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Cultures that have ‘third genders’ don’t prove transgenderism is either ubiquitous or progressive

When homophobic cultures are embracing transgenderism, we need to question its so-called “progressiveness.”

Last year, Pakistan started issuing passports with a third gender category marked by an “X”. In March, the country took things a step further and passed legislation allowing people to change their sex on legal documents, based on self-identification. Now, people can officially self-identify as male, female, or neither on government-issued ID documents, meaning an individual born male can now be issued a female passport. Al Jazeera reports:

“The law guarantees citizens the right to express their gender as they wish, and to a gender identity that is defined as ‘a person’s innermost and individual sense of self as male, female or a blend of both, or neither; that can correspond or not to the sex assigned at birth.'”

The law has been celebrated by many as a progressive victory. Amnesty International’s Pakistan researcher Rabia Mehmood told Al Jazeera that the implementation of the bill “is crucial to ensure [trans-identified people] can live their lives with dignity and respect.” While this might indeed seem like a step forward to some, an important detail brings up questions: despite Pakistan’s apparent embrace of trans-identified people, homosexuality remains criminalized in the country. What liberals and progressives who support this kind of legislation have failed to ask themselves is why transgender politics are being embraced by conservative and regressive regimes like those in Pakistan and Iran.

Trans activists claim that transgenderism has existed throughout history. To prove that “gender identity” is not a modern invention, they point to non-Western societies where, historically, more than two genders have been culturally accepted. This claim is rarely subjected to critical analysis. A feminist analysis is ignored in favour of a superficial analysis of race and colonialism that goes as follows: if a third gender exists in non-Western, non-white societies, the “sex binary” must be a colonialist Western concept that has been imposed on all of us.

But while a third gender really does exist in some societies, that doesn’t necessarily mean that these non-Western views of sex and gender roles are anti-sexist, nor does it mean the application of this idea to Western societies is automatically progressive.

If you compare India’s transgender population to Pakistan’s, you’ll notice an interesting similarity: an overwhelming majority are males. Hijra, as they are called in India, are men or boys pressured to become women on misogynistic grounds: these males love hanging out with women, help women with domestic work, have features that are considered “feminine,” or are suspected of being homosexual. They are often castrated and aren’t allowed to marry or own property. While they may be called upon to bless newborns and celebrate marriages, society generally shuns them and they are rejected by their ashamed families. Seen as accursed, they are given a ritual, religious purpose to counterbalance their ungodly condition. They often become dancers and prostitutes and, like in Pakistan, have to seek the guardianship of a guru (who essentially functions as their pimp) in order to avoid homelessness.

One Pakistani man named Zara tells The Guardian:

“I was born with a very small male organ. Inside, my feelings are female— I want to live like a woman, cook and do domestic work.”

The implication is that a small penis and a preference for “woman’s work” mean that Zara is not sufficiently masculine, and therefore not male.

A homosexual male born as Iman but calling himself Marie featured in a BBC documentary, Iran’s sex change solution, consulted several psychotherapists, some of whom “worked underground.” One suggested pills (of an unspecified nature), another electric shock treatment. Eventually, one doctor told Iman that he could “change [his] gender” and said he needed to start hormone therapy. After a while, another doctor encouraged him to take a step further and undergo surgery. “The doctor told me that with the surgery he could change the two per cent male features but he said he could not change the 98 per cent female features to be male,” Iman says. It is very probable that the surgery included removal of his genitals. As a boy, Iman was bullied for having soft features and was frequently told he looked “like a girl.” After being pressured to start hormones to emphasize his “feminine” features, Iman noticed that he started to grow breasts and that his body hair was thinning. There is little doubt as to what the doctor referred to when he mentioned his remaining “two per cent male features”— Iman says he felt “damaged,” physically. “What I saw was frightening and abnormal,” he adds.

Iran doesn’t traditionally have any concept of a third gender, but the arguments towards the acceptance of transgenderism are the same as in India or Pakistan: when men don’t conform to gender roles related to masculinity and heterosexuality, they are told they are not men at all. In countries like India or Pakistan, religious beliefs about the “balance” between male and female play a role in how women and men are treated. There are many stories about “hermaphrodites” or tales about eunuchs. Men who fail to conform are told they have a female soul and hold a special spiritual position. But in Iran, the religious explanation is non-existent: instead, men like Iman are told that they need medical treatment.

Those who claim transgenderism is universal will also bring up Indigenous societies to show that “male” and “female” are simply rigid inventions of Western, colonial culture, offering “third genders” and “two spirit” people as proof of this. “Native cultures” are glamourized as gender-fluid utopias that European, Christian, colonial conquest destroyed, imposing a rigid two-gender system instead. It is true that as part of the Christianization and colonization process, missionaries profoundly changed the social dynamics between men and women. Children were uprooted from their cultural and social spheres and sent to residential schools, where they were taught Victorian values and morality regarding men and women’s place in North American societies. Indigenous people were subjected to different social codes than those they’d grown up with. Their appearance, for instance, was refashioned: boys couldn’t have long hair because it was considered feminine — they had to wear suits, while girls needed to keep their hair tied at all times and wear dresses. But it would be false to presume that Indigenous societies — which are not at all homogenous — regarded gender (in its contemporary definition) as an instrument for self-expression. This assumes all of these cultures accepted the liberal notion of individual choice and freedom popularized in the aftermath of the American Revolution. But modern notions of individualism, self-expression, and self-realization were were not likely present in pre-colonial Indigenous societies.

The Navajo, for example, have a traditional third gender class called “nadleeh.” While, today, the term is applied to both trans-identified males and females, it originally referred exclusively to males. According to an essay by Wesley Thomas in the book, Two-Spirit People, “Navajo Cultural Constructions of Gender and Sexuality,” men who showed proclivities for traditionally female activities such as weaving, cooking, and raising children, became nadleeh.

Thomas writes, “From the Navajo view, until the turn of the century, males who demonstrated characteristics of the opposite gender were known to fulfill their roles as nadleeh.” He argues that the Navajo recognized “gender diversity” pre-colonization:

“Multiple genders were part of the norm in the Navajo culture before the 1890s. From the 1890s until the 1930s dramatic changes took place in the lives of Navajos because of exposure to, and constant pressures from, Western culture — not the least of which was the imposition of Christianity—
— Due to the influence of Western culture and Christianity, which attempt to eradicate gender diversity, the pressure still exists.”

However, he also points out that gender roles still existed in Navajo society:

“The traditional social gender system, although based initially on biological sex, divides people into categories based on several criteria: sex-linked occupation, behaviors, and roles. ‘Sex-linked occupation’ refers to expected work specializations associated with being female or male. ‘Sex-linked behaviors’ include body language, speech style and voice pitch, clothing and other adornment, and those aspects of ceremonial activities that are sex-linked (e.g., women wear shawls in dancing and men do not; men use gourd rattles during dances and women do not). Women’s sex-linked activities include those associated with childrearing, cooking and serving meals, making pottery and baskets, and doing or overseeing other work associated with everyday aspects of the domestic sphere. For men, getting wood, preparing cooking fires, building homes, hunting, planting and harvesting various vegetables, and doing or overseeing work associated with the ceremonial aspects of everyday life are appropriate. A nadleeh mixes various aspects of the behaviors, activities, and occupations of both females and males.”

Traditionally, the Navajo believed that the power of creation belonged to women. It is safe to say that they never believed that nadleeh — “feminine males” — were actually women, because they didn’t have the ability to bear children. They were regarded as feminine on the basis of social occupations but were not called women — azdaa — in the Navajo language. Society was organized on the principle of collective work divided by men and women on account of their physiological differences — women’s activities, for example, were based on their reproductive capacity and status as life-givers.

In this case, the concept of nadleeh cannot be understood as “gender identity” or gender/sex dysphoria, as it was related to social occupations and behaviors connected to sex. While the Navajo are one of the most documented Indigenous cultures, many others are not so well-documented and it therefore seems inappropriate to impose modern notions of “gender diversity,” “gender identity,” or, generally, our own concepts of gender, as we understand it today, in Western cultures.

It also is misguided to assume that non-Western, non-white “third genders” necessarily shatter the gender binary. The existence of other “gender” castes shouldn’t be assumed to challenge the “sex/gender binary” — they need to be examined within their own cultural and political contexts, from a feminist perspective.

The fact that those placed in this “third” gender category are usually males raises another red flag. It suggests that, while men can be downgraded to the status of females, women cannot rise up to the status of men. Being associated with femininity is such a disgrace that men are socially emasculated and physically mutilated. This is pure misogyny. The media remain blind to the evidence, claiming to be puzzled that these supposedly “progressive” gender identity politics are being adopted by otherwise conservative societies that are hostile and violent to women and gay people.

In The Guardian, Memphis Barker writes:

“One reason for the growing acceptance of the trans community springs from an unlikely source — Pakistan’s mullahs. The Council of Islamic Ideology, a government body that has deemed nine-year-old girls old enough to marry and approves the right of men to ‘lightly’ beat their wives, has offered some support to trans rights.”

Of course, in reality, this “support” is only for misogyny.

So blinded by our own Western views on transgender politics — certain we are on “the right side of history” — we can’t see how these ideas could be harmful. Our critical minds have been paralyzed, and fear of backlash has caused us to avoid asking questions. Despite what so many would like to believe, transgender ideology, no matter how and where it is promoted, has put women and gay people in danger all around the world.

The art of avoiding definitions: A review of ‘Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability’

“Let me define the terms, and I’ll win any debate,” a friend told me years ago, an insight I’ve seen confirmed many times in intellectual and political arenas.

But after reading Jack Halberstam’s new book, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, I would amend that observation: Debates also can be won by making sure a term is never clearly defined. The transgender movement has yet to offer coherent explanations of the concepts on which its policy proposals are based, yet support is nearly universal in left/liberal circles. Whether or not it was the author’s intention, Trans* feels like an attempt at an outline of such explanation, but I’m sorry to report that the book offers neither clarity nor coherence.

I say sorry, because I came to the book hoping to gain greater understanding of the claims of the transgender movement, which I have not found elsewhere. Halberstam — a professor in Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University — has been writing about this subject for more than two decades and is one of the most prominent U.S. trans* intellectuals. The table of contents looked promising, but the book only deepened my belief that a radical feminist and ecological critique of the transgender movement’s ideology is necessary.

Rather than be defensive about the ambiguity of the transgender argument, Halberstam celebrates the lack of definition as a strength of the movement, an indication that trans* offers deep insights for everyone. If we shift our focus from “the housing of the body” and embrace “perpetual transition” then “we can commit to a horizon of possibility where the future is not male or female but transgender,” he writes. Instead of “male-ish” and “female-ish” bodies we can realize “the body is always under construction” and “consider whether the foundational binary of male-female may possibly have run its course.”

The very act of naming and categorizing imposes limits that constrain the imagination, according to Halberstam, hence the use of the asterisk:

“I have selected the term ‘trans*’ for this book precisely to open the term up to unfolding categories of being organized around but not confined to forms of gender variance. As we will see, the asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds off the certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be, and perhaps most importantly, it makes trans* people the authors of their own categorizations. As this book will show, trans* can be a name for expansive forms of difference, haptic [relating to the sense of touch] relations to knowing, uncertain modes of being, and the disaggregation of identity politics predicated upon the separating out of many kinds of experience that actually blend together, intersect, and mix. This terminology, trans*, stands at odds with the history of gender variance, which has been collapsed into concise definitions, sure medical pronouncements, and fierce exclusions.”

I quote at length to demonstrate that in using shorter excerpts from the book I am not cherry-picking a few particularly abstruse phrases to poke fun at a certain form of postmodern academic writing. My concern is not stylistic but about the arguments being presented. After reading that passage a couple of times, I think I can figure out what Halberstam’s trying to say. The problem is that it doesn’t say anything very helpful.

To be fair, Halberstam is correct in pointing out that the instinct to categorize all the world’s life, human and otherwise — “the mania for the godlike function of naming” — went hand in hand with colonialism, part of the overreach of a certain mix of politics and science in attempting to control the world. But like it or not, humans make sense of the world by naming, which need not go forward with claims of imperial domination or divine insight. We define the terms we use in trying to explain the world so that we can meaningfully communicate about that world; when a term means nothing specific, or means everything, or means nothing and everything at the same time, it is of no value unless one wants to obfuscate.

But, if Halberstam is to be believed, this criticism is irrelevant, because transgenderism “has never been simply a new identity among many others competing for space under the rainbow umbrella. Rather, it constitutes radically new knowledge about the experience of being in a body and can be the basis for very different ways of seeing the world.” So, if I don’t get it, the problem apparently is the limits of my imagination — I don’t grasp the radically new knowledge — not because the explanation is lacking.

After reading the book, I continue to believe that the intellectual project of the transgender movement isn’t so much wrong as it is incoherent, and the political project is not liberatory but regressive. What this book “keeps at bay” is a reasonable, honest request: What does any of this mean?

In other writing — here in 2014 and again in 2016, along with a chapter in my 2017 book The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men — I’ve asked how we should understand transgenderism if the movement’s claim is that a male human can actually be female (or vice versa) in biological terms. If transgender signals a dissatisfaction with the culturally constructed gender norms of patriarchy — which are rigid, repressive, and reactionary — I’ve suggested it would be more effective to embrace the longstanding radical feminist critique of patriarchy.

Rather than repeat those arguments here, I want to try another approach, stating simply that I have good reason to believe I’m real, that the human species of which I am a member is real, and that the ecosphere of which we are a part is real. That is, there is a material reality to the world within which I, and all other carbon-based life forms, operate. I cannot know everything there is to know about that material world, of course, but I can trust that it is real.

The cultural/political/economic systems that shape human societies make living in the real world complex and confusing, and the ways those systems distribute wealth and power are often morally unacceptable. But to challenge that injustice, it’s necessary to understand that real world and communicate my understanding to others in clear fashion.

In left/liberal circles, especially on college campuses, “trans*” increasingly is where the action is for those concerned with social justice. It offers — for everyone, whether transgender-identified or not — the appearance of serious intellectual work and progressive politics. Endorsing the transgender project is a way to signal one is on the cutting edge, and work like Halberstam’s is embraced in these circles, where support for the transgender movement is required to be truly intersectional.

My challenge to those whose goal is liberation is simple: How does this help us understand the real world we are trying to change? How does it help us understand patriarchy, the system of institutionalized male dominance out of which so much injustice emerges?

Halberstam likely would put me in the category of “transphobic feminism” for “refusing to seriously engage” with transfeminism, but I am not transphobic (if, by that term, we mean one who is afraid of, or hateful toward, people who identify as transgender). Nor do I refuse to seriously engage other views (unless we describe a critique of another intellectual position as de facto evidence of a lack of serious engagement). I am rooted in radical feminism, one of those “versions of feminism that still insist on the centrality of female-bodied women,” according to Halberstam.

On that point, Halberstam is accurate: radical feminists argue that patriarchy is rooted in men’s claim to own or control women’s reproductive power and sexuality. Radical feminists distinguish between sex (male XY and female XX, a matter of biology) and gender (masculinity and femininity, a matter of culture and power), which means that there is no way to understand the rigid gender norms of patriarchy without recognizing the relevance of the category of “female-bodied women.” It’s hard to imagine how the binary of male-female could “run its course” given the reality of sexual reproduction.

This is where an ecological perspective, alongside and consistent with a radical feminist critique, reminds us that the world is real and we are living beings, not machines. In discussing his own top surgery (the removal of breasts), Halberstam speaks of working with the doctor:

“Together we were building something in flesh, changing the architecture of my body forever. The procedure was not about building maleness into my body; it was about editing some part of the femaleness that currently defined me. I did not think I would awake as a new self, only that some of my bodily contours would shift in ways that gave me a different bodily abode.”

We all have a right to understand ourselves as we please, and so here’s my response: My body is not a house that was constructed by an architect but rather — like all other life on the planet — is a product of evolution. I resist the suggestion I can “build” myself and recognize that a sustainable human presence on the planet is more likely if we accept that we are part of a larger living world, which has been profoundly damaged when humans treat it as our property to dominate and control.

This is the irony of Halberstam’s book and the transgender project more generally. After labeling the project of categorizing/defining as imperialist and critiquing the “mania for the godlike function of naming,” he has no problem endorsing the “godlike function” of reshaping bodies as if they were construction materials. There’s a deepening ecological sensibility in progressive politics, an awareness of what happens when humans convince ourselves that we can remake the world and ignore the biophysical limits of the ecosphere. While compassionately recognizing the reasons people who identify as transgender may seek surgery and hormone/drug treatments, we shouldn’t suppress concerns about the movement’s embrace of extreme high-tech intervention into the body, including the surgical destruction of healthy tissue and long-term health issues due to cross-sex hormones and hormone-like drugs.

I have long tried to observe what in rhetoric is sometimes called “the principle of charity,” a commitment in debate to formulating an opponent’s argument in the strongest possible version so that one’s critique is on firm footing. I have tried to do that in this review, though I concede that I’m not always sure what Halberstam is arguing, and so I may not be doing his arguments justice. But that is one of my central points: When I read this book — and many other arguments from transgender people and their allies — I routinely find myself confused, unable to understand just what is being proposed. So, again, I’ll quote at length in the hopes of being fair in my assessment, this time the book’s closing paragraph:

“Trans* bodies, in their fragmented, unfinished, broken-beyond-repair forms, remind all of us that the body is always under construction. Whether trans* bodies are policed in bathrooms or seen as killers and loners, as thwarted, lonely, violent, or tormented, they are also a site for invention, imagination, fabulous projection. Trans* bodies represent the art of becoming, the necessity of imagining, and the fleshy insistence of transitivity.”

Once again, after reading that passage a couple of times, I think I understand, sort of, the point. But, once again, I don’t see how it advances our understanding of sex and gender, of patriarchy and power. I am not alone in this assessment; people I know, including some who are sympathetic to the transgender movement’s political project, have shared similar concerns, though they often mute themselves in public to avoid being labeled transphobic.

I’m not asking of the transgender movement some grand theory to explain all the complexity of sex and gender. I just need a clear and coherent place to start. Asking questions is not transphobic, nor is observing that such clarity and coherence are lacking.