Truth of sex
While trans-sexuality in Iran is made legitimate,
homosexuality is insistently reiterated as abnormal
January 12, 2005
iranian.com
The recent BBC Newsnight program [Frances
Harrison,
"Iran's
sex-change operation," January 5, 2005,]
follows a number of similar reports that have hit the international
media over the past few months. Earlier reports include: Nazila
Fathi, "As Repression Eases, More Iranians Change their Sex," The
New York Times, August 2, 2004, p. 3; Aresu Eqbali, "Iran's
Transsexuals Get Islamic Approval, But!" Middle East
Online,
September 30, 2004;
and Angus McDowall and Stephen Khan, "The ayatollah and the
transsexual," The Independent, November 25, 2004.
What all
these reports have in common is a certain celebratory tone about
recognition of trans-sexuality and permissibility of sex-change
operations, sometimes mixed with an element of surprise [How could
this be happening in an Islamic country/state?]. And why not? Why
should any of us not be happy about such possibilities for persons
who desire sex-change?
But I have been one of those uneasy people,
even though it isn't nice to introduce a discordant note
into a celebratory circuit. Like Aresu Eqbali, every time I read
one more of these reports I want to say BUT, BUT, BUT, because
there are some scary things going on that have gone almost un-noticed.
Not that I don't share the view that if that's what
some people want, all power to them. But empowering as these practices
and discourses have been for transsexuals, it is deeply troubling
because of the explicit framing of trans-sexuality within a particular
mapping of sexuality that simultaneously renders homosexuality
and more generally any sexual and gender non-conformity as deviant
and criminal.
This is a discourse that only recently has become
dominant in Iran. Its contemporary production makes same-sex desire
unreadable except for people stuck in the "wrong bodies";
it makes homosexuality as such illegible and illegitimate not only
as a publicly recognized possibility, but also for one's
own self-perception and self-constitution of sexual subjectivity.
In their self-narrativizations in interviews published in Iran,
for instance, the "bi-sexed" [dawjinsi-ha] refer to
their sense of their bodies in pathological terms, such as bimar.
[See, for instance, Taq-i bustan, 101 (31 August 2004): 1 and 5.]
The New York Times article reports on the case of
a Muslim cleric who paid for the operation of his male secretary
to become female
and then married her. Well, in earlier times the cleric could have
lived with his secretary as his milhaf! One wonders to what extent
the dominant discourse on dawjinsi-ha as stricken with
some sort of illness closes off the acceptability of their desires
as same-sex
desire in their own perception.
This discourse of gender and sexual abnormality
and disease has begun to gain frightening national prominence.
While the nineteenth-century
cultural transformations in Iran re-coded adult male desire for
an amrad as unnatural, this recoding was not largely driven by
the logic of production of "governmentable citizens." For
instance, particular sexualities were not criminalized. In fact,
a category of crimes in national law specifically named sexual,
jara'm-i jinsi (as distinct from sinful acts punishable by
religious sanctions -- hudud and ta'zir) was so named
at a much later date.
Nor was the Qajar medical discourse on matters sexual
focused on categorizing desire or acts as natural or unnatural.
The medieval
Islamic medical discourse on sexual practices and diseases were
selectively dropped and partially replaced by adaptations of European
modern medical treatises. Significantly, a psycho-medical discourse
of male same-sex desire as illness (through the figure of ma'bun,
and in particular in Ibn Sina's discourse on 'ubna as
illness of will) was available, and the modernist projection of
same-sex
desire as a derivative un-natural desire, forced upon the natural
as a consequence of unfortunate social arrangement of sex segregation,
could have produced a tendency to "type" men (and women)
who "still" engaged in same-sex practices as a-normal,
if not abnormal, stricken with some sort of "illness."
Yet
the "modernist optimism" [that with heterosocialization
same-sex practices would disappear] had initially worked against
mapping of same-sex desire and practices onto minoritization of
human types. However, the "failure" of producing homogeneously
heterosexual modern men and women -- despite decades of gender
heterosocialization and propagation of the notion of complementarity
of the two now-transcribed as "opposite sexes", and
of companionate marriage -- provided the socio-cultural space
in which gradually two distinct discourses have come to combine
and produce a religio-psycho-medicalized discourse on "unnatural
and deviant" [ghayr-i tabi'i and inhirafi] sexualities.
In
the 1940s, a discourse of naturalized heterosexuality had already
begun to become more dominant through manuals on marriage, and
popular psychology books on modern marital relations and on parenting
practices. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, translation of behavioral
psychology books on "gender disorder" and medical texts
of hormonal and genetic "sex and gender determination" began
to dominate medical discourse. This now-medicalized-psychologized
discourse produced "scientific definitions" of sex
and gender (both coming in two!) that firmly coded any bodies outside
what could be clearly defined as male or female as sexual mal-function
and any person whose behavior did not correspond to gender role
definitions as suffering from the "disease of gender identity
disorder."
Moreover, in this discourse, which now seems to
have gained national dominance in Iran, one's gender is rooted
in one's biological (hormonal and chromosomal) make-up which
may have not adjusted well with socializing norms, thus producing
abnormality and gender disorder. [See, for instance, Bihnam Awhadi,
Tamayulat va raftarha-yi jinsi-i tabi'i va ghayr-i tabi'i-i
insan (Tehran: Atrupat, 2000).]
 This discourse has powerfully
informed recent parental guidance books on bringing up gender-appropriate
kids, advising them on early signs of "gender disorder." It
has also informed some literary productions about trans-genders
and trans-sexuals, often written as texts of warning against these
transgressions. [See, for example, Farkhundeh Aqa'i, Jinsiyat-i
gumshudah (Tehran: Nashr-i Alburz, 2000). For a critique of
this story and more generally of the discourses informing this
literature,
see Sima, "Naqdi bar kitab-i Jinsiyat-i gumshudah," Homan
18 (2001): 34-36.]
By the late 1960s, the medical profession began
to perform sex-surgery as a cure for both "gender and sexual troubles" -- a
move that was welcomed and embraced by a number of people who opted
to take that course. The clerical authorities who had been consulted
by some clients or doctors have sanctioned such operations through
invocation of classical Islamic discourse on hermaphrodites, which
considered every human body as innately male or female, yet accepted
the possibility that in the case of hermaphrodites it was difficult
and at times impossible to know their "true sex."
Jurisprudents
then elaborated rules of behavior to deal with the possible threat
of gender transgressions that such impossibility of knowing would
produce. [For a recent fatwa on sexual surgery, see Taq-i bustan,
104 (19 September 2004): 7.] In its modern re-configuration, it
is argued that new medical sciences have helped the unraveling
of the puzzle of the true sex of difficult hermaphrodites and medical
technology can and may correct "coming out" of that
truth.
It is this confluence of the Islamic discourse on
the "true
sex" with the psycho-medicalized notion of "truth of
sex" that has given a powerful impetus to acceptability of
trans-sexuality and sex-change bio-surgical interventions. Such
interventions are seen to not only bring out the true sex of the "bi-sexed" persons,
but also they would transform same-sex desire into opposite sex
desire. While trans-sexuality is thus made legible and legitimate,
at the same time homosexuality is insistently reiterated as abnormal.
 Most ominously, in several accounts, "gender disorder," homosexuality,
and child sexual abuse by male perpetrators (especially upon male
children) have all been mapped as part of the same bio-socio-cultural
phenomenon. [See Sina Qanbarpur, "Janian-i buzurg-i imruz
qurbanian-i kuchak-i diruzand!" Zanan 114 (November
2004): 2-7.] Even more perniciously, the link opens up the terrifying
possibility of punitive measures, such as legal imposition of sex-change
as "cure" or as alternative punishment (to execution)
of homosexuals.
About
Afsaneh Najmabadi is Professor of History and of Studies of
Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University (homepage). Her
most recent book is Women
with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxiety
of Iranian Modernity.
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