Talk:Hijra (South Asia)

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[edit] 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)

I can speak to this. I've been a member of the hijra community for about a decade. Hijras I know have as wide an understanding of their own gender/gender identity/etc. as any other group. I've identified myself as transsexual, and still do in the west. My experience of the other hijras around me is that I'd describe them as transsexuals.

As for membership, yes, it's a formal process. Part of that process is getting an authority within the organization to assert that the person is neither a man nor a woman. I think most of the rest of this discussion is because nons usually want to define us in, instead of defining themselves out. Yes, it's an ambiguous definition, and one that leads to contention. In theory, once in, however, it's not kosher to question the original classification.

There's a distinction to be made between a small h hijra, a person who is neither a man nor a woman, sings and dances, etc. and a big H Hijra, a member of the community. Annie

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)

[edit] 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

[edit] 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)

---

The Nanda book does include mention of people who were born as girls, but become hijras because they're infertile. The Dravidian Indian model of sex/gender defines ones gender by reproductive capacity: the logic's along the lines of, if you don't menstruate you can't bear children and thus aren't a woman; you also aren't a man, so you can be a hijra. It's not a surgical process, and the hijra group will know of this person's background, but not mind - as far as Nanda makes out, anyway. --J.

This is very interesting. Can you find the quote from Nanda's book and add it to the article? I haven't heard of it in modern times, but infertile females have certainly been considered a third sex in ancient India and the eastern Mediterranean; this reproductive notion of gender is much broader than Dravidian culture. ntennis 01:10, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 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)

[edit] Hjras, Sex and Religion

My two pennorth - according my understanding, the basis of the hjra status is ascetism in the service of the goddess Bukhara Mata. I suggest that they are related to the galli of Ancient Rome (q,v). Their activity as prostitutes is because they need to eat, since they no longer have a spiritual function in this secular age. They may or may not retain their penises. They wouldn't use them for sex (they probably wouldn't work very well) but as 'feminine' people they would be receivers, as in other cultures, quite possibly intercrurally.Chevin 17:43, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Uhm, is what you say actual knowledge, or mere speculation on your part? Because it sure sounds like the latter. [AR]

I cant bring to mind the original study (age telling on me I guess) but there is an account by Serena Nanda in Herdt's Third Sex, Third Gender

Male ascetism in Hindu religion is seen as the opposite to female sexuality. However those who can't or don't want to engage in procreation can become renouncers. Bukhara Mata and Cybele are related to earlier mother goddesses. I don't have personal experience of their sexual activity, but it is a matter of practicality. Plus as women prostitutes, they would be receivers. Also anal intercourse may be taboo.Chevin 17:43, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

However - another question. What is a temple prostitute? My understanding is that a prostitute provides sex for financial (not spiritual) return. User:Chevin 14:30, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Well, a good dictionary might help you there.[AR]

Well I did actually look it up in Wiktionary.Chevin 17:43, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Actually, Wikipedia has an article on it, too. So-called temple prostitution or religious prostitution is an age-old custom, spread through large parts of the world, and certianly not a simple subject. AlexR 14:48, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

It still sounds like a term conjured up by a sex phobic anthropologistChevin

[edit] photograph

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The photograph accompanying this article violates copyright. It's clearly scanned from Dr. Serena Nanda's "Neither Men Nor Women"(Wadsworth, 98) ISBN 0534509037

[edit] Hijra politicians?

I was curious about this sentence: "Other Hijras have been elected to high political positions." Could somebody who knows who these politicians are possibly add their names to the article, especially if they have their own articles on Wiki? I know I'm curious to read about them/what they do and I'm sure I can't be the only one. RaCha'ar 00:58, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Manhood

"the new born baby will be blessed if exposed to the Hijra's manhood"

What is 'manhood' meant to mean? Genitalia? Masculinity? Something else? I suggest finding a more precise word.

69.177.103.38 16:33, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

I believe this is a direct quotation from somewhere Chevin 18:36, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] and a personal subjective experience of the hijras in this festival is shown in the fascinating documentary

Non-NPOV?

[edit] Hijda

I added the word "hijda" as one alternative, as it is used in [1] and [2]. AxelBoldt 23:16, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

The retroflex r of Brahmic languages is sometimes transliterated as d. So HIjra and hijda are homophonetic to Brahmic language speakers, if not homophonemic (or, more simply, though they sound different to a westerner, they're the same sound to most north Indians, as the r is pronounced with the tongue rolled back. So these are the same word, just transliterated differently.) --Anniepoo (talk) 03:04, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Pronunciation?

IPA information about pronunciation of "Hijra" would be useful here. AxelBoldt 05:53, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 3rd GENDER rather than SEX

Hijra is best considered a third GENDER type, not a third SEX type. Sex is biological and anatomical - i.e. Male or Female - and not subject to cultural interpretation.

Gender is a cultural construct - i.e. man, woman, Hijra. It is my understand that the Hijra are anatomically-born males who are culturally a third gender type.

When I studied this subject in undergrad anthropology I recall a fourth gender type present in India, that of a culturally-male female, which I believe is called something like 'Sādhin"

[edit] Reference to Kama Sutra

The section on history says "The ancient Kama Sutra mentions the performance of oral sex on male parishioners at Hindu temples by hijras." Citation is needed here, as I did not find this in the Kama sutra when I looked it up. -- Sudarshanhs 16:54, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

I think they are referring to this passage, though temples are not mentined. AxelBoldt 20:33, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

I have read many translations of Kamasutra. Nothing is mentioned of Hijda Prostitution in temples. The only remote reference is of such prostitution in Bath Houses [Ankush] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.18.3.130 (talk • contribs)

The above anon user deleted several sections. I restored and referenced them, but left out references to temple prostitution (until a reference can be found). ntennis 06:31, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

It is calumny to state that oral sex was performed on male parishioners at Hindu temples by hijras. There is no reference of sex being performed in Hindu temples, (except for the followers of Vamachar school of thought). The only instance of oral sex being performed on males is in bath houses where effeminate males/eunuchs used to do so while giving a massage. Read Kamasutra and any other text which you wish. You will find my assetions correct.

[edit] Internal inconsistency

The article as it now stands seems internally inconsistent as to the prevalence or otherwise of castration among hijra. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.108.179.173 (talk • contribs) 18:04, 2 July 2006

How so?

And please, next time: Put your entry to the bottom of the page, instead of on top, and sign your entries with -- ~~~~. Thank you. -- John Smythe 15:23, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Removal of the outer genitals is described as if it was an important part of becoming a hijra. Yet it is claimed that most have no genital modification. Is not that a contradiction?

2007-01-01 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

New source needed for #5 please. Interested to see if this claim is true.

[edit] Moved from article

The reference regarding Gandhi asking Congress volunteers to deface lesbian and homo-erotic sculptures on temples are mere hearsay due to two reasons:

1. There is no mention/record of Gandhi ever asking his followers to do so; and 2. Except for a few temples, very few had carvings showing celestial beings engaging in sex. Even here, Only around 10% of all carvings were of sexual nature, the same being restricted to special locations on the temple walls. Of such carvings of sexual nature, very few depicted homosexual behaviour. And these depictions were almost exclusively of lesbian nature. There are very few, in fact an insignificant number of carvings which depict gay sex.

"It is believed that the newborn baby will be blessed if exposed to the Hijra's manhood."

Err.. Sources? And is this supposed to mean what it sounds like? --194.145.161.227 13:40, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Adding a picture

How about adding a picture to the article? It had pictures at one point in time but they were removed for copyright issues. These pictures are from a website about that matter. Perhaps one of them will be suitable?

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This is described on the web page I found it at Defining the hijra community: as "A young khusra from Pakistan - as shown in a tv-presentation". Because this is a screen capture from a TV show about the topic of the article this picture would be permissible as a fair use. Such screen captures are recognized as being fair use by the wikipedia (hence the tag). So there should be no copyright problem with this one. At least for keeping it here while we discuss the proposition. --Hfarmer 15:25, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I could try to track down whoever owns the copyright on this picture to get explicit permission but since they are in Pakistan that might be hard. I have no way of recognizing the station ID that appears in the picture.--Hfarmer 15:29, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Another picture that could be used is this one but it's copyright is even less clear. I have no idea where the website got it from... Image:Hijiraatmuslimshrine.jpg --Hfarmer 15:35, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I think I have left this open for comments long enough. It will be done. --Hfarmer 15:00, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

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BetacommandBot (talk) 21:42, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Terminology

The term 'chakka', as a term of abuse, is pretty general, it's closer to the english 'queer' than to 'hijra'. Since this is unsourced I'm reverting it. --Anniepoo (talk) 01:21, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

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