Tanya's Tale

[TanyaG]

Western governments often take the view that transgender people are a phenomenon of recent times, but trans has long history. Records in some countries go back to ancient times, most famously in the Kamasutra, which was written roughly two millennia ago. Yet that book is by no means the earliest mention of a third sex in India, whose rich literature shows the concept was understood nearly three thousand years ago.

The third sex can be found throughout Brahminical, Buddhist and Jain texts, as well as in epics like the Mahabharata, but also in ancient medical treatises, such as Ayurveda, Susrutasamhita and Carakasamhita. As long ago as the fourth century BCE, Indian traditional medicine took it for granted a third sex existed, the prevailing theory being sex was determined at conception by the balance between a father's seed and a mother's blood and that if both were in balance, a third sex child would result.

During the eight to sixth centuries BCE, men who were impotent, effeminate in nature, or dressed in women's clothes were called napumsaka, or 'neither male nor female'. Napumsaka were a distinct social group whose roles were limited to being singers and dancers and later, prostitutes.

By 600 BCE the Jains had broken the third sex down even further, between napumsaka, kliba (assigned male at birth, but who had what was regarded as an anatomically defective penis,) and pandaka, who were impotent or sterile, and were divided into no less than fourteen different subtypes.

Three millennia ago, Indian culture had already split sex assigned at birth and gender identity and done so explicitly.

This is where it gets complicated, because the Jains were most concerned about the reputation of their monks, who were expected to be celibate, so after another few centuries, they began to wonder if men's attraction to men might also be a condition for being third sex? This group, the purusanapumsaka posed a huge problem, because they didn't dress like women.

The Jains had by then decided that third sex people must have both male and female sexualities in order to escape what was rapidly becoming a theological mess. They rationalised that a napumsaka must be a receptive person during sex, whereas purusanapumsaka were both receptive and active, the active behaviour making them male and therefore not third sex.

Taken together, this means the Jains had accepted sex assignment was unreliable if it was based on sex assigned at birth and/or secondary sexual characteristics and had extended that to gender role markers too, including clothing and behavioural traits. The Jains had also split sexuality from sex assigned at birth and accepted that gender identity was linked to culture, but no other Indian religion did this.

A crucial theme many western commentators on Indian literature have missed is that this view wasn't part of a permissive view on sex and sexuality, it was part of a multi millennia long attempt to control both. This wasn't just a Jain attitude, it spread right across all of society, because the primary function of people assigned male at birth was to establish a family,

Which meant that anyone who fell into the third gender was viewed as an aberration, reduced to marginalised roles and discriminated against.

With such an incredibly long history, it isn't surprising India and Pakistan have complex attitudes to trans people today who are often known collectively as Hijra. Estimates of how many trans people there are in the two countries vary wildly, mostly because their situation and attitudes to them are so complicated. There is even a language spoken by some trans people, called Hijra Farsi.

Despite this long history, there is little awareness of transmen or non-binary trans people in India and Pakistan and the term Hijra only refers to people who were assigned male at birth. It's an umbrella term that includes trans women, eunuchs, intersex people, and anyone who isn't straight and has feminine behaviour.

Hijra also includes AMAB people who were born with penises judged too short to qualify as male, as I wrote in a previous blog. Within Pakistan, being gay is unacceptable outside of the Hijra community, which makes it a haven for men who are attracted to other men. This is a very varied group of people.

One of the complicating factors is that hijras (khawaja sira is a term many prefer but we'll get onto that) are believed by many to have god gifted powers to grant blessings or curses. This means they're in demand at birthdays and weddings, but despite this they're shunned at other times and many cis people have little idea about them other than a widespread belief they are intersex.

It gets even more convoluted, because many who consider themselves (or are considered to be) Hijras are part of a system known as guru-chela. A guru is a head teacher and the chelas their disciples, so the community is strongly hierarchical and acceptance into it is not possible without being adopted by a guru, often after the chela is ejected from their family as a child.

Hijra society is intensely hierarchical with each group of hijras forming a gharana, each of which is headed by a Naayak, under whose leadership the gurus fall.

For a long time, finding their way into a Hijra community was the only way a trans person who was out could survive, but nowadays a slight increase in tolerance means it is possible to be trans without grounding yourself in guru-chela. The people who choose this path call themselves Khawaja Sira and there is some resentment toward them from the Hijra community because they see the western concept of transgender eroding what's left of their traditional role.

Many from the Hijra tradition make no attempt to pass as women beyond clothes and makeup, because their status as Hijras depends on being visible for what they are. Society's expectations of them include florid cursing if their demands are not met along with other behaviours which make folk wary of them and while their status is low, for many it seems the only solution. Which in some ways, is true.

Trans rights are in a mess in both Pakistan and India, because despite equal rights legislation having been passed, there has been little attempt to implement or enforce it, leaving them isolated and discriminated against. The situation is worse in Pakistan than india, because of religious views. It isn't just the current administrations who are the problem, because in colonial times, the British government passed an act banning Hijras from crossdressing and singing or dancing, which reduced the entire community to begging. Many were left with little alternative but sex work and that remains so today.

Prejudice runs so deep that within Pakistan today trans people are frequently denied an education. No education, no job. In a society where the sex of a child and its fertility is of overwhelming importance and arranged marriages common, trans children are seen as a threat to family honour or a sign of weakness, leaving them isolated and targets for abuse. Lacking any meaningful protection, attacks on trans people are common, especially in Pakistan, where extreme violence is a regular occurrence.

In a society with such polarised beliefs about gender and sex roles, an additional penalty trans people must face is internalised transphobia, constantly reinforced by family and society. As if it couldn't get worse, there is still a great deal of conflation between transgender women and homosexuality, which means sexual barriers are that much higher than in the west.

Overriding all of this is the low status of trans people, which ensures someone who declares publicly they are trans is likely to cause offence to their entire family, because Hijra have the lowest possible status within society. A person who declares themselves to be trans is seen as destroying not only their own reputation, but those of everyone related to them.

Muslim families are extremely close knit and their expectations that oldest sons should conform are very high, but within Pakistan important kinship networks called biradaris also reinforce social obligation's importance over individual expression. Biradaris have their benefits, but it's hard to think of any if you are trans, because gossip passes like wildfire amongst their members.

Concealing secrets within nuclear families is hard and to make matters worse, if someone is not married by a certain age, there will be pressure on their family to explain why. The pressure to provide male offspring makes it is common for families to coerce transgender people into marriage, with additional pressure on eldest sons, because the marriageability of their sisters will be affected if they do not go ahead (it isn't much better for cis women, because in Pakistan, having an unmarried daughter in her late twenties is seen as a family tragedy.)

Until 2018, no trans person could even have an identity card in Pakistan and when this was fixed, they could only have what's called an 'X' identity card, or 'third sex' card, which means they cannot go for Hajj or Umrah and find themselves barred from countries which don't allow entry for anyone whose card doesn't say male or female. Great.

Religious rulings issued by organisations like the Islami Nazriati Council don't help either because gender transition is considered prohibited by many Islamic scholars and many religious people in Pakistan only accept the existence of two sexes. Religion need not necessarily be an issue though, because in areas where faith is influenced by Sufism tolerance is usually somewhat greater. This is ironic, because Islam was brought to India over a thousand years ago by the Mughals, who gave transgender people and eunuchs high status, including court positions and the right of inheritance. Eunuchs found themselves incorporated into the Hijra tradition with the result that trans people have been conflated with them right into modern times, including in Pakistan's 2009 Supreme Court ruling about a third gender.

Despite everything, trans people have their champions and gender affirming care is available within India and Pakistan. It is just very hard to get. That this should be so in two countries which between them can claim to have made a breakthrough splitting sex assigned at birth and gender identity more than two and a half thousand years ago, is deeply ironic.

As far as I know, we don't have any active members from India or Pakistan, but if we do, my belief is we should all take extra special care of them.

[TanyaG]

This was the headline in The Times a few days back and it's part of the reorganisation of gender affirming care (GAC) for children in the wake of the Cass Report.

The story is staff in the new NHS Children and Young People's Gender Services (CYPGS) will be mandated to screen referrals for conditions such as ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), learning difficulties and other mental health conditions which might be causing their distress, including depression.

The background is the Cass report speculatively linked the striking rise in assigned female at birth (AFAB) trans children with a presumed rise in undiagnosed autism; one of the stranger things about a review which has made so much of the danger of speculation, as justification for its ban on puberty blockers.

This announcement comes at a time when NHS mental health services for children and adolescents are on the ropes following decades of neglect. So it's anyone's guess how long referrals to neurodiversity clinics will take, because waiting lists are measured in years and not just one or two years, because three year waits are by no means uncommon.

It doesn't take too much colouring in of this particular playbook to work out unless new funding is found, the net result will be for the pathway through the gender service to even longer to navigate than it does now.

What if funding is found and referrals begin to go through at a rate which minimises the distress of all involved? My crystal ball says we'll see a rise in the number of trans children diagnosed with ADHD and ASD and also with conditions such as anxiety and depression.

Why? Because ADHD and ASD diagnoses are frequently diagnosed in cis children, so it's beyond belief we won't find a similar rise in trans children if we go looking. Nor will it come as a surprise to any member of Susan's that anxiety and mood issue diagnoses will be so common as to be almost universal, because that's what half the discussions here are about.

So what's the long range forecast for trans services for children in the UK? There's a risk the Cass report may substitute one type of tunnel vision with another, by gifting conservatives the opportunity to file trans-ness as a side-effect of neurodiversity or poor mental health, conditions of which they only marginally more tolerant than gender incongruity. We've already seen the Supreme Court fudge the issues where the law is concerned and Cass easily has the potential to do the same with healthcare.

More to the point, one of the things it's impossible not to be aware of after a reading the Cass report is its silence about referral patterns in countries which don't match those in the UK. A trigger for the Cass review was a sudden rise in referrals of AFAB children to the gender service, which spooked the government because of the price tag attached to dealing with it. Yet other cultures have long seen different referral mixes, including some, for example India, which have trans-ness baked into their religions for so long they celebrate it in books written in antiquity.

The thing that concerns me most is there's no shortage of research about how mental health issues in trans people are the consequence of discrimination, not of being trans per se. The Cass report, upon whose recommendations the CYPGS is being built, treads perilously close to standing this situation on its head by implying that the surge in trans referrals which so concerns the UK government has happened because of the mental health problems we experience.

All of this said, the requirement for neurodiversity and mental health screening for new referrals to the CYPGS is likely to be a good thing - so long as it doesn't create yet another constraint in a service which is already bottlenecked. The omens are not good, because so far we only have two of the eight CYPGS centres Cass recommended and in the current financial and political environment it would be all too easy for Westminster to wash its hands of some or all of the rest because of the economy, stupid.

Parliament continues to behave as if we're passing phase that will go away if they continue to ignore us. I feel like saying to them, 'Listen, the brown stuff in your mugs? The stuff you've been drinking since you passed the Gender Recognition Act 21 years ago? This is coffee, okay? Wake up and smell it.'

[TanyaG]

The foundation of Hindu law, the Manu Smriti, set out the basis of what were called the 'three natural genders' in India two thousand years ago, a position reflected in the grammar of Sanskrit. So the idea of a third sex does not only exist in India's stories and religions, it has long been reflected in India's laws.

One of the key trans stories in India is that of Lord Ram, who went into exile for fourteen years. Before he left, he asked all men and women to return to their homes, only to find a group of followers waiting for him on his return. When Ram asked why they were still there, the group responded they were neither male nor female and so had waited for further instructions about what they should do. The legend has it Ram was so impressed he gifted them the ability to bless others at occasions such as weddings and child birth, and it was with this that the Hijra tradition began.

Another famous trans story is of Lord Shiva in his half female form as Ardhanarishvara, considered dual gendered. This form of Shiva merges purusha (masculine essence) with prakriti (feminine essence) to create a being of ultimate wholeness. Trans stories are also frequent in the epic Mahabharata, one of which has Krishna turning into a woman to marry Aravan, a warrior who is doomed to die. In the female form of Mohini, Krishna performs all the requirements of mourning, the source of rites still performed by some of the Hijras in northern India.

The are other trans stories in the Mahabharata, but amazingly, one is of a trans man, Shikhandi. Stories of trans men are unusual in Indian literature, but Skihandi lives as a boy and eventually marries a woman. When the bride's father objects, a yaksha (a spirit) grants Skihandi a penis for the day so the marriage can go ahead before turning her back again. This is fortunate, because Skihandi will later play a key part in the defeat of the invincible warrior Bhishma, who cannot take up arms against a woman.

Arjuna, who is a part of Shihandi's story and a key player in the Mahabharata, is a prince who is turned trans by a malign spirit, before being convinced by Vishnu it's the perfect disguise. Arjuna spends a year in court as Brihannala, dressed as a woman and serving the women, before turning back to their original gender.

These stories are scraping the surface of classical Indian literature, but all were well known when the Romans were occupying Britain. They are deeply embedded in Indian culture.

So the third sex tradition was old by the time the Mughals invaded from Persia, though the Hijra tradition appears to have arisen after they conquered all in the 16th century. At that time it was common for the Mughal to castrate male prisoners. They had many reasons to do so, but one was that eunuchs made risk free guards for their harems and another that some Mughal rulers were as partial to men as women.

Eunuchs had arrived in India as slaves of earlier Islamic rulers in about 1000 AD and a few were given considerable responsibilities, but with the end of the Mughals and the arrival of the East India Company, they were folded into the Hijras. At this point it appears that some Hijras began to offer themselves for castration and penectomy, becoming known as nirvana moorath, while non castrated Hijra were known as akwa moorath.

Which is how castration became a part of the Hijra tradition and while no-one could have known at the time, it would prove to have dramatic consequences.

Up until the British arrived, Hijras had low status in India, but they did have a place, even if it was uncertain. That was not to last. In 1860, the British made homosexuality a crime and treated all Hijras as such. Then, in 1871, with the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), the British outlawed Hijras entirely, declaring them criminals and allowing their arrest on sight.

The injustice of the Imperial CTA was compounded by successive Indian governments allowing it to remain law until 2009, because the elites of India supported it. For them, the Hijra were an embarrassment, not to mention a constant reminder of the fate awaiting non-normative children born into their families.

The CTA was justified by the Raj in part because the Hijras were known to castrate some children. What the British administrators failed to address was why children were ending up with the Hijras in the first place, which was they were being expelled from their families for what were often minor degrees of gender non-conformance. Such as having a penis under 2cm long at birth, which was a valid reason for castration in India until this century.

The CTA did nothing to address this rejection of children, so it continued as it always had, except the children involved could now look forward both to being rejected and arrested, since nobody offered them any sanctuary except the uncertain one of the Hijras. Faced with a challenging future, the community went underground for a century and somehow survived into modern times.

After independence in 1947, attitudes in India began to ease, but only to the extent of CTA enforcement becoming patchy. The problem was that by then, the Hijra and the entire third sex community had developed such a habit of secrecy its culture was hidden from the society even as its members became more openly visible on the streets. Hijras and third sex people were there, but hardly anyone knew why.

Which leaves transgender in India in the situation it finds itself today. Attitudes to gender non-conformity have become somewhat more liberal, though much less so in rural areas than urban ones. Within India, Hijras don't find themselves in quite as bad a situation as they do in Pakistan, but after 150 years off the radar, few outside their community understand who they are anymore.

The emergence of valid trans identities outside of the Hijra community may prove to be a tipping point. Right now the situation for trans people who were assigned female at birth (AFAB) isn't so bad by comparison to anyone who was assigned male at birth (AMAB). Even when living with their families, transmen can go under the radar because of looser social constraints regarding clothing, but that only lasts until they reach marriageable age, when their lives can turn into a nightmare.

A key point is that while Hijras have become a symbol of trans in India, they aren't the only trans people and many other communities have long existed alongside them, which is reflected in dozens of terms used to describe transgender folk in India's many states and languages. One of the indelible markers of the nations love-hate relationship with transgender is this extraordinarily rich language of terms to describe its various flavours. For example, beginning in the 1990s a new group, known as kothi (or koti) began to be identified, who are same sex attracted men with feminine gender expression.

Sociologists have spent much time trying to delineate kothi's allegiances, because they have some overlap with the hijra community, but reading between the lines, the reality is trans people are much more fluid in their social relationships than the sociologists who study them. This is complicated by the way hijra households, or ghanaras, control territories, sometimes leading to mergers with other groups who have banded together on an ad hoc basis for support and mutual protection.

While sociologists agonise over the whys and wherefores, what has changed is that with the rise in awareness of transgender worldwide, it has become possible for some trans people within India to break free of the confines of tradition due to (marginally) increased tolerance in cities. While the Hijra may be conflicted about the emergence of these Khawaja sira identities, this new development can be construed as a good thing, because it marks a step away from a system whose roots lie in the compassionless abandonment of children.

Ultimately, it is not the Raj which is to blame for the plight of the Hijra, it is Indian society itself. The Raj is culpable for making a bad situation infinitely worse, but it was Indian society which created the bad situation in the first place. The Hijras are sometimes presented as part of India's rich life, but I'm struggling to think of another country which would present a two millennia history of abandoning defenceless children as a cultural icon.

That it took until 2009 for the CTA to be repealed is a scandal, because it was an epic abuse of human rights upon which Indian society quite deliberately chose to turn its back. Even today, trans people remain barred from holding a driving license and cannot obtain permanent national income tax numbers, with the government showing no inclination to address either issue.

Attitudes to trans people within India may have relaxed somewhat, but they remain unbearably cruel by western standards. It is difficult for trans people to find employment and when they do, it is usually low paid and quite likely to be sex work. Landlords are rarely trans friendly, so accommodation is a problem too (one in five have been refused a home) and violence, both physical and sexual, remains an ever present risk.

How this could have happened in a sophisticated culture which has venerated trans stories for longer than any other civilisation is enough to give anyone pause for thought. A defence which is sometimes offered is that India has bigger problems on its plate, but if Indian culture has an Achilles heel, it is the hyper-masculinity so prized by its society along with its failure to address  long standing social injustices. Independence happened 78 years ago and we're long past the time when India can pin it's multiple failures of compassion on anything but the mindset of its own people.