Transgressing Gender Boundaries: Motherhood and Transgendered Buddhist Nuns in Northern Thailand.

This paper seeks to understand the practice of celibacy and femininity of transgendered (m-to-f) nuns in Northern Thailand. It will also examine their monastic role as a mother, nurturing not only sasana, but also disciples, devotees, as well as lay community. Buddhist renunciation provides limited space for non-male gendered persons. Those who are male transgendered to female (m-to-f), if they are interested to renounce the world, they must conform to the conventional binaries of either male or female monastic rules. Often these rules are not compatible with their trans-embodied identities. Such transgendered Buddhist renouncers are perceived negatively and face different forms of social refusal, including violence. Consequently, those trans-renouncers must find and establish an alternative context of practice and monastic rules (Vinaya) which are suitable to their gendered identity. Therefore, this paper, as an ethnographic study, highlights the lived dilemma of the individual renunciant and the monastic rules pertaining among a particular group of transgendered nuns in Northern Thailand. It argues that motherhood, although is seen as incompatible with renunciation, is a key element in an alternative third-way monasticism and in the construction of a meaningful alternative monastic renunciant lifestyle.