Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran

by Afsaneh Najmabadi

Overview

Since the mid-1980s, the Islamic Republic of Iran has permitted, and partially subsidized, sex reassignment surgery. In Professing Selves, Afsaneh Najmabadi explores the meaning of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. Combining historical and ethnographic research, she describes how, in the postrevolutionary era, the domains of law, psychology and psychiatry, Islamic jurisprudence, and biomedicine became invested in distinguishing between the acceptable "true" transsexual and other categories of identification, notably the "true" homosexual, an unacceptable category of existence in Iran. Najmabadi argues that this collaboration among medical authorities, specialized clerics, and state officials-which made transsexuality a legally tolerated, if not exactly celebrated, category of being-grew out of Iran's particular experience of Islamicized modernity. Paradoxically, state regulation has produced new spaces for non-normative living in Iran, since determining who is genuinely "trans" depends largely on the stories that people choose to tell, on the selves that they profess.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822355571
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	12/16/2013
Series:	Experimental Futures Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	434
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Afsaneh Najmabadi is the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity and The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History. She is a coeditor (with Kathryn Babayan) of Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire.

Read an Excerpt

PROFESSING SELVES

TRANSSEXUALITY AND SAME-SEX DESIRE IN CONTEMPORARY IRAN

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By Afsaneh Najmabadi

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5557-1

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CHAPTER 1

ENTERING THE SCENE

Shortly after ten o'clock on a Wednesday morning in the autumn of 2006, Ms. Mohseni-nia, a friendly and, as I learned later, highly professional and cherished social worker, led me into a generic room with almost bare walls painted a tired greenish blue. A large, seminar-sized, rectangular table sat in the middle of the room, with several men and women seated around it. I recognized Dr. Mehrzad Seraji at the far end. She signaled me to go and sit next to her, a welcome (to my nervous state) recognition that my presence was approved. 1 From her commanding location at the table, I realized that Dr. Seraji was the head of the commission whose work she had invited me to observe. A very sympathetic and competent psychiatrist, Dr. Seraji evidently enjoyed the respect of the other professionals present.

I had met Dr. Seraji a few weeks earlier to learn more about what is colloquially referred to as "filtering"—a four-to six-month period of psychotherapy that is undertaken along with hormonal and chromosomal tests, the stated goal of which is to determine whether an applicant is "really transsexual," "really homosexual," "intersex," or perhaps suffers from a series of other classified psychological disorders. The filtering process has become possible through the condensed workings of legal, Islamic jurisprudential (fiqhi), and biomedical/ psycho-sexological discourses and through the work of various structures, the combined topography of which we often call "the state." This complex authorizing nexus has made the category of transsexual intelligible and acceptable; at the same time, the process of distinguishing between "trans-" and "homo-" in part depends on trans persons' own actions and narratives, and thus on their self-definitions and self-productions. This does not end the complexity of the story, however. The various institutions and discourses are not systematically coherent and predictable, nor are they necessarily coherently tied to each other. The discursive and institutional incoherence is often put to making livable lives possible.

Before leading me into the room, Ms. Mohseni-nia, in a whisper, asked a young person in feminine attire for his/her permission for me to be in the session. At the time, I wondered how his/her total dependence on the vote of this meeting would make it possible for him/her to say no, even though Mohseni-nia gave him/her explicit assurance that s/he did not have to accept. The very request for permission, however—compared with the way clients in a surgery practice were treated, where I had been led into the surgeon's room for an interview while a client was still dressing—was a surprising relief to me.

However brief, these moments of a trans person's very different treatment in the Tehran Psychiatric Institute (TPI) and the surgeon's office suggest the complex and ambivalent status of this category in Iran. On the one hand, trans-sexuality has been taken up as a legitimate category of being, as evidenced by the commission's very existence. On the other, the criteria for establishing belonging in that category, and its very legitimacy as a distinct category, is a matter of considerable debate, concern, and ambivalence in multiple domains. This becomes apparent when we consider in more detail the certification process, including the commission's purpose and practices as well as its ties to other institutions and their discourses.

To approach the certification process through the commission and associated institutions and discourses is to highlight the workings of power in processes of subjection and subject formation from a dominant point of view, however critical that approach may be. Trans persons' accounts of the certification process offer a different view—one of differently staged performances of the same process. Their stories will be presented in later chapters of this book. For now, however, I will offer one example of this alternative staging. Throughout the months of supervised therapy, presumably a diagnostic process, trans persons prepare each other, especially for the final Tpi Commission interview. These preparations benefit from the culture of preparing for the nationwide annual university examination—the kunkur—for which many high school graduates spend a year preparing. Participants in the certification process use the questions asked of one candidate to prepare another, generating a common pool of potential questions and the expected answers. This body of knowledge, produced by trans persons, is regularly used to strengthen one's case. As one female-to-male trans person (FtM) said to the commission in a meeting I attended, "When I was coming for my interview, other TSS kept giving me advice on what to say and what not, how to behave, and so on. But I am not here to fool anyone."

Preparation sessions also provide occasions for laughing at the authorities and the absurdity of their perceptions about trans persons. When Mahnaz, a young woman who was thinking about sex change, walked into a well-known sex-change clinic for an initial conversation, she was interviewed by a psychiatry intern and an assistant to the surgeon. They first berated her, she recounted, for wearing a headscarf in observation of the hijab code. "What kind of man can you be looking like this?" Mahnaz did not believe in the code and had no trouble taking off the scarf, but that was just the beginning of their "diagnostic tests." Next, they wanted to see her wristwatch to see if it was a man's or a woman's watch; they checked her legs to see if they were shaved. At this point in the conversation, another trans person asked: "Did they ask you the toothpaste tube question: Do you squeeze it in the middle or from the bottom up?" This was a familiar enough question; everyone roared with laughter.

The Certification Process

At the completion of the required supervised therapy, the commission reviews the case file of a sex-change applicant. It is composed of a lead psychiatrist (in the meetings I attended, this was either Dr. Seraji or Dr. Eftekhar), a second psychiatrist (Dr. Salehi), and a supervising case psychologist (Mr. Farzadi, who at the time had an ma and was pursuing his doctorate in clinical psychology). Every commission decision must be signed by all three members. In addition to Ms. Mohseni-nia, the indispensable social worker who made the initial case report in the meetings I attended, several other young men and women—medical graduates who had chosen to do their specialization internship in psychiatry—were always present. They were rarely asked to participate in the proceedings.

Following Ms. Mohseni-nia's case report, various members of the commission would ask questions for further clarification. Farzadi was usually the one who answered these questions because he had either directly supervised or reviewed each case during the 2006–7 period of my fieldwork. Then, the applicant was called in for one last round of questions. Upon the departure of the applicant, the commission had a summary discussion and decided whether to approve the case and send it to the Legal Medicine Organization of Iran (LMOI), to require further tests and therapy, or to turn it down.

The commission's option of referring an applicant for further evaluation points to the explicitly recognized difficulty of establishing the necessary distinction between the "really trans" and other categories. But I never saw the commission exercise the option of turning down an application altogether. Indeed, there seemed to be a general attitude in the TPI, and among its affiliated therapists, that whether applicants were TS or otherwise sex/gender-variant, it was their job to find a socially acceptable "solution for the problem." If after the first few sessions the therapist concluded that the person was "really homosexual," the applicant was sent to a psychologist who worked with homosexuals. As a state-affiliated institution, the TPI itself did not provide such services, but several psychologists did work with "real homosexuals" in private practice. One therapist held separate group and family therapy sessions for each group. For "gays and lesbians," she said when I interviewed her, "my goal is to persuade both the person and his/her family to come to terms with it, to accept it." This was by no means a dominant approach among the larger Iranian psychiatric and psychological community, for whom the category of trans remains relatively more acceptable at this time.

For many years, including during the initial period of my fieldwork, the scene of who had the last word (before the final hearing and decision of the LMOI) had been haphazard and sometimes treacherous. A trans applicant was referred to a psychologist for the required period of supervised therapy. For those who could not afford the more pricey, private, and usually more friendly psychologists, this was a person selected from a number of psychologists affiliated with several public hospitals that were affiliated with the Iran University of Medical Sciences (IUMS), such as Rouzbeh and Imam Husayn hospitals. Many of these professionals were known to be hostile to trans persons and opposed the very idea of legal certification. They saw their goal not as "diagnosis" but as "dissuasion" (insiraf). Trans activists campaigned tirelessly to put an end to this scene. By summer 2007, all applicants were sent to the TPI, known for its trans-friendly professionals, where they either saw one of two main therapists affiliated with this project (Farzadi and Pahlavani, at the time of my work), or were sent for therapy at private clinics if the TPI could not accommodate new clients.

This was only one of many significant procedural details that changed during the course of my fieldwork, making a description of trans as merely a state-approved category deceptively simplified. Indeed, during this period, the TPI itself, first established in 1977, went through many transitions. In the summer of 2006, its graduate teaching and research facilities, including the main library and the offices of its quarterly publication Andishah va raftar (Thought and behavior), were located in a clinical-research complex attached to the university-affiliated Hazrat Rasul Akram Hospital in the newer western developments of Tehran's exploding metropolis, off Sattar Khan Boulevard. At this time, the commission's monthly meetings were held in an old, dilapidated building located at the eastern end of Taleghani Avenue, which also housed the Treatment Unit of the TPI, with Nonmedical Therapy on the third floor. By the summer of 2007, they all had moved to the new complex, consolidating the commission's position within Iran's contemporary medical education, which has undergone massive growth and modernization over the past four decades.

The name of the Tpi journal also has changed. Andishah va raftar began publication in the summer of 1994; in the fall of 2006 its title was changed to the Journal of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology. Dr. Mehrdad Eftekhar explained that the name change was in recognition of unfamiliarity (in translation) of the old title to their international colleagues. Concerns about the compatibility of scientific practices and procedures in Iran with internationally recognized ones have increased since the mid-1990s as the end of the war-decade isolation made it possible for more Iranian scientists to participate in their respective international communities. For many Iranian medical professionals, the connection with, and the weight of, international scientific communities are critical for their positioning in relation to their more Islamist-oriented colleagues at home. The latter are more inclined to foster the state-supported movement for the compliance of scientific practices and paradigms with Islamic precepts.

These changes at the TPI and beyond, influenced as they have been by trans activism, national and international policies, and the tumultuous shaping of the Islamic Republic of Iran, signal the instability of any historical and ethnographic account. What I offer here, therefore, does not aim for coherence. I follow some threads that do not necessarily lead to a clear outcome or may have an importance in the future that they do not have today, while attempting to describe the formation of the category trans and what it may mean to live a trans life in Iran in the early twenty-first century.

Around and Beyond the Commission

The requirement that applicants undergo "therapy"—perhaps more accurately called "an evaluation"—before being "diagnosed," and the TPI commission's location in a state-linked psychiatric institution, situate the process of certification in a psychological or psychiatric discourse of mental health and pathology that works together with a more explicitly legal one. When the commission decides to recommend an applicant for certification as transsexual to the LMOI, the Psychiatric Ward of the LMOI takes charge of the process. Ordinarily, the main duty of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists who work under the auspices of this Ward is to respond to requests from judicial authorities, such as the prosecutors and the courts, related to case files under judicial consideration. For transsexuals, it defines its task as "confirmation of affliction with gender identity disorders and issuance of permit for sex-change in case of those individuals who cannot tolerate their biologic identity as a result of this affliction."

This much-sought-after certification is the legal document that opens numerous doors. Not only does the certificate authorize the permissibility of hormonal treatment and sex reassignment surgery (SRS), but it also entitles the recipient to basic health insurance (provided by the state), financial assistance (for partial cost of surgeries and for housing aid), and exemption from military service. The LMOI also instructs a special court to approve the name change of the certified person (after SRS), which entitles the person to receive new national identification papers.

BEFORE SITTING DOWN next to Dr. Seraji, I look around the room. On one wall there are the jointly framed portraits of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei—a very familiar sight in all state buildings and many private businesses. On an adjacent wall is another portrait—one of Freud.

As jarring as the close proximity of these three patriarchs may be at first sight, it is precisely the coming together of politico-religious authority with the scientific authority of psychology/psychiatry—the coming together of biomedical and psycho-sexological discourses with Islamic jurisprudential (fiqhi) rulings after 1979—that has enabled the sorting of different categories of sex/ gender-variant persons, including the filtering of trans from non-trans.

While each of these discourses has its own genealogical formations, they have been brought together by the bureaucratization and institutionalization of Islam and the Islamicization of professional and civil domains in Iran after 1979. In the process, fiqh has become highly specialized and acquired a disciplinary shape, whereas modern state rationalization has been painted over "with Islamic green." I will return to this topic more fully in chapter 5. A more immediate paternal figure for the current practices of TPI, however, is Dr. Faridun Mehrabi. Unlike many other medical, psychiatric, and legal figures, his name is always mentioned with deep respect among trans and other gender/sex-variant persons. There is also a common acknowledgment among the therapists who work closely with this population about his pioneering courage. Among other achievements, he is credited with the establishment of the Sex Clinic in the TPI in 2003. In his private practice, Dr. Mehrabi has collaborated and mentored a younger generation of psychologists to work with gender/sexual nonheteronormative persons and their families. Among trans and gay and lesbian communities, these psychologists also are generally considered to be the most friendly (but too pricey for many to afford).

One of the earliest psychologists who began working closely and sympathetically with gender/sexual nonheteronormative young people in Tehran more than thirty years ago, first in the TPI and Mihrigan Hospital and later in his private clinic as well, Dr. Mehrabi talked about "facing a great deal of hostility, even after Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa in 1985. I was teaching in the TPI at the time, we were inundated with TS people coming, and pleading for sex change. I must have given over a hundred talks at the office of the Journal [Andishah va raftar]." In one of the earliest articles that appeared in that journal, Dr. Mehrabi presented a study based on sixty-eight cases treated in his own clinical practice between March 1989 and October 1995. He also supervised one of the earliest master's theses on the subject. Based on a sample of fifteen MtF and sixty "non-afflicted" persons, much of the dissertation is a summary of psycho-sexological literature from English-language sources on gender identity disorder (GID). A questionnaire "in compliance with diagnostic criteria of DSM-IV, MMPI-2, Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory, and Cottle Personality Inventories" and a questionnaire developed by the researcher to get information about early life developments of the subject were used. Questions in the latter are focused on games the subject played, the clothes and playmates s/he preferred, her/his parents' reactions to non-gender/sex-normative childhood interests, her/his emotional relation with each parent, and so on. The dissertation is informed by the writings of Richard Green and John Money (Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment), Paul Kaplan (Adolescence), and a whole host of diagnostic tests developed and approved by American Psychiatric Association. The questionnaire on early life development has since become a prototype for questionnaires that trans applicants must complete when they begin their supervised counseling.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from PROFESSING SELVES by Afsaneh Najmabadi. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1. Entering the Scene 15

2. "Before" Transexuality 38

3. Murderous Passions, Deviant Insanities 75

4. "Around" 1979: Gay Tehran? 120

5. Verdicts of Science, Rulings of Faith 163

6. Changing the Terms: Playing "Snakes and Ladders" with the State 202

7. Living Patterns, Narrative Styles 231

8. Professing Selves: Sexual/Gender Proficiencies 275

Glossary of Persian Terms and Acronyms 303

Notes 305

Works Cited 373

Index 389

Editorial Reviews

" Afsaneh Najmabadi's new book Professing Selves is a great start to understanding how gender and sexuality work within Iran. It makes the point that geography, history, culture, and on-going macro- and microsocial processes are crucial to understanding transsexuality and same-sex desire.... This is a work that speaks to the historical and cultural relativity of social meanings and practices--the importance of the local and specific."--Darryl B. Hill "Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences"

"A fascinating book that... challenges the Western media's depiction of transsexuality and sex reassignment surgery as coercive while ignoring the vibrant reform movement and history of progressive activism in Iran."--Nancy Gallagher "Middle East Media and Book Reviews"

"Here we find that nuanced and adept reading of power, subjectivity, submission, and subversion--this time of lived, contemporary cultural practices--that we have grown to expect from a scholar of her caliber."--Roshanak Kheshti "GLQ"

"In her theoretically sophisticated book, historian Najmabadi investigates the political and cultural evolution of Iranian attitudes toward 'sexual deviancy and sexual disorder, ' beginning in the 1930s. . . .Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."--A. Rassam "Choice"

"Under guise of an ethnography of transsexuality in contemporary Iran, Afsaneh Najmabadi has written a nuanced ethnography of the transition of the Iranian state and public sphere from one type (jins) to another. Building on Joan Scott's (1986) observation that gender is a useful category for historical analysis, Najmabadi goes beyond showing that sex and sexuality are also useful categories for historical analysis to suggest that somatic-constitutional transformation can be as well. ... Najmabadi is an excellent guide through this world of nonconforming confirmers of the core gender categories of the Islamic Republic of Iran." --Leila Hudson "TSQ"

"Professing Selves is one of the best recent works on contemporary Iran. Arguing that transsexuals' legal and psychiatric negotiations reveal more general processes of proceduralism, negotiation of legal categories, and state formation, Afsaneh Najmabadi challenges the lumping of transsexuals and homosexuals as identical human rights issues, and argues that poorly targeted universalistic campaigns can damage the conditions of life for the people they are intended to help. She works refreshingly at the level of real lives, jurists, and psychiatrists."--Michael M. J. Fischer, author of Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry

"In this important, timely, and erudite work, Afsaneh Najmabadi brings her nuanced understanding of multiple discourses and institutions in Iran to bear on the recent and remarkable visibility of transsexuality in that country. Professing Selves is likely to have a wide-ranging appeal--to historians, Middle East specialists, sexuality and gender scholars, and social scientists interested in issues of state formation and biopolitics. It will be the definitive text on its topic for a long time to come."--Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History

From the Publisher

"A fascinating book that... challenges the Western media’s depiction of transsexuality and sex reassignment surgery as coercive while ignoring the vibrant reform movement and history of progressive activism in Iran."

Middle East Media and Book Reviews - Nancy Gallagher

Under guise of an ethnography of transsexuality in contemporary Iran, Afsaneh Najmabadi has written a nuanced ethnography of the transition of the Iranian state and public sphere from one type (jins) to another. Building on Joan Scott’s (1986) observation that gender is a useful category for historical analysis, Najmabadi goes beyond showing that sex and sexuality are also useful categories for historical analysis to suggest that somatic-constitutional transformation can be as well. … Najmabadi is an excellent guide through this world of nonconforming confirmers of the core gender categories of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
 

TSQ - Leila Hudson

"In her theoretically sophisticated book, historian Najmabadi investigates the political and cultural evolution of Iranian attitudes toward 'sexual deviancy and sexual disorder,' beginning in the 1930s. . . .Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."

Choice - A. Rassam

Here we find that nuanced and adept reading of power, subjectivity, submission, and subversion—this time of lived, contemporary cultural practices—that we have grown to expect from a scholar of her caliber.

GLQ - Roshanak Kheshti

Afsaneh Najmabadi’s new book Professing Selves is a great start to understanding how gender and sexuality work within Iran. It makes the point that geography, history, culture, and on-going macro- and microsocial processes are crucial to understanding transsexuality and same-sex desire…. This is a work that speaks to the historical and cultural relativity of social meanings and practices—the importance of the local and specific.

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences - Darryl B. Hill