Talk:Hijra (India)

Talk_Hijra_(India)_Archive 1

Contents

1 Transsexual 2 what does this have to do with religion? 3 Need for further research 4 Broken sentence

Transsexual

How are Hijras transsexual? According to their religious beliefs they are a third sex. Transsexual is inaccurate because it means you have changed gender to either male or female. The words transgender or androgynous are more accurate indicating a third gender. And I am not sure why certain users are trying to downplay their homosexuality. Hijras NEVER have sex with women. And even though they identify as a third sex, in terms of basic biology a male who has sex with a male is homosexual. Apollomelos 22:48, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Sorry the facts don't agree with what you think you know, but at least some Hijras identify as transsexual - just as some support the gay movement without being gay, or even identify as gay. I also have my doubts as to your claims that they have never sex with women - can you proove that? Mind you, that means you would have to proove a negative, which is usually a triffle difficult. And last - your pointless, factually highly questionable (what is "biological gender" supposed to be?), and discriminiating edit of Homosexuality and transgender nonwithstanding, homosexual is not the same as gay, and a male-bodied person who identifies as non-male having sex with another male-bodies person might have technically homosexual sex, but they are certainly not "homosexuals" or "gays" in the western sense - just as a straight transwoman is not a homosexual man. I also have my doubts that you know all that well what both "transgender" and "androgynous" mean, so maybe you ought to get a clue before vandalizing any more articles. -- AlexR 02:42, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Okay Alex I am going to take things slowly with you because I realize English may not be your primary language and I think you are misunderstanding my statements. If the definition of a Hijra is a third gender how can it be male to female or female to male hence transsexual? And I can prove Hijras have never been recorded to have sex with women. Historically they have been religious quasi prostitutes and all of the records indicate it is always a male. Plus the modern accounts have only recorded males as well. Please provide evidence of any record of sexuality with women being part of Hijras. There are multiple meanings of gay and homosexual. One of them is purely scientific meaning one who has sex with another of the same gender. You are greatly mistaken to think there is not scientific meanings and only social constructions. Apollomelos 19:22, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

P.S. A biological gender is simple. It is whether you were born with a penis (male) or a vagina (female). I think our disagreements are based on you reading words as simply social constructions. Apollomelos 19:25, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

What's the controversy about?

Please sign your postings. Otherwise, one tends to end up arguing with oneself ;-) 金 (Kim) 03:01, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

There is no such thing as a "biological gender", at least as you seem to intend the term. The whole idea of "gender", as opposed to "sex", came about because researchers needed a term to describe the people who might describe themselves as "a woman with a penis" or "a man with a vagina." (See the articles on gender role and gender identity.)

A "gender" is a learned 'role' and/or a felt 'identity'. Things get a little complicated because a person's community can look at external genitalia and decide that the sex of the person is male or is female, and on that basis the community can have gender role expectations. (I just flashed on an old movie in which one male cop picks up a victim's purse and starts to carry it out to the squad car by suspending it from his wrist. He gets growled at by his superior officer as carrying a woman's purse in that manner is deemed gender-inappropriate for a man.) It also gets complicated when an individual has the external genitalia of one kind but feels that in interiority s/he belongs to a gender that does not correspond to those genitals.

The majority, even the vast majority, of hijra may have been born with male genitalia. How many of them may have been born with intersexual genitals? How many of them may have been born with female genitalia? It's diffiicult to say. If a person is born with male genitalia and feels the situation inappropriate to inner experience then there is a conceptually simple solution, and, in India at least, there is some measure of social support from others who have taken that path earlier. If it were the other way around one would have a possible solution given current levels of ability to surgically restructure human bodies, but such a change could not have a long tradition because the surgical techniques are relatively new. So how do we know that there are not some female --->hijra body type persons out there? How do we know that there could not be such persons? If someone with originally female genitalia acquired the physical appearance of a hijra and became enculturated to that community, how would one know? Do you presume that there is some authority that sanctions people as hijra only if they first apply and demonstrate the original possession of typical male genitalia? 金 (Kim) 03:01, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

A central part of the Hijra religious identification is castration, meaning they are male. There are no female Hijras. And I have never heard of any intersex Hijras either. I would like to see some support of that because it runs contrary to their whole religious identity. Apollomelos 03:08, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

And thanks for the clarification on the usage of gender and sex, that was very helpful. However I still disagree as the religious identification of a Hijra in the Hindu religion is a male who gets castrated and becomes "neither man nor woman". If a Hijra of the female sex exists she is not a true Hijra and violates the religious meaning as well as I have never seen any recorded Hijras of the female sex. Apollomelos 03:14, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

What's the controversy about?

The controversy is regarding how to classify them, which I agree is difficult given the cultural distance between Europe and India. Apollomelos 05:45, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hmmm. I wonder if they are as rigid as all that. It would be useful to have citations on the ideology of the Hijra. Is there anywhere that Hijra explain themselves? How formal and inclusive is their organization? Is there an official process of certification or of something like guild membership? 金 (Kim) 03:20, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Check this out, my first Google find. I've got to back out of the Void now and get to real-world work. http://archives.lists.indymedia.org/imc-mumbai/2002-August/000141.html

I found these links helpful:

http://www.columbia.edu/~blw2102/ http://www.worldpress.org/Asia/845.cfm http://www.msu.edu/~lees/Kristina/Hirjas.htm http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/hijras.html One thing that is common to everything I have read on the subject is Hijras having a penis and having relationships with men or other Hijras. Apollomelos 05:45, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Are there supposed to be two articles on Hijras, or can they be combined?

There aren't two articles--the other one is a page that helps you decide whether you want to find out about the gender-ambigous South Asian community, emigration, or other similarly spelt things.—iFaqeer (Talk to me!) 19:46, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC)

what does this have to do with religion?

How does this deal with Hinduism? This is more of a gender issue. I think the category should be removed.

Well, Hinduism is really not just a religion, but also a culture with very religious roots, I am inclined to say, and Hijras are deeply embedded into it, so in my personal opinion, Cat:Hindusim is fine. Cat:Islam, on the other hand, now that is problematic, because even with some Hijras being Muslims, there is nothing particularly islamic about Hijras. -- AlexR 09:39, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Based upon the resources both categories are relevant and I believe with continued additions it will become apparent. There is much work to be done on this article especially with their religious integrations. Hinduism is relevant because they are embedded in the Hindu religion as well as mythology, for example they mirror androgynous Shiva. Islam gains relevancy because both Pakistan and Bangladesh that are Islamic societies have integrated them. All Hijras have been influenced in their burial methods by Islam. Islamic Hijras hold their gender identity a result of Allah. Hijras held an important status in the courts of Islamic rulers. Apollomelos 11:41, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Actually, the question is not whether Pakistani Hijras were influenced by Islam, but whether their influence on Islam is big enough to be mentionable, and that is what I doubt. -- AlexR 12:26, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

well, they play the same rôle as/with muslims as/with hindus; both muslim and hindu hijras revere the gujarati center of hijra culture as well. they certainly influence islam in the subcontinent, which counts, i think, as influence on islam. -- em zilch 0006 02 april 2005 EST

Need for further research

Thanks for the articles mentioned just before the preceding section.

It is becoming clear that there is lots of room for more research into books on this subject. In earlier decades not much objective information seems to have been published. The citations provided above mention a few recent books that could provide citations and useful information with which to improve this article.

I agree that the socionormal account of a hijra is of an individual with male external genitalia. But don't forget that intersexuals by definition have external genitalia that have been only partially masculinized, or, very rarely, may have fully masculinized genitalia and female genitalia as well. (I'm thinking of the increasingly common, after in-vitro fertilization became possible, cases of individuals who have roughly half their cells being XX and half their cells being XY, and who have a similarly complicated situation in regard to their genitalia.) So it appears from that websites cited that some individuals start with, e.g., an ambiguous organ that might be a small penis but also might be a very large clitoris, and that these people have all traces of their external sexual organs removed in the course of becoming a hijra. So we've already gained some ground in this discussion by seeing clearly that it is not only "vanilla males" who may become hijras.

What is, I think, an open possibility is that some people (whether socionormally or not) become hijras who never had male genitalia. With recent increases in the ability to alter sexual organs surgically, it must have become increasingly possible for someone who was born with female genitalia but the gender identity of a hijra to secure the same body appearance as any other hijra. It remains to be seen in the light of objective inquiry how the hijra subculture might react to such individuals should their true history become known to the group. Does the fact that in the past the only practical way for a sexed individual to become an unsexed individual was male humans to have their genetalia removed then become a determining ideological norm that precludes achieving hijra status once people with a female body type can achieve the hijra body type by following a different surgical course? Some psychological studies indicate that people who have, in an experimental setting, been subjected to prejudicial treatment then become more than ordinarily resistant to adopting as their own the privileges of a supposed "superior type" of human being and more resistant to treating others in a prejudicial, bigoted way. If that is a valid experimental finding, then it would seem to me to indicate the likelihood that a hijra would be more accepting of a female->hijra individual than would the average non-hijra indivual be accepting of a male->hijra individual. 金 (Kim) 05:45, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Broken sentence

This sentence:

This is expected a hijra's penis and testes will be removed but not all hijras do so.

Seems to have been messed up somewhere in someones edits. I would have fixed it but I was not 100% sure what it was suppose to say. Is this change acceptable:

It is expected that a hijra's penis and testes will be removed but not all hijras do so.

Dalf | Talk 04:39, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

I went ahead and made the change, since it seemed that was what the sentence was suppose to say. But double checkers are appreciated. Dalf | Talk 04:04, 12 May 2005 (UTC)