A Middle Eastern Perspective | Jasmin Faulk
2 April 2026
With Jasmin Faulk
Global
Jasmin Faulk grew up under Saudi Arabia's system of legally enforced gender segregation before emigrating to the United States, where she encountered a different but structurally similar pressure to silence dissent. Her testimony bridges two systems: one that weaponised biological sex to restrict women's freedom, and one where acknowledging biological sex is becoming its own orthodoxy. At a time when European courts and legislatures are actively debating sex-based protections, her comparative perspective carries considerable weight.
Jasmin Faulk was born in Saudi Arabia and raised inside the kingdom's formal apparatus of gender segregation. In this episode she describes the specific moment when girls are required to cover themselves in public, the social expectations that surround it, and the broader web of legal restrictions that defined women's access to space, movement, and autonomy. Her memoir, The Last Sand Storm, documents this in detail, and the conversation draws heavily on lived knowledge rather than abstraction. What she describes was not custom alone but law backed by surveillance. Fear of informants shaped daily behaviour from childhood onward. The state drew the line between permitted and forbidden life explicitly along the axis of biological sex, which meant that sex — as a legal and social category — was inescapable and consequential in the most immediate sense. For women in that system, the question of whether biological sex matters was not philosophical. The episode's most distinctive contribution is Faulk's comparison between what she experienced in Saudi Arabia and what she later encountered in parts of American academic life. She argues that polarised reactions to dissent can produce a horseshoe effect in which opposing forms of fundamentalism converge on the same coercive logic: enforce the orthodoxy, punish deviation, and silence the questioner. The Bret Weinstein episode at Evergreen State College serves in the discussion as a concrete illustration of that pattern operating within a liberal institution. For European audiences familiar with debates about academic freedom and institutional capture, the parallel is not difficult to locate closer to home. Central to her argument is the claim that biological sex remains foundational to women's safety and healthcare. This is not a rhetorical position arrived at theoretically; it is grounded in experience of a society where sex-based legal distinctions determined whether a woman could leave the house, be seen in public without a male guardian, or access institutions. European legislatures and courts have been grappling with how to weigh protections grounded in biological sex against expanding definitions of gender identity, and testimony from someone who has lived inside both a sex-enforcing legal order and a gender-identity-affirming cultural environment offers a comparative frame that domestic European debate rarely supplies. The conversation also addresses men's position inside restrictive gender systems, acknowledging that rigid enforcement of sex roles extracts costs from men as well as women, though in different forms. This prevents the analysis from settling into a simple binary and adds nuance to the broader argument about what happens when societies organise themselves around immutable biological characteristics rather than individual choice. For the European context, where free-expression protections, sex-based legal rights, and ideological conformity in public institutions are all live policy questions, the episode offers a perspective almost entirely absent from the usual range of voices. Faulk's trajectory — from a state that used biological sex as a mechanism of legal control, through the culture wars of American academia, to a considered defence of sex as a category essential to women's rights — traces a line that challenges easy assumptions on every part of the political spectrum.
