ABSTRACT
Much has been written about transsexual myths in Hinduism,1 but I wish to concentrate here on transsexual myths that shed light upon the nature of human sexual identity and its revelation in situations which attempt to conceal it. At first glance, Hindu mythology does not seem to regard sex or gender as intrinsic parts of human identity, since these stories were composed within a world in which you probably were recently, and will soon be again, another sex or gender. In some texts, a male is entirely transformed into a female, with a female mentality and memory (aspects of gender rather than of sex), the situation that we might expect from the fluidity of gender. Yet many texts seem to reflect the very opposite view: the male merely assumes the outer form of the female, retaining his male essence, his male memory and mentality, reflecting a view of gender as astonishingly durable. Even the Vedantic theory of illusion, which disparages the body in favour of the soul, implies that you may very well remain a male in some essential way even when you happen to take on a female body. Vedantic philosophy produced many male dream doubles, of whom the most famous is Narada, who became a woman and lived a full life but eventually returned to his life as a man. 2 These two contrasting views may be correlated with two contrasting attitudes to women and to homosexual love: the texts that view gender as fluid generally depict the transformed male as happy in her female form, while those in which the gendered memory lags stubbornly behind depict him as miserable in her female form.
