Abdul El-Sayed has won the race for United States Senator from Michigan, making him the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. That’s a huge accomplishment, considering the new wave of Islamophobia generated by the president and his cohort… and Dr. El-Sayed did it without abandoning trans Americans to their doom.
On Sunday, Dr. El-Sayed sat down with horrible loser Ross Douthat, a 60 Minutes correspondent at Bari Weiss’ deconstructed CBS News, to talk shop. They had a lengthy chat (more than 60 minutes, if you can believe it!), but what interested me most was when Douthat tried to pin down Dr. El-Sayed on what he described as “culture wars.”
“A lot of Muslims,” Douthat said, “have traditionalist, conservative positions on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, transgenderism… do you feel any tension between your faith, and being [a champion of] a very socially liberal, culturally liberal party?”
“This is the irony of Trump’s line of attack on me,” Dr. El-Sayed answered. “Which is like, ‘Oh, he’s both an Islamist and a socialist,’ and… well, I’m a constitutionalist. Under the constitution, I think rights are rights are rights are rights. The minute you assent to government taking anybody’s rights… you are assenting to government taking everybody’s rights.”
It’s an excellent answer, and the correct one. Dr. El-Sayed recognizes that a true champion of civil liberties cannot, under any circumstances, acquiesce on the rights of one group to placate another. He goes on, “It is a responsibility for us to stand up against the risk of government making incursions on any of our rights, to build the kind of coalition where any of us who have our rights at risk are standing up and fighting for all of our rights.”
This isn’t the first time Dr. El-Sayed has shown support for the rights of our community. In August, he told Fox News’ Jesse Waters, “I just think the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of healthcare you should have and if you’re a minor, it’s between you and your doctor and your parents.”
He expressed the same sentiment at a campaign event at Michigan State University back in September. “I went to whole-ass medical school,” he told the crowd, having earned his Doctor of Medicine degree at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 2014. “Everybody I graduated with also went to whole-ass medical school. They are the experts that a patient wants to see when they seek care. And the decision about what healthcare is necessary ought to be held between a patient—and/or their parents if they’re under the age of 18—and their doctor. That’s it.”
It’s a remarkably strong stance, considering how many of his contemporaries have rolled over on the rights of trans Americans. Dr. El-Sayed’s refusal to pivot away from us, and subsequent win in Michigan, makes one thing very clear: Liberal wins in American politics do not require trans people playing the part of sacrificial lamb. It turns out, in fact, that most Americans are sick and tired of the rank fascism that has infested our government for the last two years.
Perhaps the greatest example of this pushback against fascism is in Texas, where Democrats have taken a U.S. Senate seat and the governorship… despite interference from the state’s wealthiest conservative, Elon Musk, a foreign national who spent half a billion dollars in the last two years trying to sway American elections.
There have been some disappointing victories, of course. Despite running abhorrently transphobic campaigns, Amy Acton, Josh Turek, and Annie Andrews won their races in Ohio, Iowa, and South Carolina respectively. These are bittersweet results for our community; conservative victories in those states certainly would have been a terrible result for the trans people living there… but will the victories of traitorous Democrats be any better? Will the broader Democratic party’s takeaway from these victories be that the lives of trans Americans are disposable?
I don’t know. What I do know is that the U.S. Senate received its first Muslim senator last night. America elected its first Black woman governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, as well. Bentley Hudgins is now the first out nonbinary member of the Georgia General Assembly. I believe that Americans have rejected American fascism and its trappings: racism, homophobia, transphobia. I hope that this will lead to a brighter future for all of us.
It isn’t a perfect victory… but it is a victory.
