In the name of Allah, the most Compassionate, the most Merciful!
Express it (your gender)!
I missed one crucial boundary in my last article on Drag Sunday in the Cathedral of Hope, Dallas. An important boundary in Islam is there can't be any cross-dressing. For scriptural references about this rule, read here. Everyone has to dress according to their gender/biological sex - whatever you may call it. Men dress like men and women dress like women. But don't they say that gender and hence clothing is just a social construct? Not entirely in Islam. The first and foremost criterion that would drive how a particular gender dresses is the Awrah. Awrah - the intimate parts that have to be hidden - are different for a man and a woman. For a man, it is navel to knees; for a woman, it is head to toe minus the hands, feet, and face.
But Don't Flaunt It:
Well, a Muslim is being commanded to dress in a way that is according to their Awrah but then again the same Awrah prohibits a Muslim from going any further in how they are expressing THAT gender. Women in the Quran have been told to not speak in ultrafeminine voices [Quran 33:32], to hide their beauty from unrelated males/non-mehrems [Quran 24:31], to cover their chests, to not wear sound-producing anklets, to keep their gaze down, etc. Men have been told to keep their gazes down and protect their private parts [Quran 24:30]. For either of the genders to dress in a way where it would become impossible for the opposite gender to keep their gaze down would be a sin for both - the one that tried to tempt and the one that got tempted. Yeppers - that would be a lightbulb moment for the secular feminists who believe it is only up to the men to control themselves when the women dress seductively. Reiterating, in any scenario:
where someone who defies the dress code AND the one who looks both committed a sin.
In the secular world, some of the so-called cis-gendered have gone too far in exploiting the limits of how they show off their bodies. The transgendered do the same - they mutate their bodies to copy that extremely overblown, over-the-top sexual, ill-perceived look of how a particular gender should dress like.
And yet again, Islam has it right. It is a religion of codes and principles to guide mankind to the One Straight Path - Sirat ul Mustaqeem.
SubhanAllah!
Photo borrowed of Muslim couple from ViluPhotos at Unsplash.
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