Unnatural Acts -- Sightings
Melissa Conroy writes about the issue of gender dynamics -- and how we understand them. Her question: what is nature? I wonder myself! Could it be culturally defined?
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Sightings 5/7/09
Unnatural Acts
-- Melissa Conroy
On May 4, 2009 the BBC’s top stories included the headline “‘Gay man' disinterred in Senegal.” The article told how a gay man died and was buried in a Muslim cemetery, only to be disinterred twice. In the first instance his body was left outside the grave, and in the second, his body was dumped outside his family’s house. The man has now been buried away from the cemetery. The article explains how homosexuality has been outlawed in Senegal, a nation that has had a long tradition of “Goor-jiggen” (men-women) who “dress up as women, socialize with females and have long been tolerated in Senegal.” However, local imams, media outlets, and the courts have worked to change that attitude, denouncing this behavior as homosexuality – and homosexuality as criminal. The courts have recently gone so far as to sentence nine homosexual people to eight years in jail for “indecent conduct and unnatural acts.”
A seemingly disparate article, also one of the BBC’s top stories this May, dealt with another act deemed “unnatural” by religious authorities. Titled “Court grants teen breast removal,” this article describes a situation in Australia, where a biologically female teenager, known as Alex, has won the right to have his breasts removed in order to fully transition to a male identity. Alex has been diagnosed with “gender identity dysphoria,” “a psychological condition where a person believes they are the opposite sex.” Family Court chief justice Diana Bryant stated that having breasts was “quite an impediment to his social development, which everyone thought was very important.” Since the age of thirteen, Alex has been on hormone treatment to prevent the onset of menstruation. Criticism has come from Catholic groups. Pointing to the American medical definition of gender dysphoria as psychosis, Nicholas Tonti-Filippini of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family has stated that treating gender dysphoria with an operation is inappropriate: In an online Catholic news source, he is reported as saying, “What you are trying to do is make a biological reality correspond to that false belief.”
These two cases raise interesting questions for the scholar of religion, gender, and sexuality. In the case of Senegal, one sees how the regulation of sexuality by religion has influenced not only funerary and sexuality practices, but also how gender has become conflated with sexuality. “Goor-jiggen,” who are cited as men who “dress” and “socialize with women” are clearly labeled as homosexuals in the Senegalese Muslim mindset. In the case of Australia, one sees how the physical body, one’s sex, interferes with one’s desired gender expression. The term, “gender identity dysphoria” – however controversial – points to an anxiety in many places in the world. One expects that a body will be the same as its expression. When these do not match, Western medicine considers it psychosis and its remedy, as Tonti-Filippini points out, is to use surgery to make them match.
While many cultures have what anthropologist Serena Nanda has called “gender variants,” that is, a range of sex/gender positions that lie between purely male/masculine and purely female/feminine people, we have become accustomed to thinking that two sexes are natural. In popular, medical, and some forms of religious discourse, sex and gender appear to be “naturally” aligned. Anne Bolin has noted that “in the Western paradigm women are people with vaginas; therefore, if a man believes himself to be a woman, he must look the part, down to the genitals. This paradigm has no room for the social woman with male genitals as is found elsewhere in the world.” Sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender role are understood to relate in a “natural” way that forms bipolar states with little room for anyone who mixes the categories or stands between them.
It is clear that Christian and Muslim discourse define a dimorphic sense of the body, envisioned in the creation story of Adam and Eve. While many cultures create categories like “men-women,” Western religious thought deems this hybrid state as unnatural. Yet many religious traditions from cultures as diverse as India, Thailand, and native North America, have myths that suggest that humanity was never meant to be understood as a binary system.
Perhaps what is “unnatural” in both of these stories is the presumption that a particular religious discourse can fully regulate an unruly body and its practices into a religious system. “Men-women” have become the criminalized “homosexuals” of Senegal, a “gay” man is left unburied, and the transsexual teenager lives with the medical diagnosis of “psychosis”: These are the realities of religious intolerance. I am left wondering what, in fact, is “natural.”
References:
“‘Gay man’ disinterred in Senegal.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8032754.stm.
“Court grants teen breast removal.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8032172.stm.
“Girl 17 may have breast removal op: Family Court Rules.”http://cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=13448.
Bolin, Anne. “Transcending and Transgendering: Male to Female Transsexuals, Dichotomy and Diversity.” In Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert Herdt. New York: Zone Books, 1994.
Melissa Conroy is Assistant Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Muskingum College, New Concord, Ohio.
http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/index.shtml
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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Comments
The apostle Paul’s famous statement in 1 Corinthians 11:14 has been one of his statements that has mystified scholars for centuries. Here it is: Does not nature itself teach you that for a man to wear long hair is degrading to him, 15 but if a woman has long hair, it is her pride?
In our culture nature teaches us no such thing. We are familiar with the male lion and that glorious mane, and by way of extension how brilliantly bedecked are most males in the various species. So one wonders how it is that Paul could have received this weird understanding from “nature.”
But the mystery has been solved. In an article in the Journal of Biblical Literature (JBL, 123/1, 2004, 75-84) Troy Martin, a scholar of the history of medicine, describes the medical “givens” of Paul’s culture. He says that since the days of Hippocrates and well beyond the time of Paul people believed that hair was the principle engine of reproduction In fact, the Greek word for hair is the same word as testes.
This is how they thought this worked: Since hair is hollow (as they believed), it creates a vacuum. The longer the hair, the more powerful the vacuum. Long hair on a woman increases the ability of her womb to pull the sperm into it, thereby enhancing procreation. Conversely, long hair on a man would tend to inhibit the production and release of sperm, thereby retarding reproduction. Hence, long hair on a man is degrading to him, but on a woman it is her pride.
One interesting anecdote the author shared is that women who couldn’t get pregnant would go to their doctor for a test. The doctor would insert an aromatic suppository in the woman’s vagina and have her come back the next day and would smell her breath. Strong odor meant that the hair’s vacuum was working well; lack of odor, just the opposite.
It’s hard for cultures to stand outside their received “truths” and place them under scrutiny. Thomas Kuhn showed us how difficult in his observations on paradigm shifts. People who truly think outside the box are rare, but they come along from time to time and make obsolete the once taken for granted givens of a culture.
So we should be cautious of our received truths, especially in the context of sexual identity, as we too often conclude that what is right is, of course, natural. That’s what Paul did. Therefore, we need to be cautious in taking Paul’s word (read “received cultural biases”) when he describes what is natural and unnatural in Romans 1, just as we wouldn’t run to the pharmacy for aromatic suppositories to do a pregnancy test.
The question being raised, I think, concerns whether that is the healthiest way of dealing with this dynamic.
I also think the author is making it clear that this isn't the same thing as homosexuality.