Urooj Arshad (born 1975) is an American activist who was a co-founder the

Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity The Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD), founded in 2013, is an American support and advocacy organization for LGBTQ Muslims. History The Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity was launched in January 2013 in Atlanta. ...

, where she is also a member of the steering committee.

Early life and education

Arshad was born in Pakistan in a house built by her grandfather. Her middle-class, secular Sunni Muslim family lived in

Karachi Karachi (; ur, ; ; ) is the most populous city in Pakistan and 12th most populous city in the world, with a population of over 20 million. It is situated at the southern tip of the country along the Arabian Sea coast. It is the former cap ...

, where her father worked for a petrol company and her mother was a teacher at a military school. Her parents' families both originated from

Punjab Punjab (; Punjabi: پنجاب ; ਪੰਜਾਬ ; ; also romanised as ''Panjāb'' or ''Panj-Āb'') is a geopolitical, cultural, and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, comprising ...

, and immigrated to Pakistan after

Partition Partition may refer to: Computing Hardware * Disk partitioning, the division of a hard disk drive * Memory partition, a subdivision of a computer's memory, usually for use by a single job Software * Partition (database), the division of a ...

. She also had two younger brothers. She attended PECHS Girls School, a private school that taught in English. As a teenager, Arshad began developing crushes on girls in her school, although she did not have the language to identify them as such. She also began to question gender roles and stopped wearing jewelry and only wore white clothing in an attempt to present in a gender-neutral fashion. She immigrated to the United States with her family in August 1992, when she was 16 years old, due to increasing violence in the country. They initially lived in the Chicago suburbs with her uncle and his family, who had sponsored the family's immigration. Arshad completed her final year of high school in the United States, where she experienced racism from her teachers and peers. Arshad attended the

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...

, where she initially studied a pre-med track. She later switched her major to sociology, with a minor in women's studies. She graduated in 1998. She

came out Coming out of the closet, often shortened to coming out, is a metaphor used to describe LGBT people's self-disclosure of their sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity. Framed and debated as a privacy issue, coming out of ...

to her brother at age 19, who then

outed Outing is the act of disclosing an LGBT person's sexual orientation or gender identity without that person's consent. It is often done for political reasons, either to instrumentalize homophobia in order to discredit political opponents or to com ...

her to her mother. Her father died shortly afterward when she was 20.

Activism

Arshad became involved in LGBT organizing in 1999. In 2011, she organized the LGBTQ Muslim Retreat. , she was a fellow at the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute. In 2017, Arshad was working at

Advocates for Youth Advocates for Youth is a nonprofit organization and advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., United States, dedicated to sexuality education, the prevention of HIV and of sexually transmitted disease, teenage pregnancy prevention, youth access ...

as their Associate Director for International Youth Health and Rights. That same year, she launched the Muslim Youth Leadership Council, a support group for LGBT Muslim youth and their supporters. She is the senior program manager for

LGBT ' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity. The LGBT term is a ...

issues at

Freedom House Freedom House is a non-profit, majority U.S. government funded organization in Washington, D.C., that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom, and human rights. Freedom House was founded in October 1941, and Wendell Wil ...

Personal life

She identifies as queer and a

cultural Muslim Cultural Muslims are religiously non-practicing individuals who still identify with Islam due to family backgrounds, personal experiences, or the social and cultural environment in which they grew up. Definition In Central Asia and in former co ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Arshad, Urooj 1975 births Living people 21st-century American LGBT people 21st-century American people 21st-century American women American LGBT rights activists American queer people American Sunni Muslims Muslim women Pakistani emigrants to the United States People from Karachi Queer Muslims University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni Pakistani queer people Cultural Muslims