What are the gender role issues in Buddhism?

Answer 1

The core message of Buddhism is that labels and roles are arbitrary, things we make up, tools we use to handle the world, without intrinsic value, so in that sense there are no gender role issues in Buddhism. However, like every social institution out there, Buddhism is affected by the cultures it passes through and the times and people.

To my knowledge there is nothing in the cannon singling out sex roles as needing narrow defintions. There's a huge lot of prohibitions for monks -- who were supposed to be celebate -- but that was prohibitions against pretty much everything to do with sex (not gender). So in its incarnation, gender bending would not have been an issue.

The culture in India when Buddhism began had strict roles largely based on the Vedic beliefs in the way the world worked, so when the Buddha was asked to add nuns to his roster of monastic followers and did so, it may have caused a bit of upheaval -- at the time the Jains had female adherents wandering around so it was not unheard of, but would not have been thought of as mainstream. Still, he did set the monastic community up with both monks and nuns, which says something about his attitude.

The problem is that the canonical texts have had a multitude of rounds of telephone played with two tin cans and a string between what the Buddha actually did and said and what we've got written down, but the evidence seems to point to some additions coming into the sutras at a later time in which some damning and limiting things get said about women. There are actually a lot of wonderful things said about women as well, but as you may guess, over time and cultural changes -- particularly during periods when India was beginning to shift its view of women -- the role of women in monastic life became pretty limited, based on (probably later) additions to the sutras.

In old school traditions of Buddhism the role of women/nuns is therefore still severely limited; in modern times, many of those nuns are working to change those limits. In Buddhism as it is evolving in its new homes in the Americas and Europe, women and nuns are given at least as equal treatment as they are elsewhere in the societies in which they were raised.