Urooj Arshad (born 1975)[1] is an American activist who was a co-founder the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity,[2][3] where she is also a member of the steering committee.
[1] Her middle-class, secular Sunni Muslim[6] family lived in Karachi, where her father worked for a petrol company and her mother was a teacher at a military school.
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.
[7] 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.
[1] Arshad completed her final year of high school in the United States, where she experienced racism from her teachers and peers.