Person:

Najmabadi, Afsaneh

What can a study of transsexuality in Iran contribute to its broader global understanding? Commonly we associate some disaffiliation, if not actual animosity between science and religion, often placed in relation to larger concepts we have named modernity and tradition, to use very simplified terms. But the developments in Iran, over the past three decades, as far as concepts and practices related to transsexuality are concerned, reveals the coming together of domains and practices of science and religion that has generated possibilities for living alternatively-gendered and sexual lives. What can we make of this?

This essay offers an account of the contemporary diagnostic and treatment procedures of transexuality in Iran, situating the official process in a discursive nexus that is engaged in establishing and securing a distinction between the acceptable “true” transexual and other categories that might be confused with it, most notably the wholly unacceptable category of the “true” homosexual. In this process, the category of transexual is made legible as an acceptable form of existence by the condensed working of the legal, the Islamic jurisprudential [fiqhi], the bio-medico-psycho-sexological, and the various contingents of the forces of coercion – which we often call “the state.” This nexus is as well constituted and authorized by transgender/sexuals’ practices of everyday life, self-definitions, and self-productions.