The intellectual gymnastics required to defend state-mandated dress codes while pretending to champion liberty deserve an Olympic medal. Whenever a public figure or a human rights lawyer like Chirinne Ardakani steps up to decry how the courage of Iranian women protesting mandatory hijab is hijacked in France to police what women wear, they miss the entire fault line. They argue that invoking the suffering of women in Tehran to ban abayas or headscarves in Western classrooms is a cynical bait-and-switch. They claim it is a right-wing dog whistle designed to target marginalized communities under the guise of liberation.
They are half right and entirely dangerous.
It is a cynical bait-and-switch. But the mistake is pretending that the problem begins with the French politicians exploiting the rhetoric. The rot starts much earlier, in the comfortable delusion that state bureaucracy can ever be trusted to arbitrate human emancipation.
Let us strip away the political posturing and look at the mechanics of control. In Iran, the state uses the police to enforce a mandatory garment. In Western secular democracies, critics of the hijab want the state to use the police to forbid a voluntary or coerced garment. Two sides of the exact same totalitarian coin, flipped by different hands. If you believe freedom means a government official gets to dictate the millimeter threshold of fabric permitted on a human body, you do not love freedom. You just love your own brand of authoritarianism.
The False Equivalence Trap
The lazy consensus in modern political commentary assumes a neat moral hierarchy. The narrative goes like this: Iranian women fighting the morality police are heroic because they want the right to take the veil off. Therefore, Western women wearing the veil must be subverting that heroism, or conversely, Western governments banning the veil are simply finishing the job of liberation.
This is logic for toddlers.
Human agency is not a zero-sum game where a woman in Tehran dictates the fashion choices of a woman in Marseille. When a lawyer argues that invoking Iranian protests is an illegitimate rhetorical trick to target Muslims in Europe, they are defending a valid point about hypocrisy. European demagogues routinely weaponize feminist talking points only when it serves xenophobic agendas. They do not care about women's rights on Monday; they care about border control and cultural panic on Tuesday.
Yet, pointing out the hypocrisy of European politicians does not magically sanitize religious fundamentalism, nor does it excuse state-enforced secularism. By reducing the global struggle over bodily autonomy to a domestic culture war, intellectuals on both sides engage in flatulent moralizing while real people lose control over their own lives.
The Mechanics of Coercion
Imagine a scenario where a teenage girl in a Parisian suburb grows up under intense community pressure to wear a headscarf, while simultaneously sitting in a classroom where teachers view that same headscarf as a direct threat to the republic. Where is her agency? It has been completely crushed between two grinding stones of institutional coercion: the patriarchal family unit and the paternalistic secular state.
When the state bans religious symbols, it does not liberate the oppressed. It drives them underground or alienates them further from civic life. Conversely, when communities enforce modesty codes through social ostracization, they weaponize faith to strip away individual choice.
The Iranian women burning their headscarves are not fighting for a French administrative decree that tells them what they cannot wear. They are fighting against the foundational principle that anyone—mullah, president, or secular magistrate—owns their body.
Why the Counter-Intuitive Truth Wins
The uncomfortable truth that neither the French right nor the progressive apologists want to admit is that true secularism requires radical indifference. It requires a state confident enough in its own values to stop panicking about pieces of cloth.
When you make a hijab illegal in schools, you turn a piece of fabric into a political badge of honor and resistance. You guarantee that young people will cling to it not out of pure theological devotion, but as an act of defiance against a heavy-handed authority. You create the exact radicalization loop you claim to be preventing.
If we are going to talk about Iran, let us talk about it honestly. The women of Iran are risking execution and imprisonment because they reject state control over personal identity. Applying that lesson to the West means recognizing that state control over personal identity is garbage, no matter which flag is flying overhead.
Stop pretending you are liberating women by stripping them of their choices. Stop pretending you are protecting culture by mandating uniformity. True autonomy is messy, uncomfortable, and utterly terrifying to bureaucrats who want everyone neatly categorized.
Let people wear what they want. Let them take off what they want. And if your political platform requires a police officer to check a woman's clothing before you feel safe in your own country, the problem isn't her wardrobe. The problem is your fragile, authoritarian ego.
