by Sabene Rizvi
There is a certain joy in being known â in being accepted as you are. When that feeling becomes too much to hold, it spills over; like calling your best friend, your real best friend, and crying your heart out. Saying, âIâm crying into a hotel towel right now,â and hearing her laugh on the other end: âUse a tissue at least.â
This was my reaction at Creating Change, an LGBTQ+ movement conference held this past January in Washington, D.C. I cried not from pain, but from acceptance. When you grow up as I did, with a sexuality like mine, you spend a long time negotiating who you are allowed to be â even as others sometimes attempt to define your faith for you.
At Creating Change, I said aloud: âIâm Muslim, and Iâm pro-choice, and Iâm demisexual.â For the first time in a long time, I felt held in all of it â not asked to reconcile myself, not asked to shrink, but accepted as whole. I belonged to myself, and my identity did not need to be defended in order to exist with dignity.
I am a demisexual Pakistani-American, a brown woman who stands at 6â0â and is plus-sized, the daughter of a Shia Muslim Pakistani mother and a Sunni Muslim Pakistani father who grew up in Nigeria. In my 21 years of life, I have rarely felt digestible to narrow religious fundamentalism. At times, it has meant social alienation; at times, it has meant being made to feel that parts of me were incompatible with belonging at all.
In 2014, I was 9 years old in Pakistan, where religious education is mandated regardless of school type. On my first day, my Islamiat teacher asked me to recite the First Kalima â the declaration of being a Muslim â by memory. I said, âI donât know.â
I grew up in a secular home. I still do not know the First Kalima by memory. My answer was not defiance. It was honesty.
My teacher responded with anger, not curiosity. She berated me for something I had never been taught. A classmate added, âEven my 6-year-old brother knows this.â That may have been true in her world. It was not in mine. The openness of my parentsâ home was treated as an absence to be corrected rather than understood. I was a child still losing her teeth, standing in a white uniform.
I was often asked, âSo what religion are you?â I never had an answer that fit neatly. Sometimes I said I had religious freedom at home. Sometimes I said nothing. Teachers would ask if I prayed, or if my mother prayed. These were not questions a child should have to answer in a classroom. They assumed a belonging that was never mine.
The classroom wasnât only policing faith identity â it was also shaping girlsâ understanding of ownership over their bodies: my Islamiat teacher once told a classroom full of young girls that menstruation meant a woman was ready for marriage, that her body belonged to a future husband. I remember sitting there quietly, unsettled by how quickly girlhood was spoken of as something already ending.
As I grew older, I saw how those ideas followed women beyond the classroom. Women who worked in my family home carried the weight of expectations placed on them long before they had choices of their own.
One woman I knew had been married at 12. She asked me for help accessing birth control â she was already a mother of four, and I remember the helplessness of being too young to understand how to help. Even then, I understood that something about the situation was profoundly unfair: that decisions about her body, her health, and her future had long belonged to everyone except her. Years later, I would come to recognize how often religious fundamentalism narrows peopleâs autonomy in both quiet and visible ways.
Growing up in a secular home within a deeply religious society shaped how I understood the relationship between faith, power, and belonging long before I had language for it. On Christmas Day in 2011, my father took me to a holiday show in Lahore. We missed it, but found a bakery and went home with carrot cake. It was a small choice, but it stayed with me: his quiet openness, his ease with difference, his refusal to make joy conditional on doctrine, his pluralistic way of life.
In 2025, while studying abroad in Croatia, my umbrella flew away in the wind. The owner of a winery in Ston, a strict Catholic, handed me his without hesitation, then ran after mine. It was a small gesture, but it carried the same logic I have come to recognize across countries and faiths: care without interrogation.
What my teacher denied me was not just patience, but care. Caring for people should not begin with a question of faith, but with the recognition of their humanity. People of all beliefs â and none â deserve the freedom to exist without shame.
When that principle is absent, the consequences begin small: a child humiliated in a classroom. But they do not remain small. Sometimes the consequence is a woman asking for help she should never have had to beg for in the first place. Over time, those moments accumulate into a world where belonging, dignity, and bodily autonomy become conditional.
As an adult, I have experienced how restrictions on reproductive health care in the United States â shaped by religious fundamentalism allowed to invade public policy and a lack of care â can shape autonomy in deeply personal ways, including access to birth control used to manage chronic illness.
The threat of Christian Nationalism to limit who is fully understood and who is not, who is cared for and who is not, can quietly expand until it determines who is seen as belonging at all.
But I have also seen another way.
I have seen it in a father who bought a carrot cake on Christmas Day. In strangers who offered help without asking for an explanation. In small acts of generosity that asked for nothing in return.
Pluralism, in practice, is not abstract. It is quiet, daily, and deeply human. It is what makes a classroom safe, what makes a stranger kind, what makes difference livable.
It is what allowed me, for the first time, to say out loud: âIâm Muslim, and Iâm pro-choice, and Iâm demisexualâ â and to be met not with questions, but with acceptance.
Sabene Rizvi is a member of Americans Unitedâs Youth Organizing Fellowship program. The views expressed here are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Americans United.
