hi I'm John Green welcome to crash course religion so for hundreds maybe thousands of years in South Asia people have recognized three genders women men and Hijra those who identify as neither male nor female under both Hindu and Muslim rulers Hijra had positions of power and respect and to this day especially among Hindus Hijra are thought to possess incredible abilities powers to curse those who disrespect them and bring blessings to Newly Weds and newborns but in the past 200 years Hijra have faced discrimin ation and violence been largely restricted from holding jobs or seeking education
and often been refused medical treatment at hospitals so what changed well it turns out that religion like glitter really does get into all sorts of places including how we think about sex gender and [Music] sexuality so listen no matter what you've heard about denying the it's impossible to do religion without a body so without getting all crash course biology on you let's go over some vocabulary beginning with sex the spectrum of hormonal anatomical and genetic traits that often get reduced to two boxes male or female but sex just isn't an either or thing about one
in every hundred people in the US are born interex with a combination of biological traits that don't fit neatly into either category then there's gender which describes the roles expect ations and power dynamics a culture reinforces about women men girls boys trans folks non-binary people Everyone those roles and expectations change with time and shift from culture to culture and then there's sexuality who we feel sexually attracted to if anyone so gender is kind of like language we shape it together as a society like there is nothing inherent to the English language that says when something
is a little wet we should call it moist right like that doesn't have to exist and and God willing someday it won't similarly the idea that men should work from 9 to 5 and women should keep the home is not inherent to humanity in fact the idea of a 9-to-5 work week has only existed for about a hundred years gender roles have varied wildly throughout human history so just like the meaning of a word can change over time so can the ways we perceive and engage with gender but like language itself gender Norms are constructed
there's no reason why this color should be called Blue just like there's no reason why blue confetti should announce the birth of a boy in fact pink was considered a boys color in the US from around the 1910s to the 1940s this is all social constructs ideas that communities made up and agreed to but one thing about madeup ideas is that they're still real as one of my college professors once told me this table is constructed but if I throw it at you it will hurt languages are real the concept that people should have human
human rights is made up but still real laws are made up but still real and so on so gender is a construct but it shapes how people experience the world in profound ways and we reinforce these ideas through things like fashion culture and of course religion all religions build Norms around gender sex and sexuality some have practices where gender is really important like in South India it's common for Hindu girls to commemorate their firsttime men's trading by ceremonially wearing aari and in the Catholic church only men can be ordained as priests which when you think
about it is also a first time wearing a fancy outfit ceremony sometimes religions prescribe gender roles outright like in Judaism women are traditionally responsible for lighting Shabbat candles at home in many typical Evangelical Christian churches the idea of biblical Womanhood assigns service roles to women and Leadership roles to men which is why you're likely to find women running Sunday school or keeping toddlers entertained in the nursery or working the church bake sale but you're much less likely to find them at the pulpit leading an Evangelical service the point is every religion constructs and reinforces ideas
about gender that can strengthen or challenge the prevailing social orders ideas about gender but these ideas both in secular spaces and in religious ones are subject to change over time including concepts of how many genders there are like some indigenous communities have traditionally recognized three four or even five genders and the tall mood an ancient comp ation of Jewish law describes eight genders including people born with a combination of male and female traits and people whose gender differs from the one assigned to them at Birth this stuff isn't new but of course one religion has
had a disproportionate influence on gender Norms around the world Christianity from the 15th century onward European Empires embarked on a so-called civilizing mission to convert the world to Christianity bringing with it ideas about sexuality and gender so for example while the term missionary position coming from sexual rules imposed by Christian missionaries is likely urban legend it is true that Christian missionaries attempted to control sexual activities in colonial spaces and in some places those ideas about gender sex and sexuality stuck which brings us back to the Hijra there's evidence in Temple drawings Hindu texts and written
records that this part of the world has long been home to fluid concepts of sexuality and gender including homosexuality and the Hijra Community but British officials feared their soldiers would absorb these Norms so they sought to control what they didn't understand and this is something really important about colonialism colonialism did not just shape norms and ideas in colonized communities it also exposed colonizers to many different ways of Being Human and organizing human power structures there were radically egalitarian indigenous communities that made European philosophers think more broadly about what what kind of political structures might replace
Divine Right monarchies and there were forms of religious expression that challenged the Christianity soldiers and other colonizers had grown up with so in the 19th century colonial authorities created a law that criminalized intercourse against the order of nature in other words anything that went against Christian ideas about gender sex and sexuality the law made both Hijra and homosexuality illegal across the British colonies and even after gaining their independence many former colonies maintained laws forbidding homosexuality in fact it wasn't until 2018 that India finally struck theirs down but even so colonization left lasting impacts on perceptions
of lgbtq people in South Asia Hijra included who still face Prejudice to this day so we experience religion through our gender identity but how we interpret the religious text that guide these ideas of gender is crucial to how these Norms manifest themselves by pointing to Old text as the authority on what gender Norms should be religions can end up preserving certain interpretations making them seem Timeless and unchanging but Norms are always in flux constructed by each community in a particular time and place and texts are never neutral like according to Jewish rinic literature written between
the 1 and sixth centuries being a man meant having self-restraint a virtue women supposedly lacked although in my contemporary context it seems like a lot of men lack self-restraint I know because I see their tweets or in a number of religions it's a norm for men and women to pray separately you'll find this practice in Orthodox synagogues Buddhist monasteries and many Muslim mosques these practices construct and enforce the idea that gender is a binary which we've already learned just isn't true but they're also often rooted in assumptions about sexuality namely that men would be too
distracted to think about God in the presence of women in many mosques for example Muslim men sit in the front of the prayer space women in the back Sometimes women and men are split by a curtain and other times women and men pray in different rooms altoe but not all Muslims interpret their Traditions the same way and like any other community Muslims are constantly negotiating those interpretations on March 18th 2005 about a 100 Muslims gathered to pray in Manhattan women and men knelt together side by side and a woman Dr Amina wude LED them in
prayer a role typically filled by a man but they weren't at a mosque because none in the area would allow this kind of Gathering some Muslims called it Blasphemous arguing that a mixed gender women-led public prayer was forbidden by Islamic law others contended that the problem wasn't a woman leading a prayer it was that she did it in public rather than at home among other women so instead they hosted it all at an Episcopal church with security measures and police presence despite the controversy some Muslims felt that the Gathering reflected the correct interpretation of the
Quran they argued there's nothing in the text stating that men and women can't pray together or that a woman can't lead a public prayer and to wude and her supporters the goal wasn't to impose mixed gender prayer on others but to widen the Horizon of interpretations to this day Muslim experts disagree on whether gender segregation is actually required by the Quran and Islamic law but at Islam's most sacred site the grand mosque in Mecca visited by millions of Muslims every year there's no Separation by gender men and women worship side by side surrounding a sacred
shrine called the kabah together to consider how sex and gender inform religious texts let's consider the story of haar in Islam now haar is never named in the Quran although she is mentioned by name in the hadiths the recording of the Prophet Muhammad's thoughts words and actions but her story is told in the Quran she was given as a slave to Sarah who upon realizing her own infertility gave hhar as a wife to her husband Ibrahim only for ibraim to abandon her in the desert shortly after their son was born on God's instructions she had
nothing but her newborn baby a bag of dates a pouch of water and faith that God would provide when the water ran out so did haar's milk for her baby so she ran frantically between two Hills trying to find a well until suddenly an angel appeared and touched the ground and water gushed forth so fast so much that haar couldn't Dig A Basin fast enough to catch it all she drank and was able to feed her son there are some who believe that the entire Uma the Islamic community descends from Ishmael this son of haar
so by extension haar's heroic journey to seek survival for herself and her son made the Muslim Community possible now from a historical perspective this story reflects a reality experienced by many mothers at the time if they could not find water and food their babies would die but it also reflects a universal dependence upon the world for sustenance whether you see that human dependence as being on the world or Angels or God there is no doubt that we cannot live without help from each other from the earth from the heavens and from our mothers today as
part of the Haj the pilgrimage every Muslim is obligated to make if they have the resources and opportunity people of all genders walk between those two Hills like haar did embodying her experience and feeling her desperate struggle it is a struggle both unique to Motherhood and Universal to humans after all we all want to do whatever we can to keep our kids alive and we are all dependent upon outside forces to be able to do so in both the Hijra and hijar we see the ways that gender and religion influence and reinforce each other it's
tempting to think of religion existing all by itself in its own lane separate from how we think about our identity and our bodies but that's an illusion every religious community in every time and place negotiates ideas about gender and sexuality and even while those ideas seem Timeless and unchanging they're actively under construction and each of us living right now has a say in how future Generations understand gender sex and sexuality in our next episode we'll explore the ways that religion gets into our ideas about another social construct race I'll see you then thanks for watching
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