and put a restraining order on you,'" she said. Dawud has not returned to the property for prayer services since August.
During an interview with Fayad, he said Dawud was not barred from the property and could continue to pray with the women as long as she provides proper medical documentation showing that she has female biology.
Mosque officials posted a copy of ICC Tempe's transgender policy on its Facebook page after the incident before shortly deleting it. The Arizona chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations said they had no comment on the issue.
The policy is shown below from Dawud's Facebook account.
The policy, which Fayad said has been in place for a while, was not meant to be placed on social media and was a "really bad PR move."
Part of the policy, which bars transgender individuals from using gender-specific spaces at venues where ICC Tempe holds its functions, could and would be litigated if it is not changed, Dawud said.
Fayad said gender segregation plays a major role in the Islamic religion, to the point where men and women do not touch each other in a physical manner, an issue that he said came up with Dawud — referring to her once as her male birth name — many times.
The issue, Fayad said, was first brought up after Dawud allegedly shared her transgender situation with several community members, who then went to board members with the concern that a male was interacting with females.
"The whole story came up when she shared with some community members or some close friends in her community, 'Hey, listen, I'm actually a male. I've had a gender transformation, I was born a male' ... that kind of stuff," he said. "Those community members came to us with the concern that this person is a male, using the female restrooms, coming up, giving women hugs."
Fayad said he tried to diffuse the situation by suggesting Dawud refrain from contact with other females and offering that she use the gender-neutral bathroom located in the board's office.
"When that came up to us the first time, I personally asked her, 'Listen, if you're going to come attend, please do not make physical contact with the females because they are assuming you are a female,'" he said. "When you're making physical contact with them, you're kind of deceiving them."
Fayad said that agreement worked for some time, until another community member approached Dawud about giving another female a hug and called her a man.
Relations between Fayad and Dawud were not always hostile, a statement they both agree on. Fayad said when Dawud originally came to him, he was more than willing to get behind her.
Sumayyah Dawud from The State Press on Vimeo.
"She told me she had gender dysphoria, and all of these people rallying and saying she shouldn't be here," he said. "I said, 'If you can prove to me that you are a female, I will stand behind you, I will shove this document in the board's face and tell them this person is a female, and if anybody harasses you or tells you anything, then they will be asked to leave the community center.'"
Fayad said his goal was to prove to the community that Dawud is biologically a female, but the medical document she provided that said she completed gender transformation only proved a mental transformation.
"We did a little bit of research and found out that it was just psychological transformation which she had completed," he said. "It wasn't an actual sex change or anything like that. She still has the biology of a man but the gender of a woman."
Fayad said he hopes to welcome Dawud back into the community as long as she provides medical documentation of a physical transformation, Fayad said.
"My hope was for the document she gave me the first time to say that she had completed the gender transformation, the sexual gender transformation, to where we could close this chapter and have her treated like a woman in this mosque," he said. "In Islam, the biological state of a person is what's looked at, there isn't really a separation between gender and a biological state."
Imam Johari, a faith leader with Dar Al-Hijrah in Fall Church, Virginia, said traditionally men and women pray in separate areas where they can not see each other and it is up to the individual mosques to uphold these practices.
"One of the things we have to recognize while being accommodating to the membership of the mosque, church, synagogue, that houses of worship are not public accommodation," he said. "These areas are private property. So whatever the rules of decorum are, then the public is obligated to abide by the decorum in any private space."
The Fiqh division of the Islamic Society of North America Council, a national religious council for the Muslim community, has been reviewing this issue and will issue guidelines for mosques in the U.S. to follow, Johari said.
"I think the more fundamental issue here is opening the door and asking a question: If a person is transgender, which section do they sit in?" he said. "The council has not issued yet guidelines for mosques. Even though the number of transgender Muslims is incontestably small, the council is taking up the issue to give a full ruling on the issue of transgender people."
Johari said the council will most likely point to the history of eunuchs, men who had been castrated, to determine its ruling. He said in the Islamic religion, eunuchs were well-developed a century ago but there still continues to be no guidance in today's Islamic culture.
Although there has been no official ruling on how mosques should handle these conflicts, Johari said he believes a person's legal identity should be enough to classify them into one gender or another but admits he is unsure of what to do for people in transition.
"While we wait for their ruling, I believe that it is appropriate that, if an individual's gender identity is called into question for whatever reason, that simply providing their identification should be sufficient," he said. "Your driver's license, if it has a picture of me and it says male, then I should be in the male section and if my driver's license says female, then I should sit in the female section."
Johari said, at the end of the day, the issue should not lie with identifying the genders of individual members, but with following in line with the ideals of their Creator.
"The priority is — the whole idea is to try to connect to our Creator," he said. "So, I'm sure to the degree that the objective is to connect to one's Creator and then to find out what that Creator wants us to do and put our desires in line with him. I believe our fundamental priorities are to address (our Creator) and not concerns about what a person's genetic or physiology as it relates to gender."
Christopher O'Connor, board member for Transspectrum of Arizona, said Dawud's situation represents a new low for transgender discrimination.
"To me, it's almost like a new level of religious segregation," he said. "It's kind of weird to me because I kept wondering, 'Since when did religious spaces want to request medical information for their members?'"
According to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, 19 transgender women have been murdered in 2015. In the wake of this trend, O'Connor said forcing Dawud to use male spaces could lead to physical violence against her.
"Seeing as she was put into the male spaces because that is the sex she was assigned at birth, for her in particular, it could lead to hate violence," he said. "It could be detrimental to her if she went into a male bathroom or a male locker room, anything like that. She could be assaulted, she could be forced to endure psychologically damaging things, people could call her names."
Religions, even ones as ancient and widely-practiced as Islam, can evolve over time by educating themselves about transgender rights, O'Connor said. He said that some members of religions that segregate spaces by gender could be against or even unaware of the inclusion of transgender people.
"It's a matter of educating and bringing awareness," he said. "If you have a lack of education about transgender people or members, you end up creating barriers instead of creating inclusive spaces."
Dawud said eventually she would like to meet with the entire board and have an open discussion about the issue at hand.
"We have enough problems as Muslims with discrimination and so forth that the last thing we need is disputes among ourselves," she said. "I would like to see resolution, but ICC, basically the next step is if they're open to this, I would like to meet with their entire board, also bring people with me who are supporting of me and to bring in some research — Islamic research, scientific research, so forth — and have a healthy, open discussion about the issue."
UPDATE: The photo captions have been updated with Dawud's involvement with civil rights issues.
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