ABSTRACT
This chapter presents and discusses a number of salient examples of transsexualism drawn from the religious and mythological texts of ancient and medieval India, the cultic practices at various shrines in north and south India, and the lives and teachings of several important modern Indian religious figures and members of organized religious communities. Expressions of a profoundly antipathetic attitude towards women, their strength, their intelligence, their fidelity, their chastity, their capacities for independence and spiritual liberation, and their very anatomy are commonplace in many of the most influential documents of the major indigenous Indian traditions, Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, from the time of the very earliest texts of which we have knowledge. The chapter cites the kinds of myths, legends, and fantasies, and the social, psychological, and political realities of which they are expressions are by no means restricted to South Asia.
