Abstract
At first glance, official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and the Islamic Republic of Iran have much in common on the issues of gender and sex. Both prohibit female leadership in the clerical forms of priests or mullahs, respectively. Both understand a gender complementarity among men and women—in contrast to a radical equality—and base moral duties on this ontological distinction. Both consider the act of homosexual coitus as a sin, discourage divorce, and teach that sexual union is permissible only within the context of marriage. Taken together, these facts might lead the scholar of religious ethics to assume that sex and gender act as bridge concepts between the two traditions,1 providing an opportunity to study cross-cultural patriarchy or sexual conservativism as universal phenomena.
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Notes
Aaron Stalnaker, Overcoming Our Evil: Human Nature and Spiritual Exercises in Xunzi and Augustine (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006).
Norton John, “Vatican says ‘sex-change’ operation does not change person’s gender,” Catholic News Service (January 14, 2003). http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/CatholicTSDecision.html (accessed June 5, 2009).
Robert Tait, “A Fatwa for Freedom,” The Guardian (July 27, 2005). http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jul/27/gayrights.iran (accessed November 1, 2009).
My definitions are based loosely on those provided in Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3–13. I am not unaware of how problematic even these tentative definitions are. In fact, I remain unsatisfied with the attempt to separate sex from gender in much feminist work in the late twentieth century that makes gender a thing of cultural construction, and yet leaves sex and embodiment as natural/biological and therefore unchanging and uncontestable. I use these terms here with the definitions I provide because they are the most common working definitions in gender and sexuality studies and because, as my comparative analysis will show, they help describe differences between religious anthropologies. Gender and sex are understood differently in the case studies I consider, and I have therefore found these different aspects of embodiment helpful for analyzing distinct implications of embodiment for comparative ethics.
Bernice L. Hausman has pointed out that the entry for “gender” changed in the OED from the first edition, 1933, to the second, 1989. In the first edition, sex is given as a synonym for gender. In the second, gender and sex are differentiated so that gender includes a psychological articulation of a natural sex: “In mod. (esp. feminist) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.” Bernice Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 7.
A similar shift takes place in the culture I do much of my work in: Persia. For example, the Persian term jins, which historically is used for gender, in the twentieth century comes to mean sex as well. Najmabadi attributes this in part to a translation movement of Western psychology into Persian, in which sex and gender are differentiated. Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Sexing Gender, Transing Homos: Travail of Sexuality in Contemporary Iran.” Working Paper, 2006. Although I do not have the space to prove so here, I think this linguistic and semantic shift is at least in part caused by the reality of transsexuals and sex change operations. For an argument along these lines in a Western context, see Judith Butler, “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.4 (2001): 621–36.
Paula Sanders, “Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, edited by Nikki Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 75, 88.
Ahmad Dallal, “Sexualities, Scientific Discourses: Pre-Modern,” in Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, vol. 3. edited by Suad Joseph (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 401–7.
8. For example, Ziba Mir-Hosseini provides a translation of Ayatollah Seyyed Yusef Madani Tabrizi’s practical treatise on moral problems, which deals in part with sex change operations. Madani allows for sex change operations only in the cases of an intersexed individual, for whom “there is a possibility of either maleness or femaleness.” But he does not give permission for surgery or hormone treatment for a transsexual: “If they have resorted to this nonlawful action, they have sinned; as to religious duties, they are bound by those incumbent prior to the change in their appearance.” Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 35–7. His stance against sex change operations is most likely grounded in the Quranic sura 4:119 in which Satan promises those who choose him over Allah will be able to alter the creation of Allah. Sex change operations are seen by Madani simultaneously as a mutilation of healthy bodies and interference in God’s creation.
For example, in 1988 a fatwa was issued by the Egyptian Grand Mufti Sayed Tantawi, the highest Sunni authority in Egypt, endorsing the sex change of an al-Azhar medical student as a way to treat what was called his psychological hermaphroditism (al-khunutha annafsiya). The fatwa begins by recounting a hadith, in which the Prophet says God did not create any disease without also creating its cure, the exception being old age. The fatwa reads in part as follows: These and other noble hadiths on treatment grant permission to perform an operation changing a man into a woman and vice versa, as long as a reliable doctor concludes that there are innate causes in the body itself, indicating a buried [matmura] female nature, or a covered [maghmura] male nature, because the operation will disclose these buried or covered organs, thereby curing a corporal disease which cannot be removed, except by this operation…. It is permissible to perform the operation in order to reveal what was hidden of male and female organs. Indeed, it is obligatory to do so on the grounds that it must be considered a treatment, when a trustworthy doctor advises it. It is, however, not permissible to do it at the mere wish to change sex from woman to man, or vice versa. Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam for the Egyptian State (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 1997), 330–31.
Vanessa Barford, “Iran’s diagnosed transsexuals,” BBC News (February 25, 2008). http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7259057.stm (accessed May 5, 2009).
Nasseri Ladane, “Iran Sex Changes Get Mullahs’ Money as Regime Persecutes Gays,” Bloomberg.com (February 5, 2008). http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&refer=home&sid=aKyg7EZs.8hA (accessed May 1, 2009).
Nazila Fathi, “As Repression Lifts, More Iranians Change Their Sex,” New York Times (August 2, 2004): 3.
John Paul II, The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan, foreword by J. Grabowski (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1997), 65.
Benedict M. Ashley and Kevin O’Rourke, Health Care Ethics: A Theological Analysis, 4th edition (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1997), 342–43.
Hausman argues that in the United States during the twentieth century, the rise in the popularity of the idea that gender is socially constructed effectively erased “the semiotic conditions” of gender’s existence (sex) so that sex became natural and fixed, and only gender contestable. In other words, sex became understood as the physiological reality of the body, and gender became understood as something that is merely performed. This explains in part my surprise at the prevalence of sex change operations in Iran: I was reading this fact through the feminist scholarship that sees sex as a given, and only gender as the appropriate focus of reform. However, I am not interested here in staking a claim in the debate over whether sex or gender is ontological or socially constructed. I have invoked Hausman simply to show how different logics of sexuality are based on more fundamental epistemological issues. Bernice Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 175–94.
Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of Berkeley Press, 2005).
B. F. Musallam, Sex and Society in Islam: Birth Control Before the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 12.
John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 279.
Elizabeth Bucar, “Methodological Invention as a Constructive Project: Exploring the Production of Ethical Knowledge through the Interaction of Discursive Logics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 36.3 (2008): 358–61.
Riki Wilchins, Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2004), 71.
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© 2012 Elizabeth M. Bucar and Aaron Stalnaker
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Bucar, E.M. (2012). Bodies at the Margins: The Comparative Case of Transsexuality. In: Bucar, E.M., Stalnaker, A. (eds) Religious Ethics in a Time of Globalism. Palgrave Macmillan’s Content and Context in Theological Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137273031_3
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