A survey of medical reporting on intersex surgeries in Islamic societies demonstrates that the majority of intersex children seen by medical professionals undergo surgical “correction” before puberty. In many cases, the assigned sex is simply the sex that is most easily achieved via surgery, or it is the sex the parents want. Preference for male or female sex varies by region and sex-based landholding patterns. Muslim physicians express anxiety that the children must be able to perform either male or female social roles, and that “Islam does not tolerate” non-binary gender. An “Islamic solution” must therefore be found. However, examination of premodern legal, medical, and biographical texts (Gesink 2018) demonstrates widespread awareness of intersex conditions and construction of multiple legal non-binary sex categories. This awareness shifted gradually after 1800 to favor mandating binary sex as a result of European discourse on homosexuality and indigenous scripturalist revivalism. A return to the “Islamic solutions” of the premodern period might alleviate some of the pressure on parents and surgeons to prematurely “correct” infant sex.

Modern medical technologies have been used to perform Gender Conforming Surgery (GCS) since the middle of the twentieth century. This advanced technology raised questions for different religions, including Islam, as to whether such surgery is permissible, and if so, under which conditions. Regarding Islam, contemporary Muslim scholars had encountered this subject when the demand for GCS grew among Muslim individuals. Although in response to such demands, Muslim jurists generally regarded GCS as sinful, thus prohibited (haram) in Islam, a few Muslim jurists issued fatwas (Islamic juristic opinions) legalizing different types of GCS for intersex and/or transsexual people. However, these fatwas have been criticized for considering intersex and transsexual individuals who seek GCS to be diseased people who need treatment for an illness. I shall closely examine five of such fatwas on GCS, i.e., the fatwas of Ayatullah Khomeini, Shaykh al-Tantawi, the Islamic Fiqh Council of Muslim World League, the National Council of Islamic Religious Affairs, and the Institute of Qita' al-Ifta wa al-Buhuth al-Shar'iya. I argue that although the objection above, that is, the medicalization of the agents of GCS by the Islamic fatwas, is mostly correct, it is not always accurate as it is not the case in Khomeini’s fatwa. The paper, based on the hermeneutical-juridical principles established in current Imami Shi'a legal theory (usul al-fiqh), proposes a discursive space within Khomeini’s fatwa and the contemporary Shi'a juristic debates which suggests that intersex and transsexual individuals are not people who suffer from physical or mental illness albeit they are permitted to undergo GCS on their wish and demand. Thus, as this paper concludes, the advocates of transsexual and intersex people can apply the capacity for non-diseased discursive space embedded in Khomeini's fatwa and the contemporary Shi'a scholarship to campaign for more rights for transsexual and intersex people in Muslim communities.

Despite the public regulating forces against transgendered subjectivities in contemporary Iranian culture, strong evidence exists in narratives depicting Iranian trans people that foregrounds the determining role of a hegemonic configuration of Iranian masculinity in policing transgender. I argue that central to the issue of transgenderism in contemporary Iran is a gheirat-directed hegemonic masculinity that deems as shamefully unbearable the trans persons’ embodied violations of the Iranian society’s heteronormative gender binary system. As the culturally ascendant form of being a man in a society, hegemonic masculinity is defined by its distancing from, and othering, women as well as other sexually or racially marginalized and subordinated masculinities. Gheirat is defined a gendered social construct based on a man’s sense of honor, possessiveness and protectiveness towards certain female kin. Being enacted by many men and boys as brothers, fathers, husbands, friends, lovers, and relatives, a gheirat-motivated masculinity tends to rigorously oppose trans people’s struggle for agency through threats, or implementation, of violence. Seen through the lens of this gheirat-based hegemonic masculinity, real Iranian men are expected to avoid the abjection of feminized masculinities as much as they shun the incongruity and freakishness of masculine femininities. The current article demonstrates the above argument through rendering close readings of excerpts from several contemporary Iranian fictional and cinematic narratives that depict transgender characters. Heeding this juncture is crucial to filling the current gap in Iranian transgender studies of how trans people’s issues interplay with those of other gender and sexual minorities, particularly women and homosexual men.

Although figures vary, it is estimated that India’s LGBT community stands at 8% of the population which translates to 104 million people. A long political struggle finally saw the striking down of a colonial law (Section 377 Indian Penal Code) that banned homosexuality in India in 2018. The change in legislation has hardly followed hot on the heels of India’s recognition of transgendered people as a third gender in 2014. Indeed the ‘third gender’ category, where Hijra and Khawaja Sira communities exist, was recognized earlier in Nepal (in 2007), Pakistan (in 2009) and Bangladesh (in 2013). Third gender recognition has come about because it has been gradually accepted that Hijras form part of these societies. However, legal recognition of the Hijras of India as third gender has not been easy in a country where colonial laws have persisted to outlaw homosexuality and any variant of gender. This paper therefore examines how colonial legislation misunderstood gender variance in India, not only because Hijras have been in existence since antiquity but also due to historical and scriptural understandings of gender variance. The paper looks at the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of the Hijra and Khawaja Sira communities in Indian society and shows how multiple religions are drawn on by those of Islamic faith. The paper also examines the context in which Muslim majority countries such as Bangladesh and Pakistan officially recognized a third gender and the impact of this on recognition in India.