Third-Gender, a (Not) Modern Topic

The Semitic root that deals with non-binary is kh.n.th. If this root initially meant ‘to fold back the mouth of a waterskin for drinking’ (Rowson 1991: 672), and was linked to Bedouin life, it quickly came to indicate normative femininity due to a stereotypical association between the pliability and the perceived passiveness of femininity. A plethora of terms derive from this Semitic root: from khunthā to khanīth, they identify different shades of gender fluctuation. Talking about “shades” implies that these gender expressions take multiple forms that are not always clearly distinguished and defined. In addition, these terms bring with them representations that change synchronically and diachronically, so, for example, the mukhannath is not the same during the Umayyad or the Abbasid period. In the first case, the term mukhannath points to the existence of musicians who play and sing in womenswear, while, in the second, it deals with buffoonery and passive homosexual intercourse.

The two main examples of transgression of the gender binary in the classical period are undoubtedly the mukhannath and the khunthā. Even if, as the Arabist Frédéric Lagrange (2008) points out, lexicography suggests that these two terms are not synonyms and represent different expressions of queerness, we can also link these representations, which became a topic of particular interest to scholars who dealt with it (Rowson 1991; Lagrange 2008). In fact, the term khunthā, since its first definition by Al-Khalīl b. Ahmad, seems to identify hermaphroditism or, using the accepted modern term, intersex. Meanwhile, mukhannath, as suggested by the verb form, refers to the act of pretending to be a khunthā, and therefore effeminate.

Literature (especially ādāb) is a preferred space to speak about these shades of gender fluctuation. The mukhannath has been a very well-documented ādāb character since Rowson's pioneering research (ādāb referds to a classical literary genre in prose whose objective is to portray the most important features of the ideal Homo islamicus: see Toelle and Zakharia 2014). Prominent ādāb works, such as the Kitāb al-Aghānī by Abū Faraj al-Isfahānī, not only deal with the existence of mukhannathūn characters, but often immortalized and popularized them, such as Dalāl or Ṭuways. These characters evolve over time and by the end of the Abbasid Period, passive homosexuality and buffoonery gradually replace the role of crossdressing as well as the music and singing. In modern Arabic works, particularly from the Mashreq between the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, such as in Tuqūs al-ishārat wa-l-taḥawwulat (1994/2005) by Sa‘dallāh Wannūs or in ‘Imārat Ya‘qūbyān by ‘Alā’ al-Aswāny (2002), the mukhannath paradigm is used to discuss homosexuality and create passive homosexual characters that deal with stereotypical representations of intercourse between men as power relationships (Fortier 2019; Linardi 2023).

In contrast, the khunthā does not find as significant a place as the mukhannath in classical Arabic literature. Indeed, we cannot point to the existence of a typical ādāb character as we can for the mukhannath. However, the khunthā plays a role in shaping the image of non-binary in classical Arabic societies, because of its place in the field of fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence. In fact, this difficulty of sex assignment at birth has significant consequences in the application of the law in strongly gendered societies such as the Early Islamic one. An example of this is in the context of inheritance (Fortier 2020).

Khātim and Ḥābī employ these classical models, reformulating them to create new representations, and in doing so shape the Romanesque universe of the writers. I first analyse the choice to use or not use the classical terms, especially the term khunthā, and representations and what this choice translates into in terms of gender equality advocacy and feminist commitment.

Khunthā or mutaḥawwil?

Regarding the novels, Khātim, tells the story of the eponymous main character, a young ‘intersex’ (as we will see later, this term is anachronistic here) girl living in Mecca at the beginning of the twentieth century, while Ḥābī is set in contemporary Kuwait and narrates the transition of a young intersex boy who has been assigned female at birth. If in the Saudi novel it is only a question of intersex, in the Kuwaiti novel, intersex is also a way to speak about transgender. This nuance is a significant difference between the two works.

In the construction of Rayyān as a transgender character, al-Rifā‘ī’s Ḥābī differs completely from the way Rajā’ ‘Ālim's constructs Khātim. In fact, the Saudi writer's character is first and foremost ‘intersex’ and, as we will see later, the intersexuality seems to become here a strategy to talk about gender rules in Saudi society. By contrast, the Kuwaiti writer's focus is by and large the trans-identity path of the protagonist and – as I discuss later – we have the feeling that, under his pen, transgender and intersex are essentially the same question.

For this reason, we can point out the use of a very different terminology to speak about non-binary in the two novels and the lexicon employed by their authors can help us to further understand the main difference in non-binary representations. At the same time, it seems that the two authors deal with the same classical models.

Regarding the lexicon, on the one hand, I note that the lexicon employed by ‘Ālim is the classical one, and Khātim is clearly defined as a khunthā, especially by the character of Hilāl who refers to her as ibnat Naṣṣīb al-khunthā (‘Ālim 2002: 86), ‘Naṣṣīb's hermaphrodite daughter’. So, as I have just pointed out, the Saudi writer's character is an ‘intersex’, with the focus of the novel remaining on the double nature of the protagonist. Obviously, we have also to underline that ‘Ālim cannot use mujtama ‘al-mīm (the Arab LGBTQI+ societies) terms because it would represent an anachronism in the temporal setting of the novel. In addition to that, the term hermaphrodite was also used up until the beginning of the twentieth century in European languages (Le Mens 2019).

On the other hand, the term khunthā is never mentioned in the Kuwaiti novel in which we can find the term mutaḥawwil, “transgender” (al-Rifā‘ī 2019: 79) and taḥawwul, ‘transidentity’ (ibid. 12; 27). This term is claimed by mujtama ‘al-mīm and comes from the Semitic root ḥ.w.l that indicates change, an equivalent to the Latin etymology of ‘trans’ which means to pass to the other side. As with other terms claimed by the Arabic LGBTQI+ groups, this one highlights the effort taken to translate into Arabic a terminology that was initially coined in English. As it is a matter of importing concepts from the ‘West’, Joseph A. Massad (2007) argue that the Arabization of LGBTQI+ lexicon is a way to colonize Arab desires. I do not want to enter into this discussion – Frédéric Lagrange (2008) has already pointed out that in this way Massad denies Arab LGBTQI+ groups agency. With this critique in mind, analysis of al-Rifā‘ī’s novel becomes particularly significant, showing that these terms and identities are not already completely assimilated.

Indeed, the Kuwaiti writer's character is presented as a mutaḥawwil, someone transgender but, as it appears in the novel, he is first of all an intersex. In the novel, this intersexuality is treated essentially through a medical perspective and the narration constantly underlines that Rayyān is born with a genetic disease, probably because of his family's inbreeding. Therefore, the main point the novel makes is that the protagonist is more a boy than a girl. The doctors assert that he is biologically a boy because he does not have either a womb or ovaries, but we understand that he has a vagina, thus, in reality, as with other intersex people, he does not fit in the sex binary.

This extract clearly separates people like Rayyān, whose intersexuality is genetic and therefore their transition is justified, from those who are ‘against nature’. The use of the term shadh, which means ‘pervert’ and is normally used to refer to homosexuality, is complex to understand. On the one hand, it could refer to the difficulty of processing a trans-identity in a transphobic context and, for this reason, the attempt to deal with the old identity despite the transition. However, as we will see later, the novel seems also to imply that transition is only for intersex people and not for transgenders individuals who are not genetically intersex.

Additionally, as in other extracts of the novel, I note a confusion between transsexuality and homosexuality (ex. Lastu mithlyan, ‘I'm not gay’; al-Rifā‘ī 2019: 129–130) that really becomes a leitmotiv and further complicates the use of the term shadh. Probably for these reasons, the French readers of the French translation of Ḥābī who commented on the novel on the digital catalogue Babelio¹ accuse the Kuwaiti writer of transphobia and homophobia.

This constant reference to the intersex ‘condition’, which allows al-Rifā‘ī to speak about transidentity, links with the classical notion of khunthā, clearly exposed in ‘Ālim's novel. In fact, despite of the use of a specific LGBTQI+ lexicon and the insertion of gender as a major theme in the novel, the khunthā seems to remain an important inspiration also for al-Rifā‘ī’s character. Moreover, the novel prefers this classical representation of intersexuality over the modern LGBTQI+ community ones.

In fact, the medical lens that tries to put the protagonist's intersexuality in a new normative case deals also with the role that fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence, plays in the work. In order to justify Ḥābī’s transition (the name Ḥābī was given to the protagonist by his best friend, in reference to an Egyptian god), fiqh and fatwas concerning intersex people are constantly brought into play. Both Rayyān and his mother always refer to this argument when someone in their family, especially his sister Nūra and her pious husband, attacks the protagonist. Furthermore, we can understand the role played by jurisprudence in the novel also through the paratext: in the opening acknowledgments, the Kuwaiti writer thanks, amongst others, the famous lawyer Ibrāhīm al-Kandarī for his help with legal concepts.

This reference to Islamic jurisprudence is ultimately the element that permits a clear line to be drawn between the character and the classical conception and representation of the khunthā. In fact, fatwas concerning intersex people are far from being a modern phenomenon. The khunthā status has been of interest to fiqh since the Early Islamic period (Norallah 2024). It is actually the well-attested khunthā presence in Islamic jurisprudence that legitimizes modern intersexuality and transidentity (Fortier 2019), as far as al-Rifā‘ī combines these two notions. This link between khunthā and intersex is not only in al-Rifā‘ī’s novel; on the contrary, it is part of a contemporary jurisprudential tendency in countries with a majority Muslim population (Maravia 2022).

Thus, it can be said that the khunthā, even if it is not called by its name, remains a model for the construction of al-Rifā‘ī’s Rayyān. Following this consideration, I point out that the reemergence of the khunthā serves different purposes in the novels and is interwoven in the novels’ structures and more generally in the writers’ fictional universe and, in the case of ‘Ālim's work, is put in touch with the classical representation of the mukhannath.

A Modern Khunthā to Deal with “New” Gender Fluctuations?

The lexicon chosen by the authors, and especially the difference between the reference only to intersex by the Saudi writer and to both intersex and transgender by the Kuwaiti novelist, leads the novels to differ thematically. Whereas ‘Ālim inscribes her novel and more generally her work as covering the theme of the female condition, thus allowing us to read this production through the lens of women's studies, al-Rifā‘ī’s novel falls under the theme of gender.

More specifically, even if the experience of third gender may appear similar in many aspects, the reemergence of the khunthā in ‘Ālim's novel speaks about the female condition in the author's society, that is, Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. In contrast, as we will see later, al-Rifā‘ī’s book does not deal directly with the female condition but focuses more on transgender transition in contemporary Kuwait.

The reference to Khātim's possibility of participating in as well as gaining access to the private sphere of both women's and men's social lives gives the author the opportunity to evoke indirectly the topic of strongly gendered spaces in her society. The protagonist of Rajā’ ‘Ālim's novel is, in fact, the daughter – the narration uses the pronoun ‘her’ – of a Meccan noble, the Shaykh Naṣṣīb, who has only daughters and tries to have a son to whom he can bequeath his legacy. After ‘adopting’ his slave's son Sanad (such adoption is forbidden in Islam, so the novel shows a particular kind of kinship through breastfeeding from the same woman [Fortier 2011, 2018], in this case Shaykh Naṣṣīb's sister), Naṣṣīb's wife, Sukayna, becomes pregnant with Khātim, whose name means ‘the seal’, chosen by her father to indicate that she will be the last child (and daughter). Following the first chapter about Sanad's adoption, a second one focuses on the protagonist's birth, through which the reader quickly understands her uniqueness. The narration's focus on Sukayna presents this as a moment that marks a turning point in the family and Meccan life. Every element of this event is described as unique: Khātim is born breech, and the blood and fluids that flow out smell of nubūa, prophecy (‘Ālim 2002: 23). Additionally, one must add the silence that marks the event despite the intensity – and the huge pain endured by the mother – that gives it an aura of sacredness.

Ṭālib al-Rifā‘ī’s character, Rayyān, shares with Khātim the same family composition: he is the last of five daughters and, during the pregnancy, his mother has a strange feeling of carrying a son in her womb, just like Sukayna. However, excluding the spatial and the temporal settings, the two novels differ in the discovery of the newborns’ intersexuality. While Khātim grows up as an ‘intersex’ and the narration alludes to the discovery of the non-binary sex of the newborn by her mother, the Kuwaiti novel focuses on the late discovery of this ‘condition’. Although Rayyān, who is assigned female at birth, has always felt inwardly that he ‘was born in the wrong body’, he lives fifteen years as a girl until the moment his period does not appear. After some medical examinations and genetic tests, he discovers that he does not have either a womb or ovaries.

This difference between Khātim's awareness since her childhood of being ‘intersex’ and Rayyān's confusion creates a different territorialization of the space. The Meccan girl grows up frequenting both women's and men's social spaces due to her androgyny and the cross-dressing² that she has practiced regularly since childhood. In the morning, she goes to school, learning geography and history as a young boy, and at night, she spends time in her house under her female identity. In the same way, allowed by her father who plays an important role in the construction of her double identity, Khātim attends religious ceremonies with men and bridal hammam ceremonies with women. Finally, the experience of both ‘harīm’³ and male social spaces reaches its climax after Khātim discovers Tohfa's house, a brothel⁴ that fascinates the protagonist and in which she discovers her desire. In the brothel, Khātim meets Ziryāb,⁵ a young Syrian prostitute who teaches her to play the lute. Following this, the young girl starts to play in both women's and men's ceremonies, and doubt about her identity creeps into the minds of Mecca's inhabitants.

The role played by crossdressing, the possibility of passing through gendered spaces experiencing both masculinity and femininity, and the fact that the protagonist plays music in these spaces bring to the mind of an Arabic reader interested in classic Arabic literature the figure of the mukhannath during the Umayyad era. In fact, the mukhannathun, during this period – as we evoked at the beginning of this article – were men whose work was to sing and play music in feminine attire for both women's and men's ceremonies and parties (Lagrange 2008; Fortier 2020). This reference can be linked to Rajā’ ‘Ālim's tendency to deal with classical Arabic literature, which is clearly legible, for example, in her novel Ṭawq al-Ḥamāma (‘Ālim 2011), winner in the same year of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), one of the most important pan-Arabic literary prizes, which is held in Abu Dhabi.

The emergence of this other classical model accentuates the timeless nature of the protagonist – Khātim deals at the same time with very classical representations, such as the mukhannath, in a spatio-temporal frame far from modernity and full of mystery and hidden presences. It also touches on modern issues such as criticism of gendered spaces, and the limited movement of women.

Conversely, Rayyān does not embody this dichotomy, neither the double female/male identity nor the impression of being a timeless character. Indeed, the fact that he lives his whole life as a girl, and it is only at the end of his transition, particularly after his mastectomy and phalloplasty, that he feels able to experiment with new clothes and normative masculine spaces, does not give him the opportunity to pass through gendered spaces as the Meccan girl does. Furthermore, his family, and especially his father, plays a very different role from Khātim's family and father. While the Meccan girl's father is aware since her birth of her non-binary identity and he contributes to letting her explore both femininity and masculinity – even if the narration suggests that Khātim enjoys and suffers at the same time from this lack of fixed identity – Rayyān's father does not believe in his ‘condition’ (as I have shown, the narration treats intersex as a disease), and he becomes aggressive and choleric when faced with Rayyān's transition.

That Rajā’ ‘Ālim's novel focuses more on the possibility of experiencing both masculinity and femininity, especially in space territorialization, is what allows the author to criticize imposed gender norms that put people in predefined boxes. The Saudi novel points out the limitations that patriarchal societies set for both genders and not only for women. It is true that Khātim feels lucky and privileged for her possibility to get out, explore social spaces, and attend masculine ceremonies; at the same time, she is frightened by the possible loss of this freedom, but she also claims that her femininity matters as much as her masculinity. This claim is particularly apparent in the following episode, related to crying.

Crying is for women? And who am I? I will take off this tunic and I will put my embroidered vest and my veils on again, so I can cry as I want… Maybe I am envious of your vest and veils.⁶

Al-bukā’ li-l-ḥarīm, wa mā anā ? Akhla‘u adhā al-thawb wa a‘ūdu li-l-ṣadīriyya wa-l-maḥrama wa-l-madawra thumma yumkinunī al-bukā’ mā shi'tu… Rubbamā aḥsiduki ‘alā tilka al-ṣadīriyya wa-l-maḥrama. (‘Ālim 2002: 56)

The dialogue takes place between Khātim and the ‘adopted son’ of Shaykh Naṣṣīb, Sanad, her best friend and platonic life partner until their early deaths, after an episode that seems to be trivial: the aggression towards the protagonist's cat by Hilāl, the son of the Ḥāj Tas, a slave in Naṣṣīb's house. This episode proves essential to the critique of patriarchal society because it points to the struggles with gender rules that men also bear. If Khātim, through her double identity, feels free to show her emotions, Sanad is described as jailed – but aware of this – in his normative masculinity that forbids him to listen to his feelings.⁷ In this way, we can suppose that the Saudi writer wants to show that feminism is a human issue and not only a female one: including men in the patriarchal structure, she tries to further legitimize her claims for gender equality.

Of course, we can point out that the protagonist Rayyān suffers with his attempt to avoid crying (and the narration actually alludes to his tears many times), but the criticism of gender rules is far more subtle. As in this case, the novel has a tendency to expose gender rules rather than to criticize them: the most important issue of Rayyān's transition is to learn masculine codes of conduct and his doctors encourage him to spend time with men and learn from them how to behave to be definitely considered a boy.

On the one hand, the valorisation of the world of men is functional to Rayyān's internal logic – he is at the heart of his transition – but on the other, normative Kuwaiti femininity is presented here in a very pejorative way, and being a woman becomes almost a curse. Thus, the novel does not incorporate men into the feminist struggle to legitimize it, but focuses especially on the harsh conditions faced by women and more generally minorities in contemporary Kuwait.

These considerations lead us to say that al-Rifā‘ī does not share the Saudi writer's feminist target. Indeed, Rajā’ ‘Ālim's Khātim, is part of a larger tendency that Mona Almaeen (2020) calls ‘Sufi-oriented Islamic feminism’. Thus, her work is characterized by a deeply feminist message that passes through the use of a magical realism (Al-Sharqi 2016) in which Sufi imagination plays an important role. Khātim too, is rich in Sufi imaging, starting from the recurring duality of characters. As Laurence Denooz (2013) highlights, the protagonist is in a continuous in-between: between masculinity and femininity, childhood and adulthood, good and bad. Additionally, we can also note the duality embodied by the couple Khātim/Hilāl that is continuously underlined in the novel, for example through the comparison with a body and its shadow (referring to the two characters’ skin colours). The murder of both Khātim and Hilāl at the end of the novel, who die at the same time, suggests the union of the two opposites in order to recreate the indivisible unity. Indeed, the last episode that precedes the end seems to prefigure the Sufi notion of nonduality: the protagonist falls into a trance looking at the pilgrims who move around the Kaaba and desires to find again this unity outside the finiteness of her body.

Rajā’ ‘Ālim's feminist struggle echoes progressive Saudi women's access to public spaces since the 1990s (Le Renard 2011). However, the Saudi writer does not credit in the novel the ‘consumeristic feminist’ model that Le Renard argues to be the essential one in the country. On the contrary, she focuses essentially on questioning the weight of gender rules in her society and deals with notions from Islamic feminism – whose reflections begin during the 1990s – such as Sufi imaginaries (Shaikh 2023).

Similarly, Ṭālib al-Rifā‘ī’s works deal with minorities, such as women or immigrants. These themes play a central role in Ḥābī which is the novel that concerns par excellence gender minority and the first Kuwaiti work that presents a transgender character. Although the focus is on minorities and especially mujtama ‘al-mīm, the Arabic LGBTQI+ community, in this novel this does not necessarily reflect an involvement in the cause on the part of the novel.

In fact, the Kuwaiti novelist evokes the strictness of gender rules in his country, but this strictness is not the main problem for Rayyān. As shown by the reference to the inability to cry and the restricted freedom of movement in al-Rifā‘ī’s book, these are not topics that provide strategies to think about and challenge gendered stereotypes. In addition, the protagonist certainly struggles with a lack of knowledge and acceptance of his ‘condition’, but the novel does not question directly either the idea of intersex as a malformation or the acceptance of transgender people who are not also intersex. Also, with regard to sexuality, intersexuality allows ‘Ālim the possibility to stage the homoerotic desire that Khātim experiences with Ziryāb. On the contrary – and at the same time – Rayyān also falls in love with his best friend Jawā, but his transsexuality repositions his desire within heteronormativity, as he is, despite his previous life experience, a boy who loves a girl.

The question of the choice of terminology remains also open: why does al-Rifā‘ī use taḥawwul, transidentity, and not thunā’ia jinsiyya, intersexuality, if in the book only intersexuality is justified? Moreover, the term mutaḥawwil begins to be substituted by ‘ābir jinsī, which focuses more on the idea of the passing than on transformation. For this reason, on the one hand, this confusion reflects the lack of assimilation of mujtama ‘al-mīm lexicon. On the other hand, the issue of transidentity is perhaps more widely known than the issue of intersexuality. Also, in the context of LGBTQI+’s history, the intersex advocacy is much more recent than the transgender one, as is shown by the adoption of the transgender flag in 1999, while the most recent intersex flag appeared in 2013 (Outright International, n.d.).

Finally, this dichotomy between the inclusion of LGBTQI+’s lexicon and representations and the conception of intersexuality and transgender as a disease (which representation evokes the khunthā in Islamic jurisprudence) to legitimize the character's transition, and thus his entire novel, can also be considered a strategy to address a dual readership, both Kuwaiti and European.

Conclusion

Translation is a very powerful means of literary consecration (Casanova 2002) and it also provides the possibility to increase the author's benefits. And, in addition to that, al-Rifā‘ī seems to especially regard the translation of Arabic literature, and obviously his books, as important. In his interview in the context of the Orient Littératures Séminaire (Bulletin éléctronique de l'IISMM 2020), he underlined, in fact, the essentiality of this practice to be consecrated but also the importance to rethink this act to not essentialize Arabic literatures. Thus, he focused also on the difficulty of the translation of Arabic books because of a different readership with different values and backgrounds. For this reason, we can also think about a dual ideal reader in the Kuwaiti writer's novels and the difficulty of not offending the sensibilities of such different readers regarding a topic like gender fluctuations. So, although this subject can be well received in the context of the book market both in Kuwait and in Europe (especially France in the case of Ḥābī, because of its French translation) in Kuwait because it is, as we saw at the beginning of this article, a ‘new’ topic (al-Rifā‘ī was a judge for the IPAF prize and he is no doubt aware of the saleability of this subject) and in France because it is set in the context of a deep interest in Arabic sexualities and gender expressions (Lagrange 2008) since the 1990s as a strategy to create an image of Islam as being able to accommodate French Republican values such as laicity, it is not simple to deal with this subject addressing two different readerships’ expectations.

In conclusion, in light of what has been said, this article shows that the use of a committed lexicon does not necessarily translate into committed literature. This is finally what happens in al-Rifā‘ī’s novel, which, despite linguistic choices evoking a setting in the LGBTQI+ movements, not only connects with the classical Arabic conception of gender fluctuations but also reproduces stereotypes that portray intersexuality and transgender essentially as ‘diseases’ that needs to be healed. On the contrary, the use of a non-committed lexicon, such as the Saudi writer's choice to use the classical term khuntha, hermaphrodite, and the emergence of classical representations of gender expressions such as the mukhannath, can also be a strategy to address contemporary social issues and show a form of commitment through the ‘alibi’ of the past and local traditions.