SuttaCentral
And the more that society makes doing this unthreatening and safe, the more people will take advantage of the opportunity: both to share what they might otherwise have kept hidden, and also to look deeply into their own beings and discover what they might have not noticed or been in denial over for complete lifespans.
When we look back historically, unless we are doing deep forensic research (and let’s face it most of us are not) what is on display is the societal norm of the time.
Exactly.
As a lesbian, I feel a bit conflicted about all this. Let me share my thoughts:
Sorry for being being a bit rambly. Also, I realize this is a touchy topic, and I don’t mean to cause offense, just to express my concerns.
There are two sentences in AN 7.51 that I’ve always taken as applying to any combination of identity and/or orientation:
“Itthatte, bhikkhave, abhiratā sattā purisesu saṁyogaṁ gatā.
Beings who are delighted with their femininity enter upon union with men.”
“Purisatte, bhikkhave, abhiratā sattā itthīsu saṁyogaṁ gatā.
Beings who are delighted with their masculinity enter upon union with women.”
Seems to me this applies to whatever any person is taking most delight in at the time.
And as stated above, I also realize this is a very important and sensitive topic and hope my offer is useful.
Personally I cant see this reading at all! 
I think this sutta is very firmly hetronormative and binary. It speaks of men liking women and women liking men. Or the only other alternative; transcending sexual desire altogether.
Here’s Bhante Sujato’s brief description of the sutta:
By focusing on their own gendered attributes, a man or woman becomes attached to them and develops lust for the opposite sex.
I think this is a spot on synopsis for the info in the sutta.
Remember that Bhante Sujato deliberately translates in a more inclusive manner. But where you see the one English word “beings” as used above, there are actually two separate Pali words which are gendered: Itthatte (female) and Purisatte (male). This does change the reading somewhat. Lets take a look at Ven Thanissaro’s translation:
“A woman attends inwardly to her feminine faculties, her feminine gestures, her feminine manners, feminine poise, feminine desires, feminine voice, feminine charms. She is excited by that, delighted by that. Being excited & delighted by that, she attends outwardly to masculine faculties, masculine gestures, masculine manners, masculine poise, masculine desires, masculine voices, masculine charms. She is excited by that, delighted by that. Being excited & delighted by that, she wants to be bonded to what is outside her, wants whatever pleasure & happiness that arise based on that bond. Delighting, caught up in her femininity, a woman goes into bondage with reference to men. This is how a woman does not transcend her femininity.
The second half of the sutta talks about a man or a woman not getting caught up in their own gender identity and not getting caught up in attraction to the opposite gender, i.e. transcending the view of gender in oneself and others of the opposite gender and escaping the bonds of sexual attraction altogether. Even this transcendence is rendered in hetronormative terms. Though the sutta talks of freedom from sexual identification and desire as freedom from bondage, let’s be clear this is not saying that this freedom from bondage =being gay.
Nope. There is nothing here that is queer to me!
I have had conversations with people who tried to tell me that this sutta is pro-queer because it talks about masculine and feminine qualities and they think that gay/lesbian sex is one person being “the man” and the other being “the woman” but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what queer sex is. It’s 2 men or 2 women or whatever gender they identify as. It’s not a poor, feeble attempt at re-creating straight sex. 
In this sense, where people try to make queer relationships more hetronormative, “who’s the man and who’s the woman” it is another form of queer erasure.
Some of the people who commented earlier on this sutta may wish to discuss it further - in which case can I suggest starting a new thread, thanks.
Right, but those people would do the same with the Village People’s YMCA, even though it’s a song that’s literally about how great it is to be a young, gay man.
The EBTs seems to suggest that it’s straight people who need to do that first and foremost.
I agree, I’m only arguing that some (many?) of the EBTs could be read as queer texts 
Edit: To clarify, I don’t think it’s a plausible reading of the EBTs to use them further entrench heteronormativity. I think they are actually really subversive to heteronormativity, but this is just my own subjective opinion of course.
Thanks for your thoughts and willingness to engage.
Yes, we can queer read anything! But really this thread is about erasure of women’s and queer voices from the sutta and vinaya texts. Whilst I talked briefly above about reparative readings (which is a queer reading strategy) it’s important to be cognisant of the fact that the necessity of doing queer readings only speaks to this erasure and the absence of these voices even more keenly.
I appreciate your enthusiasm for a queer reading for AN7.51 but to suggest it is inherently queer (as some have) is quite incorrect. And if a totally hetronormative and binary text is the closest thing have to rally around, it really shows how very bereft we are of queer voices in the suttas and further illustrates my OP about the completeness of this erasure.
Thanks again!
Even this apparent distinction is questionable.
Biology is a really broad area of study, with many sub-disciplines. Even human physiology has many sub-disciplines. So we also find many definitions of what is considered either female or male. Each definition depends on the sub-discipline that it comes from.
For example, here are some different ways of assigning sex depending on sub discipline - genetics, external genitals, internal genitals, hormones, egg production, sperm production. So for example, in professional sport we might determine sex by hormones, but at birth we might determine sex by observation of external genitals. Each of these definitions is further complicated because they are all on a sliding scale, not any one of them is properly binary.
Usually, for legal purposes (filling out a birth certificate), where we are deciding on the social construct of ‘what sex a person is’, and consequently what subsequent life opportunities they will have, we resort to very blunt tools for the vast majority of our determinations, i.e observation of external genitals of infants.
We only get a little better for the small minority where observation of external genitals are ambiguous (to a particular group of observers). In these minority cases the infant is subjected to tests over a number of definitions and each test is scored for how female or male the infant presents at that time. So the infant might be say 70% genetically male (30% genetically female), but their internal organs might be 60% female (40% male).
So each of these scores are added up and then they are divided by the number of tests taken, giving us a score out of 100. If it is over 50% the infant gets categorised as one sex, under 50% they get categorised as the other.
Obviously these tests are only taken if the external genitals of an infant are ambiguous, so we never really know our own percentage of femaleness or maleness from an overall biological point of view. There are estimated to be very few people who would score 100% for either maleness or femaleness over all tests that we currently use in the UK.
In short, biology is just really messy, and we don’t know that much about it yet, but the status of biological sex as a binary seems to be waning.
Still reading through the thread, I wanted to add something though.
WRT lack of LGBT figures within the nikayas/agama/EBT, I might disagree. Though what I have to say will be a bit debatable.
However within the jataka alone there are references to past lives between Siddartha and Ananda where they had (seemingly) been same sex lovers as deer.
There is also a sutta where a male disciple gets gently reminded not to be in love with the buddhas beautiful body, one whos sees the dhamma sees him. (Do not remember the names on these).
Manikantha jataka is about gay love and loss between a naga and human.
Interestingly, the Rupavati jataka appears to be a buddhist version of the hindu story of Bahuchara Mata. Rupavati (buddha’s past life as a woman) cuts off her breasts for a starving mother, and becomes third gender/hijra by doing so. Later additions of the text will mention them changing back into a woman, earlier ones don’t.
There is of course the mention for monks who change gender being allowed to switch roomings into the gender of their choice in the vinaya.
It seems that EBT’s do make references to gay relationships, and other LGBT topics. This makes alot of sense since these things were common in alot of indian cultures, why would it not arise in Buddhism?
It seems that instead, as culture shifted, that these texts have been removed and altered by the larger public surrounding sanghas. This becomes very apparent looking at comparative agama collections when it comes to the issue of erasure of women as well.
Very interesting I think.
There is also this time when a friend from lay life tells Ven. Ananda that he will give him half of his property and they can set up a household together.
https://www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/English-Texts/Jataka/235.htm
This is story of Vakkali. I used to think this was great evidence of history’s first gay stalker! But after having done some research, it seems the desire to gaze upon the Buddha’s body and be in his presence was a contemporary cultural belief that people could receive blessings, be purified, or make spiritual progress merely by being in the presence of a holy person. That was the kind of faith that Vakkali (foremost in faith) had; a complete reliance on the Buddha’s presence for his own development, which is what the Buddha admonished him for. So maybe it was not a gay/bi thing afterall. There are female equivalents also.
I think this faith approach is still a feature of Indian culture. My Indian neighbours will make a big fuss of seeing me on their birthday to take blessings. We can also see a fetishisation or the cult of personality in the way people have a magical belief in relics placed on a shrine, or amulets blessed by an arahant, or the museums of forest monks with their false teeth and other objects in display, or chewing gum/clothes/autographs from famous actors! The aura of personal objects…
Anyway… So I’m still a bit ambivalent on Vakkali. Could be queer, or an incorrect reading, a projection onto the text.
Similarly, this story is held up as a wonderful example of how the culture at the time was fine with trans people. But recently I head someone give another reading of this, saying it showed the opposite. Because it’s kinda impossible to just magically change sex characteristics or gender overnight as happens in the story, they suggested that the monk was actually someone who was assigned female at birth (AFAB) or who may have had indeterminate sex characteristics. For whatever reason, it seems they personally identified as a man, lived as a man and “passed” for a man, and who likely entered the Sangha as a “stealth” trans masc person. Then one day they seem to have got caught out and their transgender (or perhaps intersex) nature was revealed. Instead of affirming their gender, they were forced to go and live with the nuns, the gender they did not identify with. So this story may actually be a story that shows a lack of acceptance and is actually about rejection!
Given what we know about the many barriers to do with sex characteristics and gender types that prevent all sorts people from being able to ordain, it does seem strange that there is this startling story of inclusivity, so maybe the paranoid reading here is the correct one. Who knows! But yes, at least we have a tiny glimpse in this text that there were gender diverse people there at the time - but this isn’t much, and is one story amongst thousands and thousands.
Thanks for the other examples from the jatakas that I don’t know very well. I do know that these stories were often from older cultures and became spread all over the world and many “western” fairy stories can be traced back to them. I remember reading about the deliberate erasure of queer stories from the texts, in relatively recent times. Will try and find the reference…
Here it is:
And this is where Pete says the filtering of LGBTQ characters began to occur.
“Over one hundred years, very few people edited a catalogue of the world’s folklore with a system which logs different variations of tales across borders around the world,” Pete says.
They used the Aarne Thompson Uther Tale Type Index, to catalogue certain folktales by their structure and assigns them AT (Arne Thompson) numbers.
Stith Thompson, an American Scholar and Folklorist, one half of the duo who created this system then got to work on cataloguing, which is where of monumentally erased much of LGBTQ folklore.
“Unfortunately by his own accounts, Stith Thompson brought with him to the editing his own sense of right and wrong.
“In the accompanying Motif Index of Folklore he compiled in the 1920s, and revised in the 1950s, he lists ‘Homosexuality’ and ‘Lesbianism’ in a section called “Unnatural Perversions” with bestiality and incest. Open about his views he admits he omitted many stories in the catalogue because they were ‘perverse’ or ‘unnatural,’”
Seeing how easy it is to erase these voices makes me wonder if this also happened in Buddhism. Certainly, though queers exist in the cracks and in peripheral possibilities, we have few if any explicitly queer or trans voices that are their own and who are shown in a good light.
At a talk the other night, Bhante Sujato mentioned how important the Therigatha texts are for capturing authentic women’s voices because they were maintained by the bhkkhuni lineage and therefore less subject to interference by male authority. The same cannot be said, he mentioned, for other texts, where we definitely see later insertions and interference - often about keeping women “in their place”.
I think this is an important point to remember; that we need to see that our texts, though authoritative and mostly very accurate, were not immune from redaction and in fact we know this occured.
Similarly, other voices have been systematically removed/altered/silenced throughout history. So that’s something to think about and why I started this thread. The more recent revision of queer figures throughout history, revealing that many important cultural heroes from our shared past were in fact queer was not the history I was taught in school.
This has been a very educational thread! 
Thank you Bhante and Ayya for sharing your insights on this omission/
I just find that it looks very odd that these voices are far and few given contemporary religious literature showed quite spectrum of gender diversity
https://www.google.com/amp/s/indianexpress.com/article/parenting/blog/storytelling-lgbt-themes-in-hindu-mythology-5273332/lite/
Maybe an artefact of the texts being conserved outside of continental India ? I’m just hypothesizing here …but it does seem a valid one …
Yeah maybe. You’ll probably know this better than I do, but I’ve read about LGBTQIA activists in India really struggling to get the establishment to even acknowledge the presence of diverse sexualities and gender in their shared cultural history. It seems that once again the colonials were to blame for fundamentally changing the social and religious attitude to these groups, through overt coercion and imposing punishing criminal codes. Indians are still living with this rejection and revisionism today.
I didn’t see much of that in that thread, not sure if you think i did any of those evil things.
Nor did i see any women complain, not sure why you feel the need to speak for them. Do you think they aren’t capable of speaking out for themselves?
I guess i know where you are coming from but i personally think it is a bit strange that you complain on their behalf as if they aren’t capable of standing up to ‘the patriarchy’ and ‘mansplaining’.
There were 2 threads, the second one was split especially to give focus to the concerns of women
Hmmm…maybe have another look. The title of the thread is:
Contemporary women’s concerns about apparent sexism in the EBTs
Several women voiced concerns about the threads. Two women messaged me privately. One of those said she was so upset and offended by responses and comments and the general attitude of men on the forum that she was considering leaving the forum altogether. This has happened in the past, where women have left the forum because they feel that sexist comments are made without considering the impact this has on users of the site and they don’t feel that their contributions or concerns are valued. The other person who contacted me said was grateful for my contributions because she doesn’t feel comfortable engaging in discussions about gender here because it ends up in horrible responses from men and it is unproductive.
It’s not that they
it’s just that doing so makes them a further target for vitriol, sexism, more mainsplaining, and also requires a great deal of energy and emotional labour of having to deal with the same sorts of arguments and opinions over and over again, without really getting anywhere.
The reason I spoke up was directly in response to several heartfelt messages from one of the women. This was an an act of allyship. Being an ally is where people who have some level of safety and privilege advocate on behalf of others. This is different from speaking for others.
Several people thanked me in this thread for raising these issues and five people (men and women) also messaged me privately to express their thanks.
Great! Stick with that perception then.
[Edit: if you have further comments or any feedback for me regarding your concerns, can I suggest a private message rather than derailing this thread. Thanks! ]
I am pretty sure some women liked some of the things written there by the men too.
As i see it, pleasing everyone isn’t a good idea and just because some men or women criticize the EBTs or the Buddha we have to remember this verse
No person can be found
Who has been, is, or will be
Only critized
Or only praised.
I think if people don’t like it, it is too bad but i personally don’t see anything bad in those texts.
There is that line where Ananda says ‘women are foolish’ and we can talk about why he might have said it and whether he really thought women are foolish but this hardly makes the Sutta pitaka sexist.
Seeing (or not seeing) things from others point of view is the very purpose of this thread.
I can see how a radical feminist might not like the texts or how a Brahmanist might not like them, doesn’t mean that we should change anything to accomodate them.
Can’t please them all.
I personally think calling the sutta pitaka sexist is offensive and distasteful. Let’s call it what it is, these are the utmost holy texts held in the highest regard by many men & women and talking them down is very offending.
I’ve heard In some places it is considered bad manner to put these texts down on the floor.
I’m not doubting you, but I can’t find it. Can you show me where this was said so that I can see the context?
There is this as example
It isn’t clear to me what exactly is this ‘sexism’ but it seems to be some terrible bad and wrong thing found in the sutta pitaka.
It seems like participation in this discourse about gay or women’s issues with the texts requires one to accept that there is something inherently & systematically wrong with the texts as they are and if we don’t accept this premise we are guilty of that very sin.
This can of course only create an echo chamber where dissenting opinion isn’t allowed and the only thing that will come out of it is an attempt at reforming the texts.
I wouldn’t even care if feminists and lgbt+ make their own texts but something tells me they won’t be content until they destroy the originals. All this effort & drama instead of just meditating and overcoming identification like everyone else.
Imo straight men don’t have it any easier in the grand scheme of things, the differences are miniscule and we’re all essentially stuck with ourselves.