by AFIYA S. ZIA
Pakistan’s minorities are unlikely to make any gains because freelancing moral crusaders like Maria B have flipped to seek redemption via social media performances and the state is fully invested in the piety-populism project.
Over decades, Pakistan’s women’s rights movements have slowly but surely gained more social and political acceptance (not necessarily, delivery). Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for other marginalised and minority groups, who are still struggling for formal recognition of their equal and dignified right to exist in the Islamic Republic.
Ahmedis, Hazaras, transpersons/khwaja siras, religious and ethnic minorities … it is no coincidence that they are all confronted by the same set of opposition — nationalists, conservatives, the organised theocrats and the pious, the religious institutions of the Federal Shariat Court (FSC) and the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), and the most opportunist emergent group of virtue signallers — pious showbiz and fashion celebrities.
The most vocal opposition to transgender persons’ rights in recent times has been the Lahore-based fashion designer, Maria B. So how does such self-righteousness in the name of saving Islam translate into an injustice?
Simply put, opposing the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018, isolating and campaigning against a weak community on the basis of their identity — religious, ethnic, sexual, secular or gendered — is to paint a target on their backs. It is bigotry and majoritarianism under the guise of piety.
Over the last few decades, feminists, human rights and trans activists have researched and advocated for recognising the multiple dimensions of sexual and gendered identities beyond the binaries of male/female and hetero/homosexual.
These include non-binary, non-conforming sexual identities such as intersex, hermaphrodite, bi-sexual, transsexual, homosexual and so on. Then there is a similar range of gender variant and fluid identities that include khwaja siras, khusras/hijras, pan-, poly- and transgender persons (male or female presenting) and a host of other culturally specific ones across the world.
In fact, according to Dr Mehrdad Alipour, a scholar of Islamic Studies at the Utrecht University in the Netherlands, “in the Pre-modern period, Muslim societies appear to have culturally recognised gender ambiguity which can be seen through ?gures such as the kh?s? [castrated human males], the hijra [people who are born with male sex organs and raised as boys, but after becoming adults they assume a female identity], the mukhannath [effeminate men], the mutarajjul [women who try to resemble men in clothing and speech], the Khunth? [people who possess both or ambigu-ous male and female sex organs or genitals] and the mams?? [persons who have neither male nor female genitals]”.
The limits of conscientious objections
Maria B’s assertion that “all religions” forbid or debunk the concept of ambiguous sexuality or gender identity is a fallacy, to say the least. As evidenced by Dr Alipour’s research, Islamic tradition has a distinct legal legacy regarding trans- and inter-sexualities.
Predominantly, intersex surgeries are permissible under Islamic fiqh and a continuing tradition because they bring out “the hidden genus” of the body. It is over non-intersex surgeries that differences or silence persists. However, nowhere across Muslim contexts is this some settled historical or legal principle or some clean cut, unambiguous or resolved practice. So, what does Maria B know that relevant Islamic scholars, academics, trans activists or researchers do not? (Not a trick question).
The most interesting corpus of work on Muslim sexualities is to be found by Iranian scholars, who note that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s religious fatwas and opinions weighed as law on all subjects, including on transpeople, dating from the 1960s. Interestingly, his original prima facie (al zahir) argument was that intersex/hermaphrodite transpeople are not obligated to reassign their sex. This became a legal loophole for trans people to get certificates of transsexuality without hormonal or medical change.
The gray areas for Muslim transsexuality is rooted in the discrepancy between fiqh and modern law. Sex reassignment is a painful, long series of surgical and hormonal procedures. At which stage then, is a trans person legally sex reassigned?
This is biopolitics — requiring bodily proof for the right to exist. It’s also futile because the sole purpose of life for many people of any variant sex, gender, or identity is not for the sexual endgame of reproduction, but for self-validation, self-fulfilment, self-worth, soulfulness and autonomy.
Scholars of Islamic fiqh have noted the distinct registers defining sex/gender and male/female under classic Islamic taxonomy of social meaning, as separate from that of modern, biomedical and psycho-sexual definitions of transsexuality.
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