“Today we are seeing an obsession with unwarranted sex change, which not only goes against basic human nature but is unanimously rejected by all revealed religions.” Ahmed Al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar – Egypt’s highest religious authority – made this statement on his Facebook page just two days after the Transgender Day of Remembrance 2021. To understand his position, one must examine how Sunni Islam views what’s known as gender affirming surgery, or sex reassignment surgery.
In many countries, sex reassignment surgery refers to operations that some (but not all) transgender people undergo so that their body aligns with their gender identity. However, the term is used differently in several Sunni Muslim-majority countries including Morocco, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan and Oman.
Modern Sunni Islamic scholarship started examining the issue of transgenderism in the 1980s, when several fatwas (religious rulings) were issued, most notably from Al-Azhar in 1988 and the Islamic Fiqh Council of the Muslim World League in 1989. Both fatwas used problematic concepts that pathologise transgenderism to address the issue.
