I also want to express how disturbing I found some of the responses that started this thread before it was locked and offer my support to trans folk, especially those with the aspiration to ordain.
Gender, sex and bodies are complicated and I urge people to broaden their understanding of lived trans/NB/Genderqueer experiences. They vary. Some will need gender affirming surgery or other medical/hormonal intervention to feel well and ok. Others might identify with the body they are in differently from how others might see them but not need surgery and so on.
At ordination, no one’s checking under your sarong. If you are a woman and the community you are ordaining into accepts you as a woman, then that seems pretty inline with my understanding of the vinaya and telling the truth.
One thing to consider is that if the person who is wishing to ordain needs to continue to take hormones then they would need to have provision for the cost of their medication. This may be something a community is willing to pay or may be a prohibitive factor.
Always lovely to see somebody considering ordination!
As a bhikkhu and Vinaya teacher I see no problem in such a case. People have already given the reasons why. I started to rehash some of them, but then thought: it shouldn’t be a point of consideration anyway. You should, ideally and in my opinion, just be able to go to a bhikkhuni monastery and ordain, not letting them know anything of your past. So, in the spirit of ideally being a non-issue, I decided to not explain the details. If you have more Q’s feel free to send a message, though.
Be well, and may your aspirations be fulfilled, whatever they may be.
I’d like to express my gratitude for the welcoming and supportive posts of many of the monastics on this forum. Thank you @Akaliko, @vimalanyani, @Pasanna, @Sunyo, and others for your compassionate leadership.
The lay community can also be involved with the direction of Buddhism by supporting monasteries that ordain women, that ordain trans and non-binary people, that work to make Buddhism welcoming, safe, and supportive for all gender identities and sexual orientations. By supporting organizations like Rainbodhi that work to make Buddhism welcoming, safe, and supportive for all.
In the Pali suttas, when the Buddha is asked about any specific element being isolated and analyzed, he often replies, “Recognize that this is not yours, not you. Don’t identify with it.”
I suggest that, while I have never heard a teacher apply these techniques to deconstructing gender, they could easily be applied to that task, significantly strengthening the deconstruction of ego in the process.
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The effectiveness of such deconstructive analysis can be demonstrated by the reaction of a sweet young man after a day of my teaching on Buddhism and gender. He said, “Without my mustache and genitals, I’d have no idea who I was.” I wanted to shout, “Bingo—you’ve got it!” Consistently going to that place of not knowing who one is would go far to attain the peace of egolessness and freedom from the prison of gender roles.
This brilliantly stated thesis on the problem of gender identification perfectly states my reaction to this discussion. Why all this clinging to form? Why are we discussing this concept of gender identity when we might use our time to look deeply inside of ourselves-where our concepts are are constructed-to inderstand our individual bias, and work to deconstruct them thereby reducing the amount of suffering that they create?
My intention of sharing the article was to not add more words to this discussion but rely on what someone may already have thought and expressed with more rigour, but essentially I was echoing the sentiment below.
But reading @Rosie’s response, especially this phrasing,
I couldn’t help but add few thoughts to it.
Trans people, Buddhists or not, through our very existence show that bodies are after all limitations to identifications. Where cis-folk find it unbelieveable to be anything other than their bodies, and even when transgressing all form-clinging, gender remains a constant. Trans people show a radically different way to look at yourself (yet well within Buddhist principles). Something Sakhya Muni too was known for, one can say…
If anything, Trans people’s ordination is a real challenge (as in an existential challenge) to the idea of Self, because it seems to chip away what seems like the final, unrelenting form-clinging - Gender
Trans people do not initiate the idea of gender identity, but oppose the normative, rigid and somewhat settled ideas of gender identity. Trans Buddhists would perhaps be better adept at handling the whole idea of identity in Buddhism, since cis folk haven’t had the privilege of being unsettled by an identity forced upon them; perhaps many cis folk have not had a moment within themselves to examine their gender, where Trans people have had the first-mover advantage on at least one of the major clingings. You see, gender dysphoria is real.
The article Authors’ assertion needs to be repeated that Gender in action is not just a mental construct, it has real life implications, sometimes existential (not in a philosophical sense, but that too). Also, the impediments for Women, and Trans folk are way to high to ignore it with ‘enlightenment has no gender’.
Hello again, and thank you for your insights into the problem of gender identity, and it’s accompanying dysphoria. And I agree with the majority of your points. As a nearly 72 year old post-op trans woman I have written much about this odd Karma both here and on my blog, which includes my 5000 word auto bio available here: Finding the Real Me: A Mini–Autobiography | The Radical Humanist
If you type ‘transgender’ and transsexual’ into the search option on this website you will find at least a couple of my comments regarding this Trans conditioned’ existence’. So I won’t, as is my nature, ramble on about this as I have probably said everything I need to say in those posts. But for the sake of clarification, allow me a few observations:
No we don’t initiate gender. Gender dysphoria results from variations in brain sex in-utero. But we try our best to adapt to voluminous societal rules in an effort to survive. For me gender dysphoria at the age of 10 was an ineffable, powerful force that caused me to experience a state of depersonalization that I had no words to express. I remember standing in front of a mirror in 1961, asking a seemingly karmic question: “How did you get in there?”
BUT part of the problem of being Trans is societal pressure to conform, so a majority of Trans people do their best to ‘pass’ which implicitly means to successfully assimilate into society by adopting stereotypical gender roles. Some of us are more successful at this than others depending on age, body type, and of course funds available for FFS-facial feminization surgery. As Pasanna describes it:
Indeed, I personally believe that a state of enlightenment combines a realization of the spectrum genders within one state of awareness. How could it be otherwise? Do we believe that there is only black and white? Right and wrong? Good and bad? Of course not.
The greater problem, in my humble opinion is male dominance of any societal structure. As long as polar-identified men assume the right to decide who is allowed in, and who is not, we will continue to experience un imbalance of power which denies us all the true expression of diversity in all of its elegance.
Thanks for listening!
Yes thanks for asking. I meant that enlightenment, in the purest sense, must transcend the need or craving for a gendered identity…that being enlightened means we no longer think of oneself as being male or female…that while acknowledging our biology, one achieves a balance of male and female…masuline and feminine…yin/yang.
Thank you Rosie for sharing. I was wondering if we were just going to get stuck in another binary!
On the above, I recommend folks listen to this lovely talk from Bhante Sujato
https://lokanta.live/ 2023-02-17 Dhamma talk: Discrimination and bigotry from the standpoint of Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist psychology. The four biases: chanda (preference), dosa (hatred), moha (stupidity), bhaya (fear).
You should, ideally and in my opinion, just be able to go to a bhikkhuni monastery and ordain, not letting them know anything of your past. So, in the spirit of ideally being a non-issue, I decided to not explain the details. If you have more Q’s feel free to send a message, though.
