Sex and the Citadel (42 page)

There was a time when people did. Gender-bending has a long history in the Arab world; in seventh-century Medina, for example, the Prophet Muhammad regularly interacted with men who crossed the gender divide. These were the
mukhannathun:
people who were anatomically male and raised as boys but behaved like women. Today, we would consider them transvestite or possibly transgendered. Although they talked, walked, and looked female, the
mukhannathun
were not assumed to be sexually attracted to men; it was, however, generally believed that they were not interested in women either, which is why, for example, they were allowed access to the Prophet’s wives and played a recognized social role as matchmakers, as well as entertainers.

Those who consider cross-dressing un-Islamic draw on what they see as the clear-cut duality of creation as specified in the Qur’an: “By the enshrouding night, by the radiant day, by His creation of male and female, the ways you take differ greatly.”
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And they invoke the many hadiths in which the Prophet Muhammad is said to have condemned
mukhannathun:
“The Prophet cursed effeminate men and mannish women” is just one of the variations on this theme.
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But there is some debate as to exactly why the Prophet took this line with particular
mukhannathun
in the first place, and whether this indictment can be generalized to all such individuals. Some scholars argue that it is not the cross-dressing per se that landed the
mukhannathun
in trouble, but rather that the Prophet may have suspected that one particular individual’s lack of interest in women was less than ironclad or that another may have been arranging illicit trysts between men and women—an individual injunction that came to be applied to all such people.
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Over time, the line on the
mukhannathun
hardened and their gender behavior came to be associated with passive sodomy—something that earlier generations of Arabs had been able to differentiate—resulting in a widely held confusion that continues to this day.

To be sure, homosexual men and women in today’s Arab world
are carrying a lot of baggage. But, as Randa sees it, they at least have a closet to put it in should they choose. Coming out as a transsexual, however, is not particularly good for your health—self-administered sex change aside. And it’s even worse, in a patriarchal society, for men who think of themselves as women. “They usually leave school young because of discrimination, problems in the family, in society. If they haven’t gone through hormonotherapy, they can live in the day as boys and nights in the clubs as girls. Or they have suddenly started on hormones, and they are thrown out by their families. They are obliged to prostitute themselves and to become a creature of the night,” was Randa’s grim assessment. “The ones who come from the upper classes, if they have their own business, their own projects, property in their own name, they can live peacefully even if they are thrown out of the family and their society. They can live with dignity.”

That dignity is in particularly short supply in parts of the Gulf where gender differences are color-coded—women in black and men in white—and cross-dressing is a source of rising social anxiety. In 2007, for example, Kuwait passed an amendment to its criminal code specifying that “imitating the opposite sex in any way is to be punished with up to one year in prison and a fine of 1,000 Kuwaiti dinars [approximately USD 3,600] or with one of these two punishments.”
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Since then, scores of male-to-female transgendered or transsexual people have been arrested, often on the basis of just looking a little different, since the law doesn’t actually define what constitutes such imitation; even a medical certificate of gender identity disorder, authorized by the government, doesn’t save them from arrest. As Munir found out back in Cairo, time in police custody can include torture, sexual abuse, and blackmail by officers; the law also acts as a license for men in general to prey on them.

The question is why the Kuwaiti government should have decided to clamp down on cross-dressing in the first place. As one Arab commentator put it, it’s not as if the country doesn’t have more pressing problems: “Who are the perverts, anyway? Is delinquency such as the growth and spread of bribery, political
corruption in the House of Representatives, rampant corruption in government institutions, and the collapse of morals in the Kuwaiti society … more or less of a danger to society than the so-called phenomenon of … the third sex [male-to-female trans people]?”
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Kuwait, like many of the smaller Gulf states, is on the sharp end of globalization: foreign nationals make up around two-thirds of its population. In recent years, the country has seen women rise to prominence in government and business, over the vociferous objections of Islamic conservatives.
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Anxieties about preserving national identity and local culture often fix on what appears to be the most visible symbol of Western depredation: those who are seen to violate traditional sexual or gender roles—be they empowered women, homosexuals, or cross-dressers. The fact that, “traditionally”-speaking, women have occupied significant roles in Islamic society and that alternative sexualities have long been a feature of Arab life is glossed over. Taking a hard line on as vulnerable a group as the “third sex,” is a convenient way to prove your Islamic street cred, and they make a far easier target than the country’s well-connected women’s movement.

It’s not just nonconforming men who are raising the temperature in the Gulf.
Boyat
is the Arabic term that’s been coined to describe women who look and behave like young men.
Boyat
are also causing something of a panic in some Gulf societies: in the UAE, for example, police squads scan malls and other public places in organized campaigns targeting suspicious-looking girls: those arrested for the first time are released into parental custody, but repeat offenders can find themselves in court for “violating public moral norms.”
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Boyat
have been variously accused of mental illness, defying God’s creation, and sowing moral corruption through predatory homosexuality and same-sex marriage, not to mention Satan worship and
jinn
possession.
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Although
boyat
are today characterized as a dangerous foreign import, there is, in fact, nothing new about women cross-dressing in the Arab region. In ninth-century Baghdad, the hottest girls on the streets looked like boys. These were the
ghulamiyyat
—a feminine derivative of the Arabic word for a young man. These women
were a curious combination of male and female. The
ghulamiyyat
dressed like men, yet wore makeup. While they plucked their eyebrows and painted their lips, they also drew on mustaches in musk. In an age of strict segregation, they hung out with men at dogfights, hunts, horse races, and chess matches, all the while eschewing such feminine niceties as wearing jewelry and braiding their hair. They even took male names. Yet they made no attempt to bind their breasts and were decidedly heterosexual, often painting their male lovers’ names on their cheeks.
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The
ghulamiyyat
fashion reached its height during the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad. According to some accounts, there were up to four thousand of them in the court of its most famous sultan, Harun al-Rashid. The fashion gained momentum during the reign of his son, al-Amin, thanks to Zubayda, al-Rashid’s wife. Same-sex relations flourished in the Abbasid court and al-Amin was famous for his taste in boys. Zubayda was so concerned about her son’s dwindling prospects of producing an heir that she hatched a plan: she dressed slave girls as boys and cut their hair, in the hope that they would attract her son. It seems to have worked, at least in part. Al-Amin took to the
ghulamiyyat
, and some rose to considerable prominence: his favorite, ‘Arib, was famous not only for her beauty but for her talent as a singer, poet, chess player, and daredevil horsewoman as well.

Today’s attitudes toward cross-dressing women are rather less tolerant, ranging from outright condemnation to attempted conversion. Qatar has one of the most public and organized efforts on the latter front; in 2007 the government set up a special “social rehabilitation” center to treat youth problems including addiction, aggression, and “sexual deviance,” into which the
boyat
are bundled. When I visited the facility, on the sandy outskirts of Doha, no one was quite sure just how common the phenomenon was, what was really driving it, and whether girls would outgrow it.

Many people I met in Doha spoke of seeing
boyat
in shopping malls in the same astonished tones usually reserved for UFO sightings. But according to one psychologist dealing with
boyat
, such public displays are rare: girls tend to keep their cross-dressing
quiet and under their abayas, unwrapping as boys only at school or among friends in private. Discretion is the rule, so I was told, since family ties are strong in Qatar and news travels fast. “The percentage of Qatari people are maybe 16 percent or 18 percent only [of the total population]. And they are families; it’s a lot of families with the same name, maybe fifty families with the same name. So doing something wrong, that’s it—stigma for the whole family,” the psychologist said.

Most of the teenage girls brought in for consultation don’t consider themselves troubled: “Women do not feel it’s a problem. They feel it’s their freedom; they don’t feel it’s wrong.” From observation, the psychologist divided the
boyat
into at least three groups: those whose gender identity is male; those who think of themselves as women but are actually attracted to their own sex; and those who behave like boys to be cool, fashionable, and popular with the beautiful people at school. The practitioner described one patient, a sixteen-year-old who felt uncomfortable as a girl and was disguising her blossoming body through dress, dieting, and battening down her breasts. “She was treated as a boy at home, playing with other boys with a ball,” the psychologist told me, ascribing the girl’s gender confusion to her upbringing. “[Her parents] did not try to make her play with dolls and in the kitchen. That family has no friends with young female kids, but they did not try to think or find other female friends for her.”

After psychotherapy, the young woman started to change outwardly. “She began to decrease the hours of seeing football, knowing everything about the issue. She began to accept wearing makeup and trying to have different dress. She began to think about her future … ‘At the end, I have to be married in this society, so I have to accept to think about this issue.’ ” But are such alterations merely skin-deep? If a
boya
were content with her situation, would the psychologist try to change her? “No,” was the reply, but this particular expert was doubtful of a happy ending in such cases. “If you are something in between men and women, you will not find your freedom. The same pressures are still there; it is not a solution.”

For some transgendered people, that solution lies in changing
sex altogether. It’s an expensive process: USD 30,000 to 40,000, says Randa, for the full course of hormones, hours of plastic and reconstructive surgery, and years of psychotherapy. Those who take the plunge often travel outside the Arab region—Thailand and Singapore are popular destinations for those who can afford it. It is possible to surgically change your sex in the Arab region, but the procedure is laden with restrictions.
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Hard-liners who oppose all sex change operations lean on a phrase in the Qur’an: “There is no altering God’s creation.”
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However, a fatwa issued by a former Grand Mufti of Egypt, the late Shaykh Sayed al-Tantawi, opened up a little space for those who have clinically defined gender identity disorder.
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Some Shi‘i religious scholars take a more flexible stance, most prominently Ayatollah Khomeini, who, in the 1980s, issued a fatwa permitting sex change operations (including for transgendered people) on the grounds that these procedures are not explicitly forbidden in the Qur’an and that such operations reconcile the disharmony between the soul and the body and prevent the transgendered person from falling into sinful acts—that is, same-sex relations.
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In the Arab region, though, changing your sex can be as hard on paper as it is in the flesh. In the Gulf states, for example, getting government permission to have sex reassignment surgery and altering your sex on identity documents—a procedure with profound implications for matters like inheritance that vary according sex—can involve years of legal challenges. In Lebanon, things are a little less formal, says Randa. “For Lebanese, it’s very complicated, but it’s possible. It costs money, time, but it can be done.” Not for her, though. Randa was a foreign national in Lebanon, so changing her papers there was not an option, and given her history in Algeria, the prospects are equally slim back home. In the end, Randa headed to Europe for a new life, one she could lead as a full-fledged woman.

On the personal front, Randa was lucky and rarely lacked for male companionship. Professionally, though, times were a lot tougher. She was denied employment at a private Beirut hospital, even though her experience as a health administrator in Algeria
more than qualified her for the post; no matter how convincing she is as a woman, without the sex to match her official ID, which prospective employers ask to see, bias against transgenders and transsexuals can put regular employment out of reach. Those who do get work can find themselves exploited by employers, facing longer hours, lower wages, and fewer benefits than other employees, with the possibility of sexual abuse thrown into the bargain.
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