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Wednesday, November 19, 2014

‘Accepting I was a transgender brought me closer to Allah’

A Muslim speaks against the belief that transgender people are transgressors and should be reviled.
COMMENT
By ARJ
islam2I am a female-to-male transgender. I am also a Muslim. Since the Court of Appeals judgment, there has been many things written and spoken about us from the legal, religious and medical standpoint.
But the voice of transgenders themselves appears to be muted, while everybody else talks loudly around us.
That is why I have decided to write. But I write with a pseudonym knowing how cruel some people can become about things they do not understand, things they fear. I do not want my family to be worried for my safety. I do not want my mother to suffer because of how people will treat her son.
People misunderstand us, thinking that we just want to cross-dress for fun or to deceive. Some people think we are sick in the head and must be treated and cured. They used to lobotomise us in the West, along with homosexuals, a procedure condemned today as barbaric.
For a start, let me clarify that I am not a homosexual. Transgender people are not necessarily homosexuals. There is a clear difference between one’s gender identity (what one feels deeply inside about one’s gender) and one’s affectionate preference (what one prefers one’s partner’s gender to be).
I was born with the clear knowledge that I am male. However, my body did not conform with my heart’s knowledge.
It took many years of running away from this feeling, from this body, and a lot of pain to arrive home to this fact. I have forced myself to be a girl, a woman – to be who I am not. I have also sought psychological help, but to no avail. Finally, I reflected, if I cannot accept myself, how can I accept God? It was like I was going against my “naluri”, my instincts, my God-given spirit.
It was only when I accepted myself, as male, that my real journey began – of healing and coming back to Allah, my Creator, my Sustainer, my Source.
I realise that I am a transgender person, and I am created this way. Being a transgender does not make me any less a Muslim. In fact, it has made me closer to God.
There are many like me on this journey of self-acceptance. Many of us have undergone gender reconstruction surgeries and hormone therapies to feel at home in our bodies. To become whole.
And many have not, whether because they did not have the means or opportunity (because the technology was not there yet) or did not want to go through the pain of surgeries and or for other personal reasons.
Being a transgender is a medical condition
There is a lot of medical knowledge on transgenderism. We are known to have Gender Identity Disorder (GID), or now known now as Gender Dsyphoria (GD), which is categorised under the World Health Organisation International Classification of Disease (Version 10) under code F64.
The medical fraternity has recognised that the only treatment that brings congruity to mind and body is to allow people with GD to live as the gender they inherently feel they are.
Many persons with GD who suppress that need or are coerced into not living as their inherent gender become victims of depression and even suicide. But once they are able to live as their inherent gender, they become normal, functioning, and balanced.
Transgenderism occurs in almost all known cultures and traditions, including the Muslim tradition. Some Muslim scholars have written about the four divisions of gender in Islam: male, female, hermaphrodites (khunsa) and mukhannis or mukhannas. The last two terms refer to persons having male organs who appear female in mannerisms and dress as females. Mukkhanis want to change their biological sex while mukkhanas do not.
In Islam, scholarly analyses of the Quran, Hadith and Sunnah resulted in a fatwa to allow sex change surgery for transgender persons. This fatwa was issued by the mufti of the foremost university in Islamic scholarship, the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, on June 8, 1988. It was triggered by the case of a transgender student of the university who was allowed to have sexual reassignment surgery.
Besides Egypt, other Islamic countries which allow persons with GD to change their sex surgically to match their inherent genders are Iran and Pakistan.
Although the terms mukhannas, mukhannis and khunsa are not mentioned in the Holy Quran, according to some scholars the Qur’an clearly recognises that there are some people who are neither male nor female. A translation of Verses 42:49-50 goes as follows:
“To God belongs the dominion over the heavens and the earth. He creates what He wills. He prepares for whom He wills females, and He prepares for whom He wills males. Or He marries together the males and the females, and He makes those whom He wills to be ineffectual (barren). Indeed He is the Knowing, the Powerful.”
Mukhannas and mukhannis are mentioned in several hadiths. According to authoritative Sunni scholar and hadith collector Imam Nawawi:
A mukhannath is the one (“male”) who carries in his movements, in his appearance and in his language the characteristics of a woman. There are two types; the first is the one in whom these characteristics are innate, he did not put them on by himself, and therein is no guilt, no blame and no shame, as long as he does not perform any (illicit) act or exploit it for money (prostitution etc). The second type acts like a woman out of immoral purposes and he is the sinner and blameworthy.
Another famous 11th century Sunni Islamic scholar Ibn Abd Al-Barr wrote:
The mukhannath is (also) the one who looks so much like a woman physically that he resembles women in his softness, speech, appearance, accent and thinking. If he is like this, he would have no desire for women and he would not notice anything about them. This is one of those who have no interest in women who were permitted to enter upon women.
This shows that transgenders are acknowledged in Islam. They are not regarded just as males who want to dress as females (for fun or to deceive), but because of something in-born. If it is in-born, that means they are created this way. They are also permitted to be around women during the Prophet’s time (peace be upon him).
Sexual reassignment allowed in Kuwait
In 2008 in Kuwait, senior Sunni cleric Sheikh Rashid Sa’ad al-Alaymi stated that sexual reassignment surgery should be allowed in cases where gender identity disorder is diagnosed.
His statement claimed, “It was a mistake to accuse those with GID of imitating a member of the opposite sex because they did not choose this of their own will or because it gives them pleasure, but it is something that comes from God in his infinite wisdom.”
There is also a hadith that is often quoted that I believe is the basis of our Syariah enactment to prosecute cross-dressing.
The Prophet, peace be upon him, cursed the effeminate men who are males, and the male-pretenders who are women, and he said: Evict them from your houses, and the Prophet, peace be upon him, evicted such-and-such and ‘Umar evicted such-and-such – Bukhari.
According to readings from Muslim scholars who study this historically, this hadith referred to males who imitated women in order to gain access to women’s spaces in the homes. They were not mukhannas or mukhannis or khunsas. They were biological males (the emphasis, “who are males”), and men who were deceitful, and who had sexual desires for women, imitating women in order to be able to get near to women. And that is why they were evicted by the Prophet (pbuh).
Would not the Prophet (pbuh) have used the terms mukhannas, mukhannis or khunsas if he had meant them, rather then “effeminate men, who are males”? Why the (redundant) emphasis of “…who are males” unless it is to direct it to males (rather than non-males) who are impersonating females for deceitful reasons?
Transgenders just want to live authentic lives
Transgenders are not who they are to deceive others. Indeed, it is quite the opposite. It is to be true to ourselves, to be honest about who we are and to live as authentically as we can.
I am not a Muslim scholar, but I am a Muslim who reads and thinks, an obligation asked of us by Allah in His Quran. I can only ask my fellow Muslims to not follow blindly those who urge us to judge and “jihad” against other Muslims who are a little different.
We too pray to and worship the same God, and we open our prayers and worship in His name. God must want us to always remember his compassion and mercy by opening almost every chapter of the Quran with: “In Allah’s Name, the Most Compassionate and Merciful”.
May we remember this with humility as we deal with the diversity of His creations, some of which we know, and some of which we do not yet understand.
ARJ is an FMT reader

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