Fadh, Sharaf and Respectable Passing as New Frameworks for Understanding Transmasculinity in the MENA Region: Case Studies of Transmasculine Refugees in Lebanon

Abstract

Centring transmasculine refugees in Lebanon as a case study, this article examines the role of the state and the patriarchal family in regulating the lives of transmasculine subjects. It does so by introducing and elaborating on the concept of fadh, defined as the practices of scandal and shameful outing, a move that provides new ways of understanding transmasculinity through analysing the imposition of womanhood onto transmasculine subjects living under fadh, in tandem with an attention to class, as well as citizenship status, instead of a narrow focus on sex/gender. The article offers the concept of ‘respectable passing’ as a way to account for how transmasculine refugees ‘pass’ by investing in markers of class, citizenship, and age over those of gender and offers fadh as a potential framework for understanding anti-trans violence and trans passing. The framework of fadh is an attempt to afford more complexity to transmasculinity as a simultaneously classed, raced, and gendered formation, avoiding the limited and often deceitful framing as complicit with hegemonic masculinity (or lack thereof), a narrative common in existing scholarship on transmasculinity and in recent debates in feminist/LGBT circles globally.