Khanith

Where the word khanith comes from

The word is built on the Arabic root khaʾ-nun-thaʾ, and it does not stand alone on it. The Emirati scholar Saqer Almarri sets khanith beside two other words from that root and argues that the three have to be read together, because what they share is a conflicted relationship with the society around them.

Mukhannath, meaning effeminate, is the oldest of the three. It is the term of classical Arabic and Islamic literature for men who appeared feminine and functioned socially or sexually in roles usually carried out by women, and Almarri, citing Rowson in 1991, describes the modern khanith as the current development of that earlier identity. Khuntha is the third, and it differs in kind: it is recognised by the body rather than by how a body is inhabited, naming a person understood to have both a vulva and a penis, and it appears mostly in legal treatises where inheritance shares have to be calculated. Almarri cites Sanders in 1991 and his own work of 2016 on that point.

The stigma is carried by the root itself. Almarri describes a librarian at the Jumʿa Al Majid Center for Culture and Heritage in Dubai hesitating half-way through the word khuntha while reading a manuscript title aloud, and avoiding it entirely at the second attempt. Most of the words from this root are used pejoratively, and the librarian's hesitation over one of them was a reading of what the whole family of words carries.

How a khanith dresses

The dress is a blend and it is legible as one. Men wear a plain white ankle-length tunic; women wear brightly coloured, patterned clothes. A khanith wears the ankle-length tunic associated with men but cinches it tightly at the waist in the way women do, and wears colour without pattern. Hair follows the same construction: men keep it short and comb it straight back, women wear it long and part it diagonally from the centre, and a khanith keeps it at medium length, combed forward from a side parting and oiled in the way women oil theirs.

Almarri's account of a wedding in a Dubai suburb, remembered from the age of four or five, describes what that looked like in one instance: a member of the music troupe in a tight-fitting white kandorah with the ghutrah headdress knotted into the black ʿugal cord, and a carefully made-up face, pale foundation, pink blush, and kuhl around the eyes.

What a khanith may and may not do

A khanith is assigned male at birth, keeps male genitalia, carries a masculine name and takes masculine grammatical agreement, and Islamic jurisprudence therefore grants the same rights as a man. Social classification runs the other way through much of daily life, and the two do not resolve into each other. In Oman, where men and women are strictly segregated and women are secluded under purdah, that split has practical force in both directions.

Two prohibitions follow from being socially not a man: a khanith may not sit down in public, and may not play the instruments associated with men. One privilege follows from being socially not a woman either. Khanith serve as matchmakers between men and women, and on a wedding night only a khanith, never any other man, is permitted to see the bride's face.

How a khanith becomes a man

In the Omani framing the working distinction between men and women is a sexual role. Men are understood as the active, penetrative partner; women, and khanith with them, as the receptive one, and it is failing to occupy the active role, and nothing about dress or manner, that places a khanith outside the category of men.

That definition also supplies an exit. Masculinity is validated by marriage and by public proof of sexual performance, conventionally the display of a blood-stained handkerchief on the morning after the wedding. A khanith who marries, consummates the marriage, and produces that proof is reclassified as a man. Status here turns on a performance, and because it turns on a performance it can be acquired later.

Why the early scholarship on khanith is criticised

Much of the early scholarly work is Unni Wikan's Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman, among the first books to identify khanith, spelled xanith there, as a third-gendered position within Omani society and not as a deviation from two. The criticism made of it since is methodological: transsexualism and homosexuality were the frames used to place the category, and both impose a binary on gender and on sexual preference that is predominantly Western. Applied to a social construction that is not organised as a binary, those frames distort the thing they are describing, and the criticism made of them is that they are epistemologically damaging to the study of khanith as a whole.

Almarri's answer is to work from Arabic. He pairs autoethnography with a critical edition and annotated translation of a Shafiʿi legal work by ʿAbd al-Rahim al-Isnawi on the rules of the uncertain khuntha, and writes the analysis in dialogue with the representations others have made of his community. The point of the triad is that the terms come apart differently in Arabic than in English: Intersex status, effeminacy, and a lived social position are three distinct things on one root, and English collapses them at different seams.

How khanith is used by the people it names

The word is stigmatised in mainstream use and used affirmatively inside the community, and both are the case at once. Almarri describes finding an Arabic chatroom named for the plural makhanith, with thirty or forty regular users, most of them from the Gulf Arab states, and learning the community's own Arabic vocabulary there. In English he used the Western terms his English-speaking interlocutors expected; in Arabic he used khanith of himself, because it signalled to other Arabic speakers who he was. At private gatherings the pronouns divided by language as well: Arabic speakers used feminine pronouns of one another, English speakers among the same people rarely did.

English dictionaries flatten that. Wiktionary defines a khanith as a person in Oman assigned male at birth with a feminine gender identity or expression, such as a trans woman or an effeminate gay man, which folds a social position into two English identity labels and drops the root the word belongs to. The distance from Hijra and Khawaja sira is smaller, since those are also social positions with their own histories, but neither is the same category and none of the three is a translation of another.

Nobody has counted khanith. No census, survey, or estimate of their number appears in any source behind this entry, and no source dates the first recorded use of the word either.