WHEN Donald Trump declared that Mohammed Bin Salman had done “incredible things for human rights,” Saudi women could be forgiven for wondering what country he was talking about. But that’s hardly new. The Saudi regime has never been short of applause abroad, especially when it tosses women a few crumbs dressed up as historic reforms.

The very things Western governments cheer as progress — driving, travelling, studying — are rights so basic they wouldn’t even warrant negotiation anywhere else. Yet somehow Saudi women are expected to be grateful, as if their autonomy existed only at the pleasure of the state.

What’s most unsettling is not that the Saudi regime sells an illusion of progress, but how eagerly the West buys it. Trump’s promise not to “interfere” in Saudi Arabia’s “culture,” followed by his casual “things happen” when pressed about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, was not diplomacy; it was a political shrug, a signal that human rights would no longer clutter the business of arms deals, oil partnerships and billion-dollar defence contracts.

And once Washington grants that permission slip, Europe follows. Keir Starmer has made it equally clear that business comes first. Mohammed bin Salman’s global image has been scrubbed so clean that criticism simply slides off him; authoritarianism becomes respectable as long as the money keeps flowing.

For women inside the kingdom, this international indulgence is not abstract. It is confirmation that the lie has worked, that the world has moved on, and that their voices will remain unheard. We never believed Western governments cared, but we once hoped that pressure — even self-serving pressure — might carve out a sliver of safety. Instead, Saudi women are left to their fate, punished for disobedience and erased by the calculations of global power.

In which world would any woman in the West tolerate being branded “disobedient” by law? Yet Saudi women are told to accept it as culture — even progress? Under the Personal Status Law, obedience is no longer a social expectation; it is a legal obligation that dictates whether a woman can marry, leave prison, exit a domestic-violence shelter, or keep custody of her children.

Judges, all male and all state-loyal, wield near-total discretion, and “disobedience” is left undefined by design. It can mean leaving home without permission, rejecting a forced marriage, or reporting violence — actions that anywhere else would be recognised as self-protection, not rebellion. Yet this entire system is politely ignored abroad, smoothed over by photo-ops, diplomatic smiles, and investment deals.

Nothing exposes the regime’s idea of “reform” more starkly than elevating a man who thinks the phrase “domestic violence” makes women rebellious. The appointment of Saleh al-Fawzan as Grand Mufti, hand-picked by Mohammed bin Salman, tells us far more about the state’s direction than any glossy reform brochure. When someone with that worldview becomes the country’s highest religious authority, it is not a coincidence; it is a calibration.

“Disobedience” suddenly reads not as an excess but as the point. And around it, every part of the system falls neatly into place: police who dismiss abuse as a “family matter,” judges who rule with a presumption of male authority, and state-run “care homes” where women fleeing violence are not protected but disciplined, taught to accept the very culture that endangers them. It is a bleak moment for Saudi women, yet global leaders, media and even some women continue to insist this is progress. That fantasy is easier to maintain when Saudi women have never been treated as equals in the global feminist sisterhood — only as victims of their own culture rather than of their government.

Nowhere is that exclusion more visible than in Britain’s latest wave of anti-Muslim “feminism,” where our suffering has become raw material for someone else’s culture war. Wrapped in the language of women’s rights, a certain strain of activists has seized on Saudi women’s stories not to defend us, but to fuel anxieties about immigration, Islam and the supposed threat of Muslim communities.

Under campaigns like “Free Your Face,” they circulate melodramatic tales of Saudi women fleeing Sharia — stories that, to anyone who actually grew up in the kingdom, read like bad fiction. One claimed that women receive phone notifications when their travel permission is revoked; I almost wished that were true. A single beep would have saved countless women from being dragged back to abusive homes or into state “care” facilities.

But accuracy is beside the point. These narratives aren’t shared to expose the violence of an authoritarian regime; they’re used to collapse our experience into a caricature of Islam, to turn our pain into a warning about Muslims and migrants. The result is a double silencing: at home, we are punished for refusing obedience, and abroad our pain is turned into proof of “cultural backwardness,” while the regime responsible for it escapes untouched.

And then there are the Western professionals — the academics, consultants, and global experts who lend something far more valuable than LinkedIn slogans to the Saudi state: legitimacy. These are people who know exactly how authoritarian systems work, who publish papers and reports on inequality, who speak on gender panels, yet fly into Riyadh to post gushing photos from breast-cancer awareness days, university visits and corporate events, always with Saudi women staged beside them as proof of “progress.”

They wander through heritage sites, write about “vision” and “revival,” and pose with ministers and university executives before flying back to London declaring that “Saudi is the place to be for women.” It is easy to call Saudi Arabia “the place to be” when you have a return ticket; the women who live its reality do not.

For them, Saudi Arabia is a lucrative layover — a place to cash in on career-building opportunities and leave before the contradictions become uncomfortable.

Within the kingdom, another layer of complicity unfolds: the small but deafening class of privileged Saudi women who have learned to survive by siding with the state. Diplomats, CEOs, appointees and hand-picked “trailblazers” appear across state media celebrating empowerment and opportunity, even as they look away from the violence endured by women outside their circle.

Their success stories flood government press releases and glossy interviews — the first woman to lead a delegation, the first to sit on a board, the first to address a global forum — each headline deployed to wash out the reality of the majority. The gaslighting is relentless: Saudi Arabia is changing, women are thriving, empowerment is the new norm. And because loyalty is the currency of their privilege, they take on the regime’s dirtiest work: attacking dissidents, dismissing critics and teaching ordinary women to doubt their own suffering, to believe the problem is them, not the system.

What they never say is that this empowerment is rationed — tightly controlled, selectively distributed, and always tied to obedience. Their voices drown out the majority: women whose lives are shaped not by ministerial appointments or international conferences, but by guardianship courts, police indifference and the constant threat of being labelled “disobedient.” In this performance of progress, ordinary Saudi women are not merely ignored; they are deliberately unheard.

Together, these groups form a quiet coalition: Western consultants polishing the regime’s image, British culture-war feminists weaponising our pain and privileged Saudi women selling their access as national progress. They share nothing except the effect — the silencing of ordinary Saudi women. And while each of them profits, whether through contracts, visibility, or careers, our silence becomes the currency that buys the regime international legitimacy.

Our suffering sinks into the background of a narrative rewritten by everyone but us. The lie moves freely; the truth is detained at the border. Which is what makes November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, an uncomfortable mirror for the world to face.

It is the day governments and institutions claim to confront the structures that harm women, yet Saudi women remain the easiest to ignore — too political, too inconvenient, too entangled in Western interests to be defended honestly. If this day means anything at all, it must begin with refusing the lie: refusing the applause, refusing the selective outrage, refusing the stories that erase the women whose lives are lived under surveillance and coercion.

Saudi women do not need rescuing by those who misunderstand them; they need the world to stop helping the state drown them out. On this day, the most radical act is painfully simple: listen — and finally hear the voices the regime has spent decades trying to bury.

Maryam Aldossari is a Saudi academic at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a board member at ALQST for Human Rights.