Mahdia Lynn, a transgender woman and convert to Shia Islam, was the co-founder and director of Masjid Al Rabia (founded December 2016), which was a non-denominational masjid located in Chicago, Illinois. The mosque closed in 2024.1 Mahdia took the shahada shortly after her 25th birthday and had said Islam saved her life. She was once a professional chef2 and while she still cooked in her free time, she is known for her work as a writer, educator, community organizer, and faith leader.
Organizing and serving her community was a strong part of her upbringing, and she embraced this at an early age. Mahdia grew up in a union family in Detroit and her family background inspired her to begin organizing in high school. Mahdia came out as transgender when she was 18 years old in the mid-2000s.3 She also organized with Camp Trans. She did go ‘back into the closet’ and was ‘stealth’ for several years after this, and came out again in 2016. While she was stealth she wrote and organized under a pen name.4
Mahdia, who was raised Catholic, described herself as always feeling aligned with Islam, and that she always was Muslim before she realized it and formally reverted to the faith. Converting to Islam in Mahdia’s experience, saved her life. Mahdia had struggled with issues that affect many transgender women, such as addiction, due to the lack of resources and support. Embracing Islam helped Mahdia with her struggles and completely transformed her life. Even before becoming Muslim, she had similar concepts of religion, and felt alignment with tawhid (Islamic unity). When she started reading the Qur’an, it felt like she was encountering ideas she already understood. As Mahdia practiced Islam more, she felt her life become a little easier, becoming less of a struggle and more thriving. She felt the call that since Islam gave her her life back, she should then dedicate her life to serving the faith and people.5
Mahdia observed the hijab, and commented publicly that this observation was an assertion that her body belonged to her, and the hijab symbolized her relationship between her and Allah alone. Mahdia was critical about misconceptions of the hijab as being generally misogynistic and controlling women’s bodily autonomy. She interpreted the practice of observing hijab epitomizing bodily autonomy and choice.6
In 2014 she attended the LGBTQ Muslim Retreat, and said she attended as a queer woman because she was not ready to be vulnerable about her trans identity in that space. She started the Transgender Muslim Network in 2015 as a continuation of the activist work she had always done. Mahdia had devoted her life to making activist spaces more inclusive for transgender people.7
Mahdia wrote in abundance about her life and work. Especially in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s first election as U.S. President and what that presidency meant for queer and trans Muslims. She also wrote about the needs of the queer and trans Muslim community at large, and invited others to become allies and gave them toolkits for advocacy and support.
In an article, "Coming Out Mubarak," Mahdia posted to her Medium account in 2019 (a reprint from an original article originally published in 2017), she reflected on living a dual life of pretending to be a cisgender straight woman in the Muslim community, and not being open about her life as a bisexual transgender activist in those spaces. She describes feeling the need to lie to be safe in mainstream Muslim communities so she could get the support she needed to survive. Mahdia came to Chicago after leaving her boyfriend of seven years, this was not something she could reveal to the Muslim women in the mosque community she entered. She did not feel safe to discuss her past relationship and lied to paint a reality of her as a cisgender woman who had to get divorced. She felt a rupture of this dual reality after the Pulse shooting in 2016 and discussed that Muslim communities came together to talk to LGBTQ Muslims about reconciliation and inclusion but nothing came of those conversations.
Mahdia came out in light of the Pulse shooting, along with many other queer and transgender Muslim activists, to show that LGBTQ Muslims, did indeed exist. She did many interviews and turned down even more during this time. She described this period as very vulnerable, and a turning point for LGBTQ Muslims. Even though the Muslim community could disengage from queer issues and the conversation broadly, queer and transgender Muslims had to deal with the consequences of vulnerably engaging with this subject with their traditional communities. This fallout necessitated the building of infrastructure to support queer and trans Muslims as a community.8
Masjid al Rabia was a mosque created to provide safe spaces to those living their truth. They had their first meeting in a Unitarian Universalist church basement a month after Donald Trump won his first election in 2016.9 It was a women-led and affirming mosque. Community participation and leadership was highly valued and members were asked to lead prayer each week. Masjid al Rabia prioritized disability access by making sure meeting places were close to wheelchair accessible public transportation and hosting online access to services for people who were unable to travel or meet in person. They also had programming for the entire month of Ramadan for LGBTQ youth.
Mahdia and Masjid al Rabia performed an abolitionist ethic. They worked to provide care packages to incarcerated community members. Later, the Masjid would send out a newsletter multiple times a year to those who were incarcerated or in detention centers. In 2017, Mahdia created a pen pal program for LGBTQ prisoners. Mahdia created an infrastructure so that incarcerated Muslims still felt connected to the community and did not feel like they were forgotten.10
In 2017, the Windy City Times honored Mahdia Lynn amongst a cohort of 30 under 30 LGBTQ activists in Chicago for their work. Mahdia was recognized for her local and international contributions and her leadership as one of the few transgender women in the world to lead a mosque (at the time of the award, Mahdia was the only transgender woman in the Western hemisphere to hold this role). In 2020, GO Magazine chose her as part of their ‘100 Women We Love’ cohort, honoring LGBTQ women for their work.11 Mahdia has also been recognized by other Muslim organizations and activists for her work such as HEART, a reproductive justice organization. Muslim Girl Magazine wrote an article on her work and contributions as a transgender Muslim woman.12
Mahdia was a church administrator for the First Church of Evanston. She was deeply loved in this church community.13 Church members respected and admired her leadership for queer and trans Muslims. In a tribute delivered by Minister Eda Uca at the First Church of Evanston following Mahdia’s passing, Minister Uca described how Mahdia organized her life on being able to continue living. Mahdia suffered a stroke some time prior to her death, and already had a disability prior to this event. Mahdia confided in Minister Uca that she had to change her whole life and style of organizing in order to continue to live. Minister Uca reflected that that Mahdia’s positionality as a young trans Muslim woman and activist put her under a lifetime of stress in a short amount of time, and while Mahdia was an incredibly hard worker, trans women who organize have to deal with the lack of support and resources to uplift their wellbeing.
Mahdia was a remarkable writer, writing about her own life, theology, and human rights. She was an educator and advocate for LGBTQ rights, abolition, police accountability, disability access and pluralism within the Muslim community. Mahdia saw leadership as not a title, but a responsibility to the community. That serving as a faith leader was a moral and ethical responsibility of putting service before ego, and that leaders must model new possibilities.14 When asked what Mahdia did for a living, she responded,”I pray five times a day, and I do what I can to keep kids from killing themselves.”15
While the world felt a deep loss after the dissolution of Masjid al Rabia, the world feels a chasm of grief and a loss of a life that should have been much longer than the amount that Mahdia Lynn was allowed on Earth. Mahdia chose to be Muslim, to keep living, to resist and fight injustice with everything she had.
(This biographical statement written by Soaad Elbahwati.)
1 Masjid al Rabia homepage, https://masjidalrabia.org/.
2 Women in Leadership Publication, “Portrait of a Changemaker, Chicago, USA”, photo.
3 Daneen Akers, Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints, “Mahdia Lynn”, Watchfire Media, 2025.
4Gender Spectrum, “‘Being Transgender and Muslim’ with Mahdia Lynn, founder of Masjid al Rabia Mosque”, Mahdia Lynn interviewed by Austin Hartke, 2018.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Shanzay Farzan, Meet the Founder of the Transgender Muslim Support Network muslimgirl.comhttps://muslimgirl.com › interview-founder-transgender...
8 Mahdia Lynn, Coming out Mubarak, Medium, 2019.
https://medium.com/@mahdialynn/coming-out-mubarak-b7f69c10c50a
9 A Tribute for Mahdia Lynn, Minister Eda Uca, September 18, 2024.
https://www.firstchurchevanston.org/mahdia-lynn-memorial-page
10 Daneen Akers, Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints, “Mahdia Lynn”, Watchfire Media, 2025.
11 Isabelle Lichtenstein, Robin Kish, Gloria Perez, “100 Women We Love: Class of 2020” GoMag, 2020. http://gomag.com/article/wwl-2020/63/
12 Shanzay Farzan, Meet the Founder of the Transgender Muslim Support Network muslimgirl.com https://muslimgirl.com › interview-founder-transgender...
13 Minister Eda Uca, “A Tribute for Mahdia Lynn”, September 18, 2024. https://www.firstchurchevanston.org/mahdia-lynn-memorial-page
14 Women in Leadership Publication, “Portrait of a Changemaker, Chicago, USA”, photo
15 Mahdia Lynn, Choosing not to Drown, Medium, 2016. https://medium.com/@mahdialynn/choosing-not-to-drown-d9a899d017f1
Biography Date: August 2025