US-headquartered social media platform Facebook allows users to choose from more than 50 different gender options. Some sources claim it has as many as 71 options.
In much of the Western world, till recently, the concept of gender was very simple: man and woman. The view came from a Biblical understanding that your gender is based on your biology.
The first chapter of Genesis make this clear. When God created humans, “male and female he created them”. In the next two chapters, the Genesis assumes that it’s this physical difference between male and female—their sexual organs and reproductive functions—that also translates
into gender (man and woman). (The Bible doesn’t say anything about intersex babies. Babies born with sex characteristics that do not fit the definition of male or female. It’s estimated that around 1.7 percent people globally are born with intersex traits.)
Gender, in reality, is a cultural rather than a biological category. In most patriarchal societies, the process of becoming a man or a woman is decided by the society, values and customs into which a baby is born. Culture also defines specific roles and responsibilities for both men and women. Women in general were regarded as inferior to men in most patriarchal societies. This hierarchy was so rigid in the West that when the British came to India, they were shocked by India’s gender and sexual fluidity.
Unlike Christianity, Hinduism has multiple religious texts. As a result, beliefs among people living in the subcontinent, especially on gender and sex, varied drastically, despite the rigid caste hierarchy.
Social life in ancient India was guided by a tradition of ‘sutras’ or literary guides. These sutras told people how to live a good life. One among them was the Kamasutra, a third century erotic manual, which became famous the world over for its sex positions ever since Richard Burton, a political agent of the East India Company, published it in English in 1883.
The truth is sex positions comprise only 20 percent of Kamasutra. Much of the book is a dispassionate assessment and acceptance of gender and sexual diversity that prevailed in ancient India.
Like Kinsey classifying gall wasps, Kamasutra describes different types of women based on their size and sexual behaviour; Padmini (lotus women), Chitrini (art woman) and Shankhini (conch woman). The text is most radical when it comes to its acceptance of people of the third nature (tritiya-prakriti), that is those who do not conform to binary gender norms like hijras, intersex people, homosexuals, bisexuals and transpersons.
In social life, this acceptance can be seen in the erotic sculptures of ancient Hindu temples, hundreds of which survive all over the country even to this day.
All of this came to a screeching halt with the arrival of the British. For a bunch of people trained to look at gender only in binary terms, the acceptance of third nature was nothing but revolting. So, they passed a slew of laws criminalizing hijras in 1871. They also passed Hindu and Muslim personal laws telling people what they could or could not do, sexually. This new social order was entrenched through a system of education that made Indians hate their own culture and traditions. It’s no secret that much of these so called ‘social reforms’ were introduced with the support of several nationalist leaders who found a common ground with their British masters.
In recent years, the judiciary has been at the forefront of setting right some of these colonial wrongs. From decriminalizing homosexuality and adultery to exploring the legal possibilities of same-sex marriage and to making sex work a ‘profession’, the Supreme Court has been at the forefront of capturing this cultural zeitgeist.
On a social level, the change is amplified by technology. People can now create virtual avatars of any gender in a digital environment. As we stand on the threshold of a new AI (artificial intelligence) revolution, we are going to live in a world reshaped by algorithms. Algorithms are the step-by-step technological process through which a decision/product is made. They can reflect the values, beliefs and biases their creators. For instance, a transphobic or misogynistic coder in Bengaluru can encode his own biases into a computer programme, thereby impacting the lives of millions. Hence making algorithms bias free and ethical is key.
Past forward
Artificial Intelligence is set to make human abilities, irrespective of gender—such as emotional intelligence, empathy, curiosity, open-mindedness—that cannot be replicated by technology, more valuable in the future job market. This means people, including engineers and coders, must be trained in ethics and relationship skills, preferably at the school level itself, to get rid of their prejudices and sexism. Our precolonial past with its spirit of inclusiveness and gender sensitivity can show us the way in the world of AI.
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