Trans people are often portrayed as a new Western phenomenon foreign to the Middle East that would destroy Muslim societies.1 In this article, I show that the figure of the ‘trans’ person, or historically of the ‘third gender’, is not a ‘Western phenomenon’ but is present in many Muslim societies from the Medinese period until today.
Despite the importance of gender binarity and spatial segregation in Muslim countries, there are many historical figures of ‘third gender’, to use the concept introduced by the anthropologist Gilbert Herdt in his edited volume Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (Herdt 1994). It is important to note, however, that such term is etic, constructed by anthropologists as an analytical category. The societies in question used their own emic terms to name these gendered realities in their specific historical and cultural contexts.
In the Muslim world, the term ‘third gender’ generally refers to the eunuch of Ottoman harems, but there are many other figures representing third gender persons in the Islamic context, varying across different countries and times, especially regarding the figure of what is more commonly known as the ‘effeminate man’: mukhannath in the Medinese period (Nawawy 1991); Ottoman köçek in the seventeenth century (Popescu-Judetz 1982: 48; Van Dobben 2008: 43); khawal in Egypt in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Fortier, in this volume); khanīth in Oman (Wikan 1977, 1982); gūrdigan in Mauritania (Fortier 2019a); hijra in India (Nanda 1990; Lal 1999; Reddy 2005; Reddy and Nanda 2009; Jami 2005; Boisvert 2018; Fortier 2020a2); hijra, khusra or khwāja sirā in Pakistan (Frembgen 2011; Khan 2014, 2016; Nisar 2022); waria or transpuan in Indonesia (Kjaran and Naeimi, in this volume); and bacha birish in Afghanistan (De Lind van Wijngaarden and Rani 2011). Within the limits of this article, I focus on some figures of third gender from different periods and countries in the Middle East.
The Recognition of Khunthā or Intersex in Islam
The Qur’ān provides clear assertation of sex difference as exemplified in the verses (Sura 92, verses 1–4): ‘That which created the male and the female’ (Arberry 1980: 595). Khalīl (1995: 453), the Sunnī jurist of the fourteenth century, wondered about the status of the hermaphrodite or khunthā in the last lines of his Compendium (Mukhtaṣar) which is a reference for Malīkī jurisprudence. As it is obvious that there is no ‘true hermaphrodite’ or people born with a physical body combining integrally both sexes, the term hermaphrodite is used here to translate the Islamic legal concept, because to speak of ‘intersex’ in such a context would be anachronistic, as this term is new and related to the West. What seems a problem for the Sunnī jurist is less the sexual ambiguity of a person but their gender ambiguity.
The necessity to identify gender identity in a clear way comes from the fact that men and women don't benefit from the same rights from a legal point of view, in particular regarding inheritance (Sanders 1991: 74–95). So, Khalīl (1995: 453) tries to define the key biological and sexual characteristics of the person to allow him to determine if the hermaphrodite is a man or a woman: position of the urinary lacuna, the quantity and speed of the urine, pilosity of the beard, emission of sperm, appearance of menses and breasts.
However, if it is impossible to decide at puberty, Khalīl asserts that the khunthā has the right in terms of inheritance to half of a man's part and half of a woman's part (ibid.). They are thus considered, in this context, as half man–half woman, belonging to both categories. There is indeed, in this case, recognition of a third gender. Islamic jurisprudence does not refer to an emasculation which would transform the hermaphrodite body into a female one. There is no necessity to mono-gender this hermaphrodite body (Fortier 2014). But Khalīl recognizes it as a bigendered body related to a special juridical status different from men's and women's ones.
Although it is not well known, this Islamic jurist created a third legal status for hermaphroditism, that is to say in today's terms, for intersex (Fortier 2017). In this volume, Noemi Linardi analyses Arabic novels from the Gulf – Khātim (1991), by the Saudi novelist Raja ‘Ālim, and Ḥābī (2019), by the Kuwaiti writer Tālib al-Rifā‘ī – that deal with an intersex character called khunthā or even al-jins ath-thālith, literally ‘third gender’.
The Archetypal ‘Effeminate’ Figure of the Medinese Mukhannath and its Posterity
Already in Medina, at the time of the Prophet, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the term in classic Arabic of mukhannath, which means ‘the effeminate’, is known through a ḥadīth which stated that Mohammed ‘cursed effeminate men (al-mukhannathin min ar-rijāl) and mannish women (al-mutarajjilat min an-nisā)’ (Nawawy 1991: 435). The etymology of this term refers to sweetness, curvature, and languidness, qualities which are considered specific to women (Bouhdiba 1979: 55). We find the same Arabic triliteral root /k-n-th/ in the word khunthā which designates in Muslim jurisprudence (fiqh) the ‘hermaphrodite’.
This ḥadīth gives evidence to the existence of men displaying ‘effeminate’ behaviour. The mukhannath does not cross-dress necessarily, but demonstrates erotic movements and feminine manners of speaking (Lagrange 2008). As American historian Everet Rowson asserts (1991: 671): ‘There is considerable evidence for the existence of a form of publicly recognized and institutionalized effeminacy or transvestism among males in pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabian society. Unlike other men, these “effeminates” or mukhannathūn were permitted to associate freely with women, on the assumption that they had no sexual interest in them, and often acted as marriage brokers, or, less legitimately, as go-betweens’. They also practiced music, singing, and dancing (ibid.; El-Feki 2013; Almarai and Persichetti 2023). In addition, these ‘effeminate’ men could be married and have children (Mezziane 2008: 218), insofar as they were obligated, as everyone else, to achieve their social and religious duties related to marriage and reproduction (Fortier 2011), even if they were not interested sexually in women.
The figure of the Medinese mukhannath existed in the Persian, Ottoman, Arabic, African, and Asian worlds. Although this figure is named by a vernacular term specific to each society and historical period – with the exception of Iran, where, until the nineteenth century, the word mukhannath itself was used (Najmabadi 2005: 5) – these terms often have an Arabic root, which indicates the Arab-Persian influence throughout time and space of the mukhannath figure. For example, hijras in India and khusras or khwāja sirās in Pakistan identify themselves with the figure of the mukhannath (Abbas and Pir 2016).
Furthermore, theses various local figures share characteristics similar to the mukhannath, such as being beardless. Another common feature of these different local figures of third gender is the practice of music, singing, and dancing, especially in ritual ceremonies, where they become objects of desire for men. Sharing the spatial and social access to both feminine and masculine spaces in contexts that are mostly gender segregated gives third gender figures an important role as matchmakers between men and women.
Pilosity is conceived as an immediately perceptible element which demonstrates clearly the physical difference between the sexes (Fortier 2010: 95). The beard, and to a lesser extent the moustache (shārab), which is somehow associated with it, is the visible mark of masculinity, and of the superiority which is attributed to the man compared to the woman (ibid.). Not to wear a beard can be considered a sign of effeminization; a beardless man could be seen as falling below the virile ideal (Fortier 2022a).
In this regard, the Arabic term for ‘beardless’ or amrad refers to the young boy, an object of desire in the Arab poetry of Abū Nuwās (circa 747–762/815) (Fortier 2021). The love of ‘young boys’ (mujuniyyat) was widespread in Baghdad during the Abbasid period (Merzoug 2002: 44–45), a love inclination towards the ephebe called ghulām (plural ghilmān), totally assumed and claimed by the poet Abū Nuwās despite its illicit and paedophilic dimension.
The Arabic term ‘beardless’ or amrad is also used in Persian poetry, for example by Omar Khayyām (circa 1048/1132) or Ḥafiz (circa 1315/1390) (Fortier 2021; Montazeri 2021). A boy's first facial fuzz is named by a specific term in these poems: the ‘line’ (khaṭ or izār) (Fortier 2021) and is clearly erotized in these poems. Beardless boys were objects of desire by adult men and their beauty was praised in poems and painted in Persian miniatures until the nineteenth century (Najmabadi 2005: 15). The same word, khaṭ, is also used to describe the first facial hair of the amrads in Urdu poetry of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Vanita 2012: 178).3
Regarding the qualification of these poems, first their homosexual dimension was denied and it was only recently that they became recognized as ‘homoerotic’. But, from my point of view, the use of the term ‘homoerotism’ is a euphemistic way to romanticize paedophilic inclination for male prepubescent children, as it hides potential sexual abuse committed on them.
Persian miniature painting, Iran (photo by author)
Citation: Anthropology of the Middle East 20, 1; 10.3167/ame.2025.200101
Eunuchs in Mecca or Medina and in Ottoman or Mughal Harems
Medieval Islamic eunuchs, characterized by their lack of pilosity and their feminine stoutness, play also a role as matchmakers between men and women (Cheikh Moussa 1982: 415). The fact that the eunuchs were castrated allowed them to guard the women in the harems without the risk of reproduction, as it was the case in Ottoman harems, which existed during the period from 1300 until 1922 (Hataway 2017), and in Mughal harems from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (Nanda 1990; Jaffrey 1996; Frembgen 2011) in actual what is now India and Pakistan.
Although Islam forbids emasculation of eunuchs (Ducène 2021), some Muslims avoided the prohibition by performing this practice on non-Muslims slaves sold in Muslim countries by non-Muslims, in particular Christian, Coptic, or Jewish traders (Fortier 2020a). Ottoman harems practiced castration on East African slaves (Hataway 2017), mostly from Ethiopia, but also on non-Africans who were war prisoners, and also on young boys, mainly from the Balkans, who were taken from their families as part of a tax payment (Dikici 2013: 110). In Mughal harems, the eunuchs came mostly also from Ethiopia or from the Indian subcontinent. They were enslaved through war, kidnapping, or sale by their own families (Lal 2017: 102), and some castrated boys were sent as tax payments to the province headquarters (Hinchy 2018: 153).
Still today, East African eunuchs, mostly from Ethiopia, serve as guards to holy places of Islam,4 17 eunuchs in 1988 for the Prophet Mohammad's tomb in Medina and 19 for the Ka‘ba in Mecca in Saudi Arabia (Zeghidour 1989: 220). Their hybrid gender status makes them able to maintain order between men and women in the sanctuaries during the pilgrimage (Marmon 1995). Slimane Zeghidour (1989: 223), who met them in 1988, recalls their words: ‘We make sure that men and women are clearly separated, we prepare the prayer rugs for the imam and visiting personalities, and we prevent the daughters and sons of Adam from courting each other in the sacred area’. This function of separation between the sexes is very similar to that attributed to eunuchs in harems.
Young Ottoman Koçeks
The Turkish word köçek (plural köçekler) is derived from the Persian word kuchak, meaning ‘little’, ‘small’, or ‘young’. The köçek of the seventeenth century was a handsome young boy who cross-dressed in feminine attire and was employed as an entertainer for dancing (Popescu-Judetz 1982: 48; Van Dobben 2008: 43). Before that, male dancers were called by the Arabic/Persian term rāqqaṣ (dancer), suggesting an Arabic or Persian influence of this third gender figure. The culture of the köçek, which flourished from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, had its origin in the customs of the Ottoman palaces, and in particular in the harems (Van Dobben 2008: 43). Köçeks were allowed into the harems because they were not yet considered men (ibid.: 48). The occasions of their performances were wedding or circumcision celebrations, as well as the pleasure of the sultans and the aristocracy.
Ottoman miniature painting (photo, public domain)
Citation: Anthropology of the Middle East 20, 1; 10.3167/ame.2025.200101
Like the eunuchs, the köçeks were recruited from among the ranks of the non-Muslim subject nations of the Ottoman empire, such as Jews, Romani, Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, and others (Van Dobben 2008: 45). A köçek began training around the age of seven or eight and was considered accomplished after about six years of study and practice. A dancer's career would last as long as he was beardless – a characteristic noticed before in other cultural contexts – and retained his youthful appearance (Shay 2005: 56 and 2014: 25).
The köçek's style of music and dance imitated that of the female entertainers, and they took on the outward appearance and behaviour of women (ibid.). In the first part of their performances, the dancers would move to slow music using a veil or a shawl (Van Dobben 2008: 48). The second part would be livelier, and the dancers would shimmy their shoulders and hips (ibid.).
Ottoman miniature paintings from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries show young boys around the age of ten or twelve with long hair, dancing in small groups and playing wooden clappers in their hands (ibid.).
European observers who saw the köçeks described them as suggestive, sensual, and attractive, affecting the movements and looks of women, and their dancing as ‘sexually provocative’ (Boone 2014: 102). The köçeks were available sexually, often to the highest bidder, in the passive role (Ze'evi 2006: 86). In certain levels of Ottoman society, homosexual attraction was not a taboo subject (Van Dobben 2008: 32), especially in eighteenth-century Ottoman poetry, as shown the article in this issue by Esra Egüz about the poems of Enderunlu Fāzıl. But with the suppression of harem culture at the end of the nineteenth century, köçek dance and music lost the support of its imperial patrons and gradually disappeared (Schmitt 1992: 84–85). In comparable accounts of the Ottoman köçeks, there are the khawals (plural khawalat) in Egypt in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, mentioned in my own article in this volume.
Afghan Bacha Birish or ‘Beardless Boys’
There were in Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia, and Afghanistan bacha birish, or ‘beardless boys’ in dari or dialectal Persian. A beardless boy is seen as ‘asexual’, feminine, and not totally masculine, because pilosity is associated with masculinity, puberty, and sperm in many Muslim societies (Fortier 2010: 97–98).
Afghan bacha birish wear makeup and cross-dress to dance in front of mature men during marriages or other private ceremonies. During their dancing performance, they put a belt around their waist, which underlines their swaying hips, as well as arm and ankle bracelets provided with little spherical bells, which gives rhythm to their movements.
The men in attendance during these private parties compete in poems and in money to acquire the most handsome boy of the evening, who is considered the object of desire. This activity is called bacha bāzī, literally ‘boy game’ from bacha, ‘child’, and bāzī, ‘game’, and the man who plays is called bacha baz (De Lind van Wijngaarden and Rani 2011: 1064). In the Uzbek community of Afghanistan, this practice could also be called bacabaozlik, and the terms of address between an Uzbek dancing boy and his lover are uka or ‘younger brother’ and aka or ‘older brother’ (Baldauf 1990: 15).
In Afghanistan, pimps buy boys from their parents when they are about eleven years old (De Lind van Wijngaarden and Rani 2011: 1064). Paradoxically, they sometimes offer to pay their dowry and the wedding ceremony, because at puberty, bacha birish will stop their dancing performances to get married (ibid.).
Pimps employ a master for one year to teach the boys erotic songs and lascivious dances that they will perform in private circles in front of rich men who can pay for sex with them (ibid.). Although it is forbidden by Islam as well as by the Afghan state, hashish and alcohol circulate in these parties and are given to these young boys to disinhibit them. Far from being a shameful activity, having for himself a bacha birish is a sign of prestige, honour, and wealth for a man in Afghanistan (ibid.) and is not considered a paedophilic practice.5
Bacha birish and a group of musicians, Samarkand (photo, public domain)
Citation: Anthropology of the Middle East 20, 1; 10.3167/ame.2025.200101
Baldauf (1990) and Quraishi (2010) show that there is a poetic tradition in Afghanistan of celebrating the beauty of boys during the private ceremonies where they dance, which includes references to romance and sexual pleasure (Fortier 2021). The documentary film The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan by the Afghan journalist and filmmaker Najbullah Quraishi (2010) shows this reality – as well as the novel The Kite Runner by the Afghan writer Khaled Hosseini (2003), which inspired a movie of the same title (2007).
According to Jan Willem De Lind van Wijngaarden and Bushra Rani's research in Pakistan (2011: 1075), the cultural difficulty for unmarried Pakistani men to have social or sexual relations with women seems to encourage such relationships and cultural practices as the bacha bāzī. Male relationships with women outside of marriage are strongly discouraged, while physical affection between males is socially tolerated. One of the boys interviewed said clearly: ‘Sex with women gives children. Sex with men gives pleasure, so the difference is quite explicit.’
In Pakistan, De Lind van Wijngaarden and Rani (2011: 1071) remarked that the boys are so dear to their ‘masters’ that the men make boys part of their life. Most importantly, they take them to their homes with their wives and daughters. The boys can have their meals at the same table with them as if they are part of the family. In Pakistan, De Lind van Wijngaarden and Rani (ibid.) observed that the bacha bāzī phenomenon is changing under the influence of globalization, with the exploitation aspects becoming more important and a decline of the cultural element of the phenomenon (ibid.).
Masculine Exceptions: Afghan Bacha Pūsh and Buyāt from the Gulf
While there is a long history of social recognition and of significant roles provided to effeminate men, the opposite – the process of recognition and incorporation of masculinization and masculinized females – is much rarer. The exception is the phenomenon of the bacha pūsh in Afghanistan. Bacha pūsh, literally ‘dressed like boy’ in Dari (dialectal Persian), are Afghan girls who, from around 11 years of age, are obliged by their parents to dress like boys, cut their hair very short and forego headscarves (Nordberg 2014: 9). They can behave like boys, play sports outside the house, and do not need to do domestic work like other girls (ibid.).
For the parents who have only girls, having one of their daughters pretend to be a boy, which allows her to go out more freely in the masculine public place (Fortier 2012: 73–74; Fortier and Monqid 2017), is important, as it provides the family with help in work or shopping. She can also escort her mother in places where she could not go without her husband or son. Bacha pūsh are widely accepted in the society, as they are seen as a solution to the problem of not having a boy in the family (Nordberg 2014: 7).
This practice was the subject of many films, such as Osama (2003), an Afghan movie by Siddiq Barmak, or French director Stéphanie Lebrun's documentary film Kaboul, You Will Be a Boy My Daughter (2012), or The Breadwinner (2017), the animated drama film by Nora Twomey, based on the best-selling novel by the Canadian writer Deborah Ellis (also titled The Breadwinner) (2015).
The bacha pūsh conforms to parents’ expectations, but as soon as the girl begins to have feminine physical attributes, her masculine way of life is supposed to end, and she returns to the feminine domestic place in order to marry and procreate (Nordberg 2014). Women raised as a bacha pūsh often have difficulty making the transition from life as a boy and adapting to the traditional constraints placed on women in Afghan society. Many girls do not want to go back once they have experienced freedom as a boy.
Some of them, like Ukmina Manoori, who wrote her autobiography (2014), decided to confront family pressure and keep her menswear. She had an extraordinary man's destiny: she waged war against the Soviets, assisted the mujaheddin, and ultimately became one of the elected council members of her province (ibid.).
Today in the Persian Gulf region that includes Dubai, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, there is a very recent movement of gender subversion that affects a group of urban girls of a high social and cultural level named buyāt (singular buya), an Arabization of the English word ‘boy’ (Le Renard 2011), which is most often explained in Arabic by the expression ‘mustarjilāt’ or ‘girls who become men’ (Nigst and Sanchez Garcia 2010: 16).
Buyāt have a queer adolescence and post-adolescence, cutting their hair,6 wearing masculine clothing, walking, speaking, moving, and acting like boys. Like Afghan bacha pūsh, masculine cross-dressing enables them to engage in certain kinds of sports like football that are forbidden for women (ibid.: 30). Furthermore, some of them change their feminine names to masculine ones (ibid.: 6) as if they were trans.
Religious, medical, and social authorities of the Gulf condemn this movement (ibid.), but it has become so important in cyberspace through social networking that ‘it has created a transnational pan-Gulfian community, with the Internet serving as a mediator for the production of a queer imaginary’ (al-Qasimi 2012: 139).
Gender Segregation and Third Gender
The clear segregation between gender which exists in Islamic societies facilitates the existence of in-between gender figures (such as mukhannath, khanīth, and eunuchs). These individuals are characterized physically by their lack of pilosity, their round forms and feminine body movements. They can enter feminine spaces because of their capacity to sing, play, and dance, in particular at times of marriage ceremonies. Furthermore, their supposed lack of virility does not risk spoiling the virtue of women or creating illegitimate children (zinā). The fact that they can share masculine spaces as much as feminine ones has made them favoured matchmakers between men and women.
Furthermore, in certain societies, the social duty of virginity before marriage and the idea that men have irrepressible sexual desire favour premarital homosexuality, which is admitted because it reduces the sexual desire for women that threatens society, on the condition that this homosexuality is practiced discreetly and not claimed as an identity (Murray 1997; Whitaker 2006). It is tolerated insofar as it is only temporary, as men must fulfil their social duty by entering into a marriage. However, in certain societies, this homosexuality may continue after marriage, as women's main sexual role is restricted to procreation and producing sons.
Some boys (amrads, ghulāms, köçeks, khawals, and bacha birish) are dedicated through their feminine allure, and sometimes cross-dressing, to entertain and to satisfy men's pleasure in a relation based on domination not only through the age difference (adult/beardless), but also through gender (virile man/‘effeminate’ boy), social position (rich/poor), sexuality (active/passive), and perspective (male gaze/being looked at).
This category of boys or ‘effeminate’ men (mukhannath, hijras, khusras or khwāja sirās) is the product of certain masculine erotic desires which, far from being socially repressed, are legitimate and are even considered a sign of virile potency associated with social power. Furthermore, allowing sexual relations with them rather than with women represents a way to avoid dangers related to adultery and to illegitimate descent inherent to any relation with a woman (zinā). And because these ‘effeminate’ men are not subject to feminine codes of modesty, they can show themselves more actively than women in seducing men and can engage in certain sexual practices that women refuse.
The strict gender segregation in Muslim societies explains also the existence of some rare masculine third gender figures. There is the exceptional case of bacha pūsh in Afghanistan, in which families that have only girls dress them alternately as boys, so they can have access to the public space and work for their parents. And there is the recent case of the buyāt in the Gulf, adolescent girls who cross-dress as boys to escape to feminine injunctions and to engage partially in activities forbidden to women especially in the public space.
From Third Gender to Trans People
‘Trans’ is an umbrella term that includes individuals who identify as cross-dresser, transvestite, transgender, transsexual, or non-binary, among other terms. In the West, terms to designate trans people were only developed recently, in the nineteenth century to be more precise. They were also a recent development in the Muslim world. According to Joseph Massad (2007), local activists, under the influence of international LGBTQI+ associations, translated the Western term ‘transsexual’ into Arabic as mutaḥawwil, derived from the verb ‘to transform or shift shape’. But this term is nowadays considered derogatory and is replaced by the term ‘abīr from the Arabic root meaning ‘to cross’.
Today, despite some prohibitions and discriminations, more and more trans and queer people are asserting their gender identity in Muslim societies. Bahar Azadi, who analyses in this volume marital experiences of trans individuals in Iran facing family pressures and stigmatization, shows paradoxically that religious discourse can sometimes be more accepting compared to familial attitudes.
Recently, new medical advances have created the possibility for third gender individuals to take hormones and/or undergo sex change surgery to become trans (Fortier 2022b). In most historically and anthropologically documented cases of Muslim societies, prior to availability of surgical techniques, ‘effeminacy’ was more common than masculinization among third gender figures. Similarly, trans women are more common than trans men in the rare Muslim countries which practice transsexual surgery, such as Turkey (Zengin 2014), Egypt (Fortier, in this volume), or Iran (Azadi or Saeidzadeh, in this volume).
Recently, however, in Iran, women wish to become men. Arguably, their motivations are similar to that of the bacha pūsh during childhood in Afghanistan and the buyāt during adolescence in the Gulf. They become boys to escape constraints which weigh on the control of their bodies (veil, mobility) and on their autonomy (work, sexuality) to reach a masculine social status more valued in these societies, where masculine domination remains strong.
Religious authorities of Muslim countries have issued legal opinions about the issue of trans surgery, which are studied in this volume by myself for Sunni Islam in Egypt and by Zara Saeidzadeh for Shī‘ī Islam in Iran. Discriminations and the importance of local trans or LGBTQI+ associations are highlighted in these two articles, as well as the active role played by certain trans or queer activists in their own countries.
It is important to examine these figures collectively as a group with their role and social status, as well as to look at them as individuals, as activists or as celebrities, as some have left their mark on popular culture in their own countries, whether as singers, dancers, actresses, or TV presenters, like the transsexual actress and singer Ḥanan aṭ-Ṭawīl in Egypt (Fortier, in this volume) or the transsexual TV presenter Dorce Gamalama in Indonesia (Kjaran and Naeimi, in this volume).
In Turkey the cross-dressing singer7 Zeki Müren (1931–1996) (Stokes 2010) and the transsexual singer Bülent Ersoy (born in 1952) were very popular. Since 1988 in Turkey, where Islam is not the state religion, transsexual surgery practiced within the framework of a medical protocol can end in a change of legal gender identity (Zengin 2014: 57). But this was not the case before 1988, as shown by the example of the transsexual singer Bülent Ersoy, affectionately nicknamed the ‘diva’ or ‘oldest sister’ by the Turkish public. She took advantage of this legislative change to return to her country to perform after having been forbidden due to her sex change surgery in London in 1981, and after having played in an autobiographical film about her ‘transition’, The End of Fame (Şöhretin Sonu, Orhan Aksoy, 1981) (Ertür and Lebow 2014).
Bülent Ersoy (public domain)
Citation: Anthropology of the Middle East 20, 1; 10.3167/ame.2025.200101
The Lebanese association Helem, meaning ‘hope’, is the first LGBTQI+ association in the Middle East, created in 2001 in Beirut, before Lambda Istanbul in 2006 in Istanbul, or Bedayā in Cairo in 2008. Beirut is seen as a more accepting city for LGBTQI+ people than elsewhere in the region, so consequently it is often a stopping point for trans refugees who are seeking asylum in Europe.
Working with Helem, the Lebanese photographer Mohamed Abdouni (born in 1989 in Beirut) created a collaborative journal of photography called Cold Cuts, dedicated to trans and queer cultures in the Middle East. In the book and photographic installation Treat Me Like Your Mother (Abdouni 2022), he collected narratives and photographs of ten trans women from Beirut, most of whom were famous dancers, entertainers, and celebrity personalities of the 1990s.
Similarly, the Syrian LGBTQI+ internet website SyriaUntold/Ḥikāyah mā inḥakat (2013)8 archives queer experiences related to the 2011 revolution. In this regard, Greta Sala examines in this volume the portrayals of queer characters in Le dernier Syrien (2020) by Syrian-French author Omar Youssef Souleimane (born in 1987) and The Foghorn Echoes (2022) by Syrian-Canadian Danny Ramadan (born in 1984).
From Third Gender Dancers to Cross-Dressed Performers and Choreographers
We have seen that one of the characteristics of third gender figures in the Muslim world was to cross-dress, especially when they were dancing for entertainment. Today, this practice is revisited by Arab choreographers and performers from the contemporary international scene, as in the case of the Lebanese dancer Alexandre Paulikevitch (born in 1982 in Beirut).
In the series of films called Gender Café9 by the Lebanese film director Jocelyne Saab (born in Beirut in 1948 and died in Paris in 2019), one of them (Fortier 2019b) entitled The Table of Dance and Pride has the subtitle: ‘Interview with the Dancer Alexandre Paulikevitch in Beirut’. In this short documentary, the filmmaker follows the dancer and choreographer Alexandre Paulikevitch as he is dancing and also when he is protesting with the Lebanese Association Helem for women and LGBTQI+’s rights. Through the words and the dance of Alexandre Paulikevitch, who is homosexual, the focus of this documentary is on discrimination against the LGBTQI+ community.
Alexandre Paulikevitch dances the baladi dance, literally meaning ‘local’, and he does not call this dance a ‘belly dance’, most likely because of the colonial and female connotations of that term. In the Arab world, men's and women's dance are very similar. For example, it is not unusual for men to dance together during weddings or at private celebrations, tying a scarf around their pelvis to emphasize the movement of the hips (Fisher and Shay 2009). But this type of dance becomes transgressive when it is performed by a cross-dressing dancer, as is the case of Alexandre Paulikevitch when he presents himself cross-dressed during his performance.
At the beginning of The Table of Dance and Pride, Alexandre Paulikevitch is looking at himself in the mirror and putting on makeup, especially kohl, a staple of makeup in the Arab world. He is transforming himself for his performance, a gesture that corresponds to a type of feminization. And in the filmed performance, he is dancing in a red ‘oriental costume’ usually used by a female dancer.
At a performance at the ‘Arab World Institute’ (Institut du Monde Arabe) in 2017 in Paris, Alexandre Paulikevitch wore a red tutu. That costume has connotations of the feminine ballerina, but Paulikevitch does not hide or cover the bulge of his genitals, the way a transvestite would, which carries echoes of Judith Butler's gender performance in Gender Trouble (1990). As such, Alexandre Paulikevitch's dance does not constitute a sexual inversion, but rather an overexposure of his masculine virility, as he emphasizes his muscles and the visible bulge of his penis when he moves. It is not a feminine but a masculine body that appears and asserts itself by dancing as an object of desire.
In an interview in 2018 in the French newspaper Le Monde, he explained: ‘It is also a tool of gender liberation. By surfing on the codes of the feminine and the masculine, by playing with them too, we subvert them, and we get out of the gender binary’.10 As such, the dancer questions the codes of gender in his performance.
Alexandre Paulikevitch dancing. Screenshot of Jocelyne Saab's film The Table of Dance and Pride (Courtesy of Jocelyne Saab)
Citation: Anthropology of the Middle East 20, 1; 10.3167/ame.2025.200101
Similarly, in Jocelyne Saab's film, Alexandre Paulikevitch did not appear as a hairy man – he has no beard or moustache – but he shows some hair on his chest and arms, and at the same time wears long feminine hair that he uses as a visual and moving element during his performance, which actually makes him look ‘effeminate’.
In The Table of Dance and Pride, Alexandre Paulikevitch turns shame into pride, as indicated by the title of the film. In his performance, he shows a homosexual body that is proud to dance a feminine dance through a male body. Embodying that paradox, he allows himself to experience and perform on the stage, challenging international audiences, not only Lebanese ones but also those of Europe.
In the same way, the queer artist and performer Khookha McQueer (born in 1987 in Tunis), in a subversive photograph of her body called Hairy Breast (2016),11 wears a feminine corset as if she had breasts, and at the same time this ‘biological feminine characteristic’ (Fortier 2020b) coexists with a masculine one: hair (Fortier 2010) on her breast, playing, as does Alexandre Paulikevitch, with ambiguity and renewing somehow with a ‘third gender’ figure.12
Hairy Breast (2016) by Khookha McQueer (Courtesy of Khookha McQueer)
Citation: Anthropology of the Middle East 20, 1; 10.3167/ame.2025.200101
In contrast to the performance of Khookha McQueer, the Libanese queer artist Bassam Faghālī (born in Wadi Shahrour village in 1977) – that other Lebanese drag queens recognized as the first drag queen in Lebanon, although he does not call himself a drag queen (Elsayed 2019: 69) – erases all traces of masculinity in his performance. Dressed with elaborate wigs and costumes made by himself, he performs the manners of a ‘diva’13 and sings songs of female singers like Fairuz or Marylin Monroe in a high-pitched voice.14
The Libanese queer artist Bassam Faghālī (photo, public domain)
Citation: Anthropology of the Middle East 20, 1; 10.3167/ame.2025.200101
The Lebanese dancer Alexandre Paulikevitch posed as the model for the artwork of the Lebanese visual artist Chaza Charafeddine (born 1964 in Tyre in a Shī‘i family)15 in L'oiseau du paradis I. This work belongs to her photo montage series called Divine Comedy, in which the artist replaced the amrad16 of Persian or Mughal miniatures by a photo of a cross-dresser or trans person.17 The collage of this contemporary trans or queer figure in the place of the primary one illuminates its ‘third gender’ status,18 revealing by this artistic gesture what I have tried to demonstrate in this article.
L'oiseau du paradis I. Original imprint of the peacock: anonymous artist (end of the nineteenth century), printed in Iran. Background: Mughal ceramic. Sizes: 32.4 x 48 cm & Sizes: 54 x 80 cm. Chaza Charafeddine 2010 (Courtesy of Agial Art Gallery)
Citation: Anthropology of the Middle East 20, 1; 10.3167/ame.2025.200101
Notes
It is the same for homosexuals (Dennerlein 2017).
I did a fieldwork on hijras in the Muslim city of Delhi in India in 2011.
Urdu poetry written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in the Indian cities of Lucknow and Delhi, which was the centre of a flourishing Indo-Persian culture, exalts some same sex-desire among men (Vanita 2012).
More generally, as Almut Höfert remarked (2018: 22): ‘[…] from the twelfth century onwards, the great sanctuaries of Islam were guarded by eunuchs: the tombs of the Patriarchs (including Abraham) in Hebron, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Ka'ba in Mecca and the prophet's tomb in Medina’.
The pedophilic dimension of this practice cannot be denied; on this subject see ‘Le Bacha Bazi – forme grave de maltraitance d'enfants camouflée en coutume afghane’, by Jovana Andelkovic, 13 September 2022, Humanium, https://www.humanium.org/fr/le-bacha-bazi-forme-grave-de-maltraitance-denfants-camouflee-en-coutume-afghane/.
Some will try to look like if they had the masculine bodily characteristic of the mustache and beard, ‘as some are encouraging the growth facial hair in the mustache and beard areas by making use of “male razor blades” in order to make the hair appear denser’ (Nigst and Sanchez Garcia 2010).
There is also the cross-dressing singer and dancer Buchayb al-Bidāwī in Morocco.
The title in French is Le café du genre, as this film was commissioned by the Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean (MuCEM) located in Marseille in France.
‘À l'IMA, Alexandre Paulikevitch mêle féminin et masculin’, by Rosita Boisseau, Le Monde, 19 April 2018, https://www.lemonde.fr/scenes/article/2018/04/19/a-l-ima-alexandre-paulikevitch-mele-feminin-etmasculin_5287821_1654999.html.
On the analysis of this performance, see also Anne Marie Butler (2019).
Khookha McQueer said herself (Denieuil 2022: 98) : ‘[…] I deliver a composite product, a mix of masculinity and femininity’.
See for example the video ‘A day in the glamorous life of Bassem Feghali’, Vogue Arabia, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2V1Dlxk3wY.
‘God save the (drag) queen: les confidences de Bassem Feghali’, L'Orient-Le Jour, by Karl Richa, 8 September 2023, https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1348661/god-save-the-drag-queen-les-confidences-de-bassem-feghali.html.
I would like to thank Chaza Charafeddine who gave me the authorization to publish the image of L'oiseau du paradis I.
Chaza Charafeddine explained: ‘In Mughal art, beauty was conveyed through the young, beardless boy while in Arab classical poetry, the ghazal, a sexually indistinct poem on beauty, developed. At that time, it was actually good form to have a young beardless lover’. ‘Chaza Charafeddine: Dante, Muhammad and the burqa. The Divine Comedy is wonderland’, by Isabelle Mayault, Mashallah News, 19 January 2011, https://www.mashallahnews.com/chaza-charafeddine-dante-muhammad-and-the-buraq/.
Chaza Charafeddine (ibid.) confirmed: ‘Some of them are just homosexual men who enjoy cross-dressing while others are trans-genra: biologically male, but with a female sexual identity and orientation’.
Élodie Bouffard, Khalid Abdel-Hadi and Nada Majdoub (2022: 12) used the term ‘ambiguity’.
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Vocabulary of Terminologies
Cross-dresser
Drag Queen
Gender Affirmation Surgery
Heterosexual
Homosexual
Intersex
Khunthā
Mukhannath
Mutaḥawwil
Queer
Third Gender
Trans
Transidentity
Transsexuality
