Texts can do whatever they like
Hey kids, people swap sexes in myths and fairy tales, therefore it’s totally possible for people to swap sexes in real life. People can fly in myths and fairy tales, therefore etc. Animals can talk in myths and fairy tales, therefore etc. There’s no end to the possibilities!
University of Tennessee religious studies academic has the skinny:
State legislatures across the United States have introduced over 400 bills to limit transgender Americans’ rights. Many of these bills’ sponsors, such as the Christian nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, cite Christian values as well as the values of the other Abrahamic faiths – Judaism and Islam – to justify their anti-trans positions.
But of course she doesn’t pause to tell us what rights specifically “transgender Americans” have that are different from the rights Americans in general have.
The Alliance Defending Freedom claims that Christians, Jews and Muslims view gender as binary and defined only by biology, though these religions’ diverse followers actually hold a range of views on LGBTQ+ issues. Historically, these religions were often more accepting of varied gender identities before colonialism imposed binary gender as a universal concept.
Religious values from multiple traditions have supported transgender identity. As a scholar of Buddhism and gender, I know that several Buddhist texts treat gender as fluid. One such text is the Lotus Sutra, one of the most popular Buddhist scriptures in East Asia. Its core message is that everyone, no matter their gender or status, has the potential to become a Buddha.
The Lotus Sutra conveys its message of universal Buddhahood in several stories that depict transformations between male and female bodies. For example, a dragon girl instantly transforms into the masculine body of a Buddha, proving that female bodies are not barriers to awakening.
Well, that’s stories for you. Stories can include magic in a way that real life can’t. Stories can have people fly, converse with animals, go back in time – you name it, some storyteller will have thought of it. The fact that it’s in a story, including a “scripture,” doesn’t demonstrate that it’s a reality, it demonstrates only that it’s something people can imagine. We can imagine way more magical stuff than we can actually make happen.
Mormon ‘scripture’ says that Black and Native American converts will turn White.
And note how easily even Islamic misogyny can be blamed on ‘colonialism.’
Well Islam has certainly never been shy about colonizing.
Well, talking animals are a good exmple of that, and not just Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck and the enigmatic Goofy. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden were led astray from the true path of righteousness by a damnable talking snake, and the whole of Creation went downhill and pear-shaped from that moment on. And God, despite His omniscience and omnipoitence, did not see it coming, and so got left holding the bag.
I’m sure there has been a long tradition of misinterpreting Buddhist texts: when I was taking comparative religions as an environmental philosophy class, we read an article saying that Westerners had misread texts as being environmental, when they really were nothing of the sort. The philosophy students dismissed the article, saying the author obviously didn’t know anything about Buddhism. The author of the article was the Dalai Lama.
We are in the habit of reading scriptures, stories, and other things exactly as we like, interpreted through our biases. I suspect the story cited here was more about misogyny than trans – she had to have a male body when she became a Buddha…her female body wasn’t good enough for a Buddha body.
iknklast, I was going to suggest something similar. These examples of “diverse gender identities” from other cultures are without exception born from sexism, so why should we expect any different here? As impressive as the Bodhisattva Guanyin is, she’s still forever inferior to the Tathagata Buddha.
And I’d wager good money that the chances that any of those various traditions see “gender identity” in the oh-so-modern, progressive 21st century, “born in the wrong body” way is just about zero. And as for Buddhism, with its concept of birth and rebirth, through life after life, existence after existence, species are fluid. That doesn’t mean they’d look approvingly at furries.
Where in the world do they get this crazy notion? Seems to me that all societies knew/know about the two sexes, before, during, and after “colonialism.” It’s preposterous. There could have been no societies, and no civilizations, without recognition of the sexual dimorphism of the human species. The myths of many peoples posit male and female primary gods and goddesses as progenitors of the particular civilization in question.
Ancient peoples and civilizations were also colonizers. “Colonialism” didn’t begin or end with modern Western European/Euro-centric civilization.
I have absolutely and utterly no idea how supposedly intelligent people can say such arrant nonsense with a straight face. It’s lunacy.
maddog, it’s a good solid bet that all the ancestors of these trans activists, all the way back to mitochondrial Eve (a term I loathe), knew about sexual dimorphism. Like you said, communities were able to maintain. The very existence of the activists is evidence that their ancestors knew which sex was which.
So I’m guessing the many extra rules that Buddhist nuns were required to follow were instituted for a laugh…
God, I’m just glad my Buddhism teacher wasn’t this (presumably) lady… Had to double check.
maddog1129:
The existence of Japanese Colonialism and Russian Colonialism is widely attested to by historians, see here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/177547
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3649917
But these non-Western colonialisms *never* get mentioned by the “colonialism invented the gender binary” crowd. To them, it’s only the evil Westerners that conquered other cultures.
It seems Maria Lugones, an Argentine academic living in the United States, came up with the idea of
the “Coloniality of gender”.
This idea has been widely promoted by academics and TRAs.
If you look up the book “Gender : A Graphic Guide” by Meg John-Barker and Jules Scheele (a book I have seen being given to older teenagers to teach them “progressive” ideas about sexuality) you will find this passage:
“Europeans from the 16th century onwards imposed their understandings of gender and family life on the people they colonized – as well as often wiping out indigenous groups, and their ways of doing gender.”
A paraphrase of Lugones’ ideas about “coloniality of gender”, aimed at adolescent and twentysomething readers.
Another passage from the book, about Native Americans who adopted opposite-sex clothing and behaviours:
“Here again we see the link between gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism. White settlers endeavoured to eradicate this group because they did not fit into a binary classification of male or female.”
Pure propaganda.
To expand: it is undeniable that Europeans did force their beliefs (Christianity, economic individualism) on non-European people from the 16th century onward, and they did destroy a large number of indigenous groups in this process.
However, to say they were motivated specifically by hostility to those cultures ways of “doing gender” (whatever that means) or because those cultures had members who “did not fit into a binary classification of male or female” is absurd.
Are John-Barker and Scheele saying that Native Americans had a third gamete?
Mostly Cloudy, I did a whole long thing (or two long things) about Judith Butler driveling about colonialism–>gender rules a couple of weeks ago. She cited Maria Lugones. It was remarkably unpersuasive, what Butler said.
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2023/gender-itself-is-a-colonial-introduction/
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2023/let-us-be-clear-about-the-difference/
“[A] dragon girl instantly transforms into the masculine body of a Buddha, proving that female bodies are not barriers to awakening.”
No, the story proves female bodies are absolutely barriers to awakening. If they weren’t, why was she turned male? How stupid do they think the average person is?