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Unlikely Sex Change Capitals of the World: Trinidad, United States, and Tehran, Iran, as Twin Yardsticks of Homonormative Liberalism
... In the late 1980s, in Iranas a Shiite-majority Muslim country -SRS was legalized in Shari'a and in state law by the Fatwas of Ayatollah Khomeini. Till 2008, after Thailand, Iran had the largest number of SRS operations in the world [20]. Nevertheless, considering Iran as a pioneer SRS country, there is a research gap about this niche medical tourism market in Iran. ...
... After Thailand, Iran has provided leadership to legitimize gender reassignment surgeries (GRS). In Iran, people after the diagnosis of transgenderism, are legally permitted hormone therapy and GRS [20]. After GRS, all their identity documents are changed in accordance with their new sex. ...
... After GRS, all their identity documents are changed in accordance with their new sex. Bucar and Enke [20] refer to Tehran as a salient center for SRS. GRS records in Iran demonstrate experience and expertize of the surgeons [23,24]. ...
Some studies have focused on identifying the factors affecting the selection of medical tourism destinations with regard to different types of treatment. But less attention has been paid to factors affecting individuals’ travels to Iran for sex reassignment surgeries (SRS). There is a research gap with regard to this niche medical tourism market in Iran. Iran is one of the SRS pioneer countries, where the concept of this medical tourism market can be developed further. This study addresses this knowledge gap through in-depth interviews with key professionals in SRS and medical tourism. We use a content analysis of interviews to identify the factors affecting the selection of Iran as a medical destination for SRS by individuals. The results indicate that factors influencing individuals’ decisions on medical tourism destinations come under seven headings. We conclude by recommending research directions for future research by health, medical, and managing scientists.
... Communication and journalism scholars have found that the mainstream press tends to elevate the voice of non-trans experts (legal, political, scientific, and medical personnel), delegitimizing trans issues (Billard, 2016), silencing and pathologizing trans people (Graber, 2017), and relegating trans voices to soft news stories (Capuzza, 2014(Capuzza, , 2016. Mainstream media privilege certain types of trans narratives (Namaste, 2005), such as storylines about sex reassignment surgery (Baptista and Himmel, 2016;Buscar and Enke, 2011;Mocarski et al., 2013), with an emphasis on passing (Mackie, 2008). In some cases, trans people are sensationalized (Arune, 2006;Riggs and Patterson, 2009) and represented as deceptive (McInroy and Craig, 2015;Phillips, 2006), which further oppresses trans people as victims of discrimination (Barker-Plummer, 2013;Billard, 2016;Schilt and Westbrook, 2009). ...
In this article, we explore how the concepts of listening and voice influence trans communication and how communicators give voice to their identities and lived experiences through the communication work they perform. We examine amplification as a strategy for elevating historically marginalized voices within institutional and mediated spaces. Through interviews with trans communicators, findings reveal gaps that strategies of visibility leave unfilled, drawing attention to symbolic and material resources that are needed for generating effective change. We find that visibility-based strategies, such as amplification, can be instrumental in producing an inequitable distribution of power and exacerbating the burden of representation that complicates transgender communicators’ ability to navigate organizational politics.
... A transformative gender justice framework supports a research process that studies up on the social institutions and structures that transgender youth bump up against in their daily lives, and echoes Meyer's (2010) insistence that advocacy and activism designed to achieve gender justice for children and youth requires the integration of an antiracist/anti-oppression framework that links processes of gendering, racialization, and economic marginalization. Our study draws on this analysis to uncover the ways in which gender operates within racist, classist, colonial and neoliberal nationalist systems (Bucar & Enke, 2011;Lozano-Neira & Marchbank, 2016;Skidmore, 2011;Stryker & Currah, 2017). ...
In 2015 the Gender Vectors research team received a major research grant to conduct research with and about transgender youth in the Greater Vancouver Area. A unique aspect of this research project involved combining social action research with the development of a prototype of a video game as a knowledge translation tool to depict the life experiences of trans youth. We draw on transformative gender justice theory to document and address the diminished life chances of and the need to promote resilience among trans youth in the region and more broadly, across Canada and the United States. This article provides an overview of the research project and concludes by identifying key insights relating to resiliency that resulted from 15 narrative interviews with transgender youth, focus group meetings with the Project’s Youth Advisory Council, and dialog from an intergenerational workshop for transgender youth and adult care/service providers and allies. These themes informed the creation of the prototype.
... Research on news coverage of issues faced exclusively by the transgender and intersex communities have included sex reassignment surgery (Buscar & Enke, 2011;Meyerowitz, 1998;Oberacker, 2007;Siebler, 2012), "passing" (Mackie, 2008;Siebler, 2010;Skidmore, 2011;Squires & Brouwer, 2002;Wilcox, 2003), hate crimes against trans people (Barker-Plummer, 2013;Eckhardt, 2010;Schilt & Westbrook, 2009), stereotypes of trans people (Ryan, 2009), and the strategic use of the media by the intersex and transgender movements (Gray, 2009;O'Riordan, 2005;Preves, 2004). English-language research on global news has investigated Thailand (Sinnott, 2000), Iran (Shakerifar, 2011), Britain (Amy-Chinn, 2011), and Australia (Kerry, 2011). ...
This article documents and assesses sourcing patterns used by U.S. journalists in news stories about gender diversity. These patterns reveal the degree to which transgender sources are underrepresented, stereotyped, or assimilated. While transgender people are not deprived completely of a voice, that voice is limited both quantitatively and qualitatively.
This essay cluster features two essays by students and faculty collaborators describing the ways in which new forms of pedagogical practices are expanding and changing the field of Digital Humanities. Each essay takes a different approach that reveals the importance of pedagogy in bringing social justice to the digital humanities. One pedagogical approach lies in the design and development of a game that shows the experience of transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming youth, and the other emphasizes the significance of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in offering a space to develop and teach a theory of inclusive and activist digital pedagogy. Taken together, these essays demonstrate that transforming DH into a politically engaged, socially just, and inclusive field is an ongoing process of teaching and learning in new and traditional places, forms, communities, organizations, and institutions. Kimberly O’Donnell responds to these papers as a graduate student and Digital Fellow at Simon Fraser University, offering her perspective on the challenges and necessity of creating these transformative pedagogical spaces. Résumé Ce regroupement de dissertations se compose de deux dissertations écrites par des étudiants et membres de faculté collaborateurs qui décrivent les façons dont de nouvelles types de pratiques pédagogiques étendent et changent le domaine des Humanités numériques. Chaque dissertation adopte une approche différente qui démontre l’importance de la pédagogie pour l’intégration de la justice sociale dans les humanités numériques. Pour une approche pédagogique, il s’agit de la conception et du développement d’un jeu qui montre l’expérience de jeunes transgenres, de jeunes non-binaires et de jeunes dont le genre est non conforme, tandis que l’autre approche souligne l’importance du 'Digital Humanities Summer Institute'(Institut d’été des humanités numériques) dans l’offre d’un endroit pour le développement et pour l’enseignement d’une théorie pédagogique numérique inclusive et activiste. Ensemble, ces dissertations démontrent que la transformation des humanités numériques en un domaine qui est politiquement engagé et juste au plan social et inclusif est un processus permanent d’enseignement et d’apprentissage dans de nouveaux lieux et dans des lieux traditionnels, ainsi que dans des formes, communautés, organisations et institutions. Kimberly O’Donnell répond à ces dissertations en tant qu’étudiante de cycle supérieur et en tant que 'Digital Fellow' (chercheur) à l’Université Simon Fraser, en donnant sa perspective sur les défis et sur la nécessité de créer ces lieux pédagogiques transformateurs. Mots-clés: justice sociale; humanitiés numériques (HN); pédagogie; numériques; activisme numériques; transgenres; technologie des jeux video
Iran like many countries of the world, has recorded growth in the cases of transsexuals. Being an Islamic nation, issues of transsexuality could be controversial in view of the fact that it is perceived as a leeway for homosexuality. Transsexuality is permissible, while, homosexuality is a crime punishable by death in Iran. This is in view of the fact that transsexuality is perceived as a form of disability that can be cured through medical treatment. This paper intends to examine the position of gender, transsexuality and sex reassignment surgery in Iran. Doctrinal methodology was used in arriving at the findings of the research. According to the findings, Sex reassignment surgery is the most medically effective treatments for gender identity disorders. It increases satisfaction and the quality of transsexuals’ life after surgery in compare with responding before surgery and Iran is ranked second in cases of sex change surgeries globally. Despite, the legality of sex reassignment surgery and change personal documents, transsexuals face challenges in other aspects of life in Iran like other countries.
Although queer theory is distinguished by its antihumanistic rhetoric, in much of queer theory antihumanism is more about performance than substance. This is not a bad thing, for, on those occasions when queer theory takes its antihumanism too seriously, it commits itself to incoherence. I illustrate this through an intertextual critique of Edelman's and Bersani's works. Edelman's celebration of the death drive is internally torn between an amoral standpoint and immoral urges. Unlike recent critical interventions, however, my point is less to impugn queer theory's preoccupation with antinormativity, than the performance of antinormativity that manifests as queer antihumanism.
Sex-change surgery has been practiced through a medico-judicial process in Iran based on Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic juristic legal opinion (fatwa), which he issued just a few years after the Islamic revolution, in 1982. According to the Iranian legal system, judges can refer to the fatwas as a source of decision making if there are no stipulations on the matter within existing legal codes. In this article, I elucidate the divergent legal opinions on sex change among Islamic jurists in Iran and how this has amounted to different legal practices by judges in the country. The lack of law has generated difficult-and in some places impossible-conditions for trans persons to undergo sex-change surgery. According to Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, and by drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted in Iran, I argue that sex-change surgery is not obligatory, opposing those who believe homosexuals in Iran are forced to undergo it. Trans people who decide to do so see it as a way to complete the transition, which indicates the importance of body materiality. Using the information gathered during interviews with trans persons in Iran, I examine bodily experiences during the process of transition, in which I have identified three phases: self-recognition, passing, and rebirth. These analyses show that transition does not happen at once or suddenly, it rather takes a long time and may continue after sex-change surgery, which is only one part of it.
In recent years, online media have offered to trans people helpful resources to create new political, cultural and personal representations of their biographies. However, the role of these media in the construction of their social and personal identities has seldom been addressed. Drawing on the theoretical standpoint of positioning theory and diatextual discourse analysis, this paper discusses the results of a research project about weblogs created by Italian trans women. In particular, the aim of this study was to describe the ways online resources are used to express different definitions and interpretation of transgenderism, transsexuality and gender transitioning. We identified four main positioning strategies: “Transgender”, “Transsexual before being a woman”, “A woman who was born male” and “Just a normal woman”. We conclude with the political implications of the pluralization of narratives about gender non-conformity. Specifically, we will highlight how aspects of neoliberal discourses have been appropriated and rearticulated in the construction of gendered subjectivities.
In 2005, following a year of increased attention in English language media to the prominence of sexual reassignment surgeries in Iran, the London-based Guardian dubs Tehran “the unlikely sex-change capital of the world.” This title is significantly complicated when we realize that according to mainstream English media, Tehran is not the first or only sex change capital of the world. Its sister city is Trinidad, Colorado, a predominantly Catholic town with a population hovering around 9,000. Although English language newspapers have served up stories of each location as “surprising” magnets for SRS, none have mentioned both places in the same article because these stories operate with a different set of logics related to religion, sex, and human rights. Analysis of the journalist rhetoric of these two unlikely capitals highlights these diverse logics, particularly how assumptions about Muslim subjectivity affects judgments about the status of sexual freedom in Iran.
This article describes and explains the current official status of lesbianism in Iran. Our central question is why the installation of an Islamic government in Iran resulted in extreme regulations of sexuality. The authors argue that rather than a clear adoption of "Islamic teaching on lesbianism," the current regime of sexuality was "invented" through a series of interpretative moves, adoption of hidden assumptions, and creation of sexual categories. This article is organized into two sections. The first sets the scene of official sexuality in Iran through a summary of (1) the sections of the Iranian Penal code dealing with same-sex acts and (2) government support for sexual reassignment surgeries. The second section traces the "invention" of a dominant post-revolutionary Iranian view of Islam and sexuality through identifying a number of specific interpretive moves this view builds on.
The modern regulatory project of sex classification is currently in crisis. Contestations over the legal meaning of “sex” — manifested not only in the incommensurate outcomes of different cases but in inconsistent rulings in the same case as it moves through the judiciary from lower to appellate courts — are stark illustrations of the clashes taking place in multiple social arenas over the inability of a birth sex determination to secure a person’s gender. In the face of this epistemic classification crisis, just what stance should transgender rights advocates adopt in challenging state definitions of sex and gender that classify people based on the sex assigned at birth? Should the state base legal sex assignment on reassigned sex rather than the sex assigned at birth, or on gender identity rather than “biological” sex? Should the state’s ability to police the relationship between one’s body and one’s gender be challenged? What role should medical discourse and expert knowledge play in furthering the cause of transgender rights? How should we negotiate the tensions between an identity politics movement that seeks primarily to amend the definitions of the binary sex classification scheme and the larger goal of disestablishing sex as a meaningful legal category which distributes rights and resources unequally? I argue that the very different goals of working to dismantle gender as a coherent legal concept and working to expand gender to include trans people should not be seen as an either–or proposition. In thinking about how to frame the goals of rights claims made on behalf of transgender people, I suggest that transgender rights advocates can learn much from the work done by Critical Race Theorists. I argue that it is a mistake to see the goals of defending gender as a coherent legal category and “disestablishing” as a zero-sum calculus. The fact that organic “common sense” notions about gender underlie both negative and positive outcomes in many transgender rights cases reveals that the social and legal imagination of the meaning of gender is already being expanded.Instead, I suggest the solution is not to try find the “one perfect theory” that would make sense of all these contradictory state constructions of sex, gender, and the relationship between them. Instead, we should, as a movement, be celebrating the incoherencies between them even as we continue to pursue rights claims in the here and now by invoking context-specific useful constructions of gender definition. This essay is part of a larger book project, The United States of Gender, (forthcoming from NYU) that investigates state constructions of legal sex.
Sex and gender are not merely incidental to the formation and perpetuation of neo-liberal discourse, they are absolutely central to it. In this article I explore how neo-liberal discourse is predicated on a politics of heteronormativity that (re)produces the dominance of normative heterosexuality. The World Bank is an excellent example of this, reproducing a heteronormative discourse of economic viability through policy interventions that are intrinsically sexualised, that is, predicated on a politics of normative heterosexuality. Bank discourse, although articulated as value neutral, ‘straightens’ development by creating and sustaining policies and practices that are tacitly, but not explicitly, formulated according to gendered hierarchies of meaning, representation and identity. Thus, one effect of contemporary neo-liberalism's inherent heteronormativity is to associate successful human behaviour almost exclusively with a gender identity embodied in dominant forms of heterosexual masculinity.
This article traces the historical becoming of the contemporary supersaturation of images of queer and transgendered Iran through the narrative and tropic devices introduced by filmmakers in the past twenty years. I argue that the censorship code enforced by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance is partly responsible for the formation of what has come to be a ubiquitous figure in the New Iranian cinema: the “cross-dressing” or “passing” figure. By performing close readings of Baran and Dokhtaraneh Khorshid—two films that are exemplary of a subgenre organized around the “cross-dressing” or “passing” figure—I identify a “transgender move”: a temporary space of political and agential potential that many spectators—both domestic and diasporic—seek in the post 1990s New Iranian cinema.
This essay explores the ways in which emerging religious understandings of sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) have potential for new work in comparative ethics. I focus on the startling diversity of teachings on transsexuality among the Vatican and leading Shia clerics in Iran. While the Vatican rejects SRS as a cure for transsexuality, Iranian clerics not only support decisions to transition to a new sex, they see it as necessary in some cases given the gendered nature of the moral life. In this essay, after describing the practical justification for sexual reassignment surgeries in Iranian fatwas and the emerging official Vatican position on transsexuality, I explain how these divergent positions are based on different semiotics of sex and gender that reflect specific ontological views of the human body.
This article explores the ethics of the current "War on Terrorism, asking whether anthropology, the discipline devoted to understanding and dealing with cultural difference, can provide us with critical purchase on the justifications made for American intervention in Afghanistan in terms of liberating, or saving, Afghan women. I look first at the dangers of reifying culture, apparent in the tendencies to plaster neat cultural icons like the Muslim woman over messy historical and political dynamics. Then, calling attention to the resonances of contemporary discourses on equality, freedom, and rights with earlier colonial and missionary rhetoric on Muslim women, I argue that we need to develop, instead, a serious appreciation of differences among women in the world—as products of different histories, expressions of different circumstances, and manifestations of differently structured desires. Further, I argue that rather than seeking to "save" others (with the superiority it implies and the violences it would entail) we might better think in terms of (1) working with them in situations that we recognize as always subject to historical transformation and (2) considering our own larger responsibilities to address the forms of global injustice that are powerful shapers of the worlds in which they find themselves. I develop many of these arguments about the limits of "cultural relativism" through a consideration of the burqa and the many meanings of veiling in the Muslim world. [Keywords: cultural relativism, Muslim women, Afghanistan war, freedom, global injustice, colonialism]
Something happened in 2003–4: transsexuals and transsexuality in Iran suddenly became a hot media topic, both in Iran and internationally.
The medical practice of sex change by means of surgery and hormones dates to at least the early 1970s in Iran; for nearly three decades the topic had received occasional coverage in the Iranian press, including a series of reports (presumably based on real lives) published in a popular magazine, Rah-i zindigi (Path of Life), beginning in 1999.1 Iranian press coverage of “trans-” phenomena increased sharply in early 2003, however, and it has continued intensely ever since—sometimes the reports directly address transsexuals and transsexuality, and sometimes they pertain to them in the context of other people marked as “vulnerable to social harm,” such as prostitutes (both male and female) and runaway girls, who reportedly live trans-dressed lives. It was these last two topics that drew the attention of documentary filmmaker Mitra Farahani to the subject of transsexuals in Iran. Her documentary Just a Woman won international acclaim at the 2002 Berlin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and elsewhere and seems to have ignited broader international attention to the issue of transsexuality in Iran. A flurry of articles appeared in the world press in 2004–5. The Guardian, for example, wrote on July 27, 2005, that “today, the Islamic Republic of Iran occupies the unlikely role of global leader for sex change,” adding, “Iran has even become a magnet for patients from eastern European and Arab countries seeking to change their genders.” A number of television documentaries in France, Sweden, Holland, and the United Kingdom followed, as well as several independent documentary film productions (Abdo 2000; Eqbali 2004; Fathi 2004; McDowall and Khan 2004; Harrison 2005; Stack 2005; Tait 2005).
The celebratory tone of many of these reports—welcoming recognition of transsexuality and the permissibility of sex change operations—is sometimes mixed with an element of surprise: How could this be happening in an Islamic state? In other accounts, the sanctioning of transsexuality is tightly framed by comparisons with punishments for sodomy and the presumed illegality of homosexuality—echoing, as we shall see, some of the official thinking in Iran. 2
While transsexual surgeries are not new in Iran, over the past decade such operations seem to have increased not only in publicity, but also in actual frequency. At the first national symposium on transsexuality, “Studying Gender Identity Disorder,” held in the northeastern provincial capital of Mashhad in May 2005, Dr. Aliriza Kahani, from the National Legal Medical Board, reported that in the fifteen years between 1987 and 2001, 200 males and 70 females had submitted sex change petitions to the board, and 214 had been approved. Over the following four years, between 2001 and 2004, another 200 petitions had been received (Shakhis, May 24, 2005).3 Anecdotal statistics from a private sex change clinic in Tehran point to similar increases—for the period 1985–95, 125 of 153 clients went through partial or full sex change operations; in the decade that followed, the numbers increased to 200 surgeries in a client population of 210.
The increasing frequency of sex change petitions and operations is not an unproblematically positive development, empowering though this trend has been for transsexuals. Many political challenges are posed by framing transsexuality within a dominant mapping of sexuality that explicitly renders as diseased, abnormal, deviant, and at times criminal any sexual or gender nonconformity (including transsexuality itself, as well as same-sex desires and practices). For legal and medical authorities, sex change surgeries are explicitly framed as the cure for a diseased abnormality, and on occasion they are proposed as a religioegally sanctioned option for heteronormalizing people with same-sex desires or practices. Even though this possible option has not become state policy (because official discourse is also invested in making an essential distinction between transsexuals and homosexuals), recent international media coverage of transsexuality in Iran increasingly emphasizes the possibility that sex-reassignment surgery (SRS) is being performed coercively on Iranian homosexuals by a fundamentalist Islamic government (Ireland 2007). This narrative framing (along with similar ones concerning the suppression of women’s rights and other political and labor struggles) circulates within larger...
This paper explores the connections between ethnicity and sexuality. Racial, ethnic, and national boundaries are also sexual boundaries. The borderlands dividing racial, ethnic, and national identities and communities constitute ethnosexual frontiers, erotic intersections that are heavily patrolled, policed, and protected, yet regularly are penetrated by individuals forging sexual links with ethnic "others." Normative heterosexuality is a central component of racial, ethnic, and nationalist ideologies; both adherence to and deviation from approved sexual identities and behaviors define and reinforce racial, ethnic, and nationalist regimes. To illustrate the ethnicity/sexuality nexus and to show the utility of revealing this intimate bond for understanding ethnic relations, I review constructionist models of ethnicity and sexuality in the social sciences and humanities, and I discuss ethnosexual boundary processes in several historical and contemporary settings: the sexual policing of nationalism, sexual aspects of US-American Indian relations, and the sexualization of the black-white color line.