A Middle Eastern Perspective | Jasmin Faulk
2 April 2026
With Jasmin Faulk
Global
Jasmin Faulk's account of growing up in Saudi Arabia under rigid gender segregation offers an unexpected comparative lens on the Western debate about biological sex. Her "horseshoe" argument — that ideological certainty from any direction produces the same silencing effect — resonates with what the Cass Review found in UK clinical culture: an environment in which questioning the prevailing framework carried professional risk. Faulk grounds the conversation in what state enforcement of sex-based rules does to women's lives, and what the erosion of those categories may mean.
Jasmin Faulk grew up in Saudi Arabia before moving to the United States, a journey she has written about in her memoir The Last Sand Storm. In this episode she joins the Beyond Gender hosts to describe what it meant to be a girl in a society where biological sex determined almost every dimension of public life: the spaces available to you, what you were required to wear, who you could speak to, and who might be monitoring your behaviour. The conversation opens with a detailed account of the moment girls are expected to begin covering themselves in public, and the social and legal mechanisms that make that transition compulsory rather than chosen. Faulk describes the broader restrictions imposed on women and how the threat of surveillance — formal and informal — shaped the everyday decisions of girls and women around her. Her account is not a generalised condemnation but a precise description of how a legal system built around the significance of biological sex can become, in practice, a system of control. The comparison she draws to contemporary Western debates is structural rather than superficial. She argues that highly polarised ideological systems, whatever their origin, tend to converge on the same intolerance for dissent — a pattern she describes as a horseshoe cycle of fundamentalism. In her telling, the pressure to conform, the cancellation of those who ask unwelcome questions, and the sense that certain topics are simply off-limits operate by the same logic whether the enforcing institution is a theocratic state or a progressive-leaning university campus. This argument has specific purchase in the UK context. The Cass Review, published in April 2024, described a clinical and research environment in which professionals felt unable to raise concerns about the evidence base for paediatric gender medicine without risk to their careers. Dr Hilary Cass explicitly noted the difficulty of conducting independent research in an atmosphere of ideological pressure. Faulk's horseshoe analysis offers a comparative framework for understanding how that atmosphere develops and what sustains it — a framework built not from theory but from lived experience of a society that made ideological conformity a matter of law. The episode also gives time to men's experiences within restrictive gender systems, a dimension frequently absent from both progressive and conservative accounts of these debates. That willingness to hold complexity reflects the psychotherapeutic seriousness the Beyond Gender hosts bring to these conversations: attention to the full human picture rather than a straightforward assignment of victims and perpetrators. The conversation concludes with the controversy at Evergreen State College involving Bret Weinstein, which has become a reference point in discussions about illiberal tendencies in academic culture. Set alongside Faulk's account of her Saudi upbringing, the episode builds a consistent argument: that biological sex is a category whose legal and social significance has always mattered most to women, and that the suppression of open discussion about it — wherever it occurs and under whatever banner — tends to work against them.
