“This is my rifle, this is my gun but I never felt like I really should have it.
This is for fighting, this is for fun but I never felt like I really should have it.”
How a Transgender Man Tries To Honor His Muslim Faith [!]
LA Times | 7/31/2015 | Garrett Therolf
He walked unsteadily across the tattered green carpet inside the mosque. Out of habit, he stepped for a moment toward the women’s section. Then he made his way to the front, where the men pray.
In one sense, everything felt familiar after a childhood spent in Islamic Sunday school every week: the smell of strong cologne worn by so many of the men [LA Times is Racist!], the low murmur of Koran recitations.
“Can they tell?” Alex Bergeron recalls asking himself as he knelt for prayer.
The sideways glances were probably innocuous. Just other men taking a fleeting moment to register the newcomer in the room. He mentally scanned his body for any gesture that might betray his secret, realizing that his arms were clenched too tightly around his body as he prayed, that his legs were held too closely together, like a woman.
The men around him didn’t know that the young Palestinian American, then 18, was reaching, almost recklessly, for a new life — and reconnecting with an old one.
Born with female anatomy, Alex had recently begun hormone therapy and decided to fully transition to a male identity. And as he entered his second adolescence[a new term for “Democrat”?], he had decided to rededicate himself to a life as a practicing Muslim. On most days, he returned three times a day for prayer.
“It felt like the missing piece,” he says[Heh!].
This path he had taken was not an easy one. Perhaps, however, it would settle once and for all: Could Alex be transgender and Muslim at the same time?
Muslim Arabs have some history with people who hold a culturally recognized third gender, including eunuchs who lived in the time of the prophet Muhammad and came into contact with him. But not in the modern [head-chopping]period. [LA Times is Racist!].
Alex deliberately chose a gender-neutral name and prefers to be called “they” instead of “he” [oh, THAT’s not confusion!] to indicate that gender identity is not just a male/female binary but a continuum along which any individual may fall [which includes being plural?]— and where Alex occupies a middle space. [Maybe he’ll get a Middle Yeast infection.] The 20-year-old gets tongue-tied with it at times and reverts to the more convenient “he.” [But he’s not being transphobic when he does it. Or ‘they’ do it.]
Perhaps no identity in Islam is harder, Alex thinks, than a person with female anatomy who wants to transition to life as a man. […. Except “prisoner.”]
Alex is aware of media reports that naively heralded Iran as an affirming place for transgender people in the wake of the 1987 decision by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini allowing gender-reassignment surgery. Iran is now the second-largest center for the procedure behind Thailand, according to some estimates.
Alex has also heard about a similar religious ruling by clerics at Al Azhar University, the leading institution of Islamic thought in Cairo.
“Those decisions just allow them to ‘fix’ people and say that they don’t have gay people,” Alex says. “It’s because they are so conservative, not because they are liberal in any way. They would never allow someone like me: a trans man who is sexually attracted to men and women and trans men and trans women.” [??]
And in America, mosques tend to be conservative [Um — not in the American politics sense…], and visits to the local imam or mosque committee chairman usually draw stern rebukes for LGBTQ Muslims.
Small, progressive Muslim organizations exist in some major cities, and there is an annual LGBTQ Muslim spirituality retreat held each year on the East Coast. [Incidentally, Obama vacations each year on the East Coast.]
“That’s really all there is,” says Scott Siraj Haqq Kugle, a professor at Emory University [after looking closely at Alex’s genitals, and] who has written extensively about transgender issues and homosexuality in Islam. “No dates or location are publicly disclosed because there must be a lot of secrecy to keep it as a safe venue. It’s very delicate.”
Still, maybe, somehow, [<– Classic LA Times reporting terms] Alex believed there was a way that Islam would help ease the bewilderment of his [or their] situation, providing his [or their] life with structure and meaning.
Over potato tacos [– another example of things that are not what they are commonly understood to be –] at Gracias Madre, [“Thanks, Mom”? Ha!] a chic vegan [!] Mexican restaurant in the [Unending-]Mission District, Alex prepared for what he worried might be a hard conversation with his grandmother. [!]
They’re just trying to off R. Lee Ermey by giving him an apoplectic fit.
—
Apparently, there are now THREE things that come out of Oklahoma.
“This is my rifle, this is my gun but I never felt like I really should have it.
This is for fighting, this is for fun but I never felt like I really should have it.”
But what if s/he doesn’t “identify” as a soldier on any particular day?
In related news:
I get it, the terrorists will die of laughter…right?
We could use the transgendered people as bait.
Oppo,
What are the three things that come out of Oklahoma?
Steers, Queers, and Transgenders…. Poorly borrowed from “An Officer and a Gentleman”.
I thought it was going to be Queers, Steers and more Queers.