November 20, 2025

Bronx Anti-War wrote the following statement, edited by Arm the Dollz and Crown Heights Bites Back.

An anti-imperialist political education event held this week at Another World in Crown Heights brought together local organizers for a detailed discussion on Iran, U.S. imperialism and the weaponization of feminist and LGBTQIA2S+ narratives to justify foreign aggression. The event was organized by Arm the Dollz, a collective of Marxist-Leninist trans women, with participation from Crown Heights Bites Back and Bronx Anti-War.

Speakers opened with organizational introductions before turning to the central themes: understanding Iran and its history beyond Western corporate media narratives, examining how pinkwashing serves as an imperialist tool utilized by the West and analyzing how women’s and queer rights are utilized to rationalize economic warfare, covert destabilization, sanctions and direct military attacks on Iran.

A major segment of the program provided historical context on Iran’s 1979 revolution and the substantial social transformations that followed. Presenters explained that despite decades of U.S. and Israeli military pressure — including sanctions, assassinations, cyberwarfare and recent bombings of Iranian nuclear sites — Iran has made significant social gains which include women and queer people.

Women now constitute roughly 70% of Iran’s science and engineering university students; public universities remain tuition-free; universal health care has expanded dramatically; and Iran implemented one of the world’s earliest universal basic income systems. These developments, speakers argued, contradict Western portrayals of Iranian women as uniformly oppressed while ignoring the material devastation caused by U.S. economic siege. (workers.org/2025/06/86431/)

The event also highlighted Iran’s internationally recognized achievements in trans health care. Iran provides state-subsidized, gender-affirming surgeries and hormone therapy, performs some of the highest numbers of such procedures globally and recognized legal gender transition earlier than many Western nations, including the U.S., Britain and other hegemonic nations.

Iran has also developed extensive HIV care and harm-reduction programs — progress that continues despite sanctions restricting access to essential medications. Organizers argued that the greatest threat to queer and women’s health in Iran is not the Iranian state but Western sanctions, which block medical imports and destabilize daily life.

Contrast with U.S. transphobia, homophobia

Speakers contrasted these advancements with the precarious state of women’s and LGBTQIA2S+ rights in the United States, where trans people face rising criminalization, restricted health care access and systemic violence — especially against Black trans women.

They emphasized that queer and women’s rights in the U.S. were never granted by the state but won through decades of grassroots struggle. At the same time, U.S. officials frequently invoke the rhetoric of “saving women” or “protecting LGBTQIA2S+ people” to manufacture consent for bombings, sanctions and regime-change campaigns abroad.

A central distinction drawn throughout the event was the different role of anti-imperialists in the West versus those living under U.S. sanctions and war threats. Iranians confront questions of social development under conditions of siege, while those in the United States — the heart of Western imperial power — carry the responsibility to oppose their own government’s interventions. Speakers stressed that when they refer to foreign aggression, they specifically mean U.S. imperialism, which they described as the single greatest destabilizing force shaping conditions in Iran and across the Global South.

The event concluded with a call for principled, internationalist solidarity rooted in material analysis rather than liberal moral narratives that frame U.S. warfare as humanitarian intervention — claims that the U.S. bombs or sanctions nations to “save women,” “defend gay rights” or “promote democracy.”

Organizers emphasized that these narratives function to obscure geopolitical interests and justify U.S. imperialist violence. They affirmed that U.S. imperialism is the common enemy of all humanity and that genuine liberation must arise from within societies resisting imperial domination, not through external coercion or military force.