As a white trans woman, while I understand the fear a lot of folks have, it's still racism and we do still need to call it out.

I get it with being awkward around someone wearing hijab or other religious clothing, I'm awkward around people wearing crosses too. But there are plenty of Muslims who are cool with us or capable of a peaceful coexistence stalemate. I'm really hopeful about people like Ilhan Omar, Zohran Mamdani, and Abdul El-Sayed changing perceptions of Muslims.

But also, holy fuck white westerners need to understand that people can be Middle Eastern and not Muslim. I've met a trans lesbian atheist who had just gotten to America from Iran as a refugee. Palestine has a Muslim majority, but still has Jewish and Christian communities. Most middle eastern countries have traditional Christian communities, some have extremely old ones with wildly divergent traditions. There's also Baha'i and Zoroastrianism and possibly even some traditional paganism. And that's without even touching on the communistic atheists (such as in the PKK) or the fact that in every society a certain portion of people will hear all the religion stuff and just, not buy any of it, whether or not they can be openly atheist or convert to what they do buy.

And that was just for people from the Middle East, which isn't all (idk if it's even most) of them in my country (USA). In 2002 most Arab Americans were Christians. Regardless though, people of middle eastern descent are just like any other descendants of immigrants. An American of middle eastern descent has the ability to find themselves embracing a much more liberal approach to Islam than their parents or to be an atheist or whatever else, just like someone who's family came over from Ireland at the same time has with their family's Catholicism.

Sorry about the rant, but I grew up in post 9/11 America and I was fortunate enough to have plenty of exposure to Middle Eastern people over the course of my early life and in addition to seeing the people everyone was losing their shit to be racist towards I got to see a lot of the beauty in their cultures. And as I mentioned earlier I've seen people who had to flee the governments and social movements people actually have a problem with, we should be welcoming those people with wide open arms, not treating them with suspicion just because they look and sound Iranian or Iraqi or whatever.