Among some of the most disturbing and gruesome initial scenes from the chaotic war the U.S. and Israel unleashed on Iran was the bombing of a girls' elementary school on Saturday. The strike reportedly killed at least 175 and left 95 injured. Thousands of Iranians have turned out this week for funerals. Images and reports of young girls strewn across classroom floors and parents clinging to their remains horrified many around the world. As these deaths are considered, it should not be missed: This tragedy typifies the role and exploitation of gender in imperialism, both practically and in abstraction. Narratives around the war on Iran tap into two critical gendered tropes that are essential to the imperial project: The first is the category of the "Muslim woman," refracted through the Western gaze, who is in need of saving. The second trope implicitly genders "the West" as masculine and "the East" as feminine. (While categories such as "the East" and "the West" offer a shorthand whe…