Iran’s Multipurpose Transsexuals

BBC News published an article a couple of weeks ago about transition in Iran. In Iran, it is legal to change sex: if you can convince a doctor that you are a transsexual, and if they permit you to undergo GRS, then you can legally change your name and gender on your identifying documents. (It’s a package deal: there’s only one way. In the states, “full” transition is usually privileged by the law over “partial” or “incomplete” transition, but the trend, knock wood, is towards autonomy and it’s not illegal to opt out of any procedure, stop hormones, or fail to change any marker on your documents.)

Sex changes have been legal in Iran since Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution, passed a fatwa – a religious edict – authorising them for “diagnosed transsexuals” 25 years ago.

Today, Iran carries out more sex change operations than any other nation in the world except for Thailand.

The government even provides up to half the cost for those needing financial assistance and a sex change is recognised on your birth certificate.

“Islam has a cure for people suffering from this problem. If they want to change their gender, the path is open,” says Hojatol Islam Muhammad Mehdi Kariminia, the religious cleric responsible for gender reassignment.

He says an operation is no more a sin than “changing wheat to flour to bread”.

Yet homosexuality is still punishable by death.

“The discussion is fundamentally separate from a discussion regarding homosexuals. Absolutely not related. Homosexuals are doing something unnatural and against religion,” says Kariminia. “It is clearly stated in our Islamic law that such behaviour is not allowed because it disrupts the social order.”

This is odd, at least to outsiders, because Iran’s stance on homosexuality remains quite different: it’s a capital crime. So Iran has it ass-backwards: first gay people gain a measure of acceptance under the law and validation via science, and then transpeople gradually struggle up after them. Iran is doin oppression wrong.

It’s worth pointing out that many reactionaries in Iran–like the families of some of the people profiled in the article–find hatred to be wholly compatible with their belief systems. “Legal” doesn’t always mean “acceptable” or “protected.” Even so, at least some people say that they have transitioned under duress because their sexual orientation is illegal.

The author seemed content to leave it at man bites dog, but some people used it as an excuse to saddle up one of their favorite spavined hobbyhorses: “Transsexuals are more normal than gays.”

Andrew Sullivan explains it for you:

Iran’s government will now pay for [sex changes]. I’ve long wondered why Christianists, whose hostility to gender non-conformity is almost as intense as the Islamists’, don’t support this more. Gender ambiguity or transgression – integral to nature, protected and defended by civilized societies – is anathema to the fundamentalist mind. Some fundamentalists even panic if men pee sitting down, for Pete’s sake. So isn’t surgically changing the gender of some transgendered people the perfect fusion of transgendered rights and religious orthodoxy? It clears everything up, the way fundies like their universe. No confusion. Just chop it off and marry a man; or become a man and marry a woman (or several). Ayatollah Khomeini approved of sex change operations a quarter century ago. And here’s a link to a new documentary about several Iranian men who have become women – in order to wear veils. It has a fitting title: “Be Like Others.”

Transgendered identity and heterosexual normativity are allies. In many cases, only a physical barrier exists to transgendered people being fully integrated into heterosexual norms. But gay people, by our very existence, violate such norms. And our persistence in not wanting a cure – or seeing its desirability in any way – is what drives those who hate us crazy. We like our gender. We just express it differently.

Hey, that looks like fun! Let me try:

The religious right is pretty sexist. Compulsory homosexuality seems like the natural solution to that whole leaky-vessel problem, don’t you agree? What better way to cement the inferiority of women than loving men instead? So Pat Robertson will officiate at the LaHaye-Jenkins wedding any day now.

Because fundamentalists love marriage, right? They think that romantic relationships should be monogamous, lifelong partnerships structured around raising children, right? They think all young people should be encouraged to see marriage as a model.

So the marriage-equality folks are the natural allies of the religious right. It stands to reason that the religious right would support marriage equality and encourage these couples to marry–and support them in the legal defense of the partnerships they’ve already formed, especially since children are involved. I mean, why wouldn’t they?

Wait, what’s that you say? They don’t accept any definition of marriage that includes same-sex partnerships? As far as they’re concerned, a gay marriage is a contradiction in terms? No characteristic of marriage matters more than that vital man-on-woman component? There’s no point in pretending otherwise, and you end up saying pretty bizarre things when you do?

Huh.

It’s the same way with transsexuality: the Christianists just don’t accept any definition of gender that includes trans genders as valid. A trans woman is a contradiction in terms. That means that transsexuality is not a natural solution for them, but a natural threat. It represents a destabilizing influence and a major change–not necessarily because trans genders are less like the cis kind in any number of other ways, but because they don’t conform to the most important rule. No matter how reactionary any given group of transpeople might become, they’ll still be about as acceptable to the religious right as gay covenant marriages or lesbian quiverfull couples. The fact that Del and Phyllis both work outside the home is not the problem.

There’s no purpose in conducting little thought experiments in ideas that should make perfect sense to the religious right but mysteriously don’t. They have no obligation to be internally consistent, either, although I think they are by standards more appropriate than Sullivan’s.

It’s a good idea to consider bad reasoning, and to explore its possible origins in custom or superstition, but illogic has never prevented any belief system from gaining support. “Pro-lifers should support access to birth control,” is a sensible argument. “…Therefore there is no national movement to prevent women from getting their hands on it,” isn’t. Whether or not they’re supposed to hate transsexuals, the religious right does.

Speculative political fiction is a problem because its failure to acknowledge the actual status quo means that its authors can’t analyze the actual causes.

The religious right likes men to be men and women to be women, so the reasoning goes. Transsexuality frequently involves the desire to become a man or a woman. Therefore, the religious right should be right behind efforts by trans activists to improve access to transition-related services, right? Why aren’t they?

In this country, sex is defined primarily by birth sex. Evidence for this belief abounds–the new identity and everything associated with it are almost always defined as less real or less complete. The BBC News article, for example: “Ali Askar had a sex change operation and is now called Negar.” Your birth sex is your real sex, and no matter how far or fast you run, it will hunt you down and kill you. Here, see? Julia Serano posts another example of the “transpeople are filthy liars” trope. Note this passage:

Transgendered men want to believe they are women but they have the same XY chromosomes like any other man. No doctor in the world can change that.

Here’s another example: “chop it off.” Cliche, right? That doesn’t sound like gaining anything; it certainly doesn’t sound like becoming anything. Loss, amputation, fixation on the magic penis…not much sense of parity between pre-chop and post-chop sex. Compare Sullivan’s terminology to this article from the Concerned Women for America website:

I asked Besen: “There’s actually a doctor coming from New York who is talking about ‘breast reconstruction’ — chopping off the breasts of these girls because they want to become men. We think that’s dangerous. How can you justify teaching that as normal in the schools?”

(snip)

I was unprepared to see so many young women desiring this body-disfiguring operation, which leaves long and large horizontal scars under the place where there were once full breasts. (He said the scars eventually fade.) On his Web site, Reardon states that he “is seeing younger patients who are making these gender decisions earlier in life, preferably before entering college or their careers. The adolescent patient requires in-depth psychological evaluation, frequently with a second opinion, and will certainly benefit from parental support and interaction in the decision-making process.”

Wait, one more quote:

Linda Harvey, president of the Columbus, Ohio-based Christian group Mission:America, said after hearing descriptions of the True Spirit conference that it demonstrates the “chaos of the gay agenda.”

“Here we are in a time in which fighting breast cancer is one of the biggest crusades of the women’s movement,” Harvey said. “And one of the biggest advances in breast cancer treatment is the lumpectomy [removing just part of the breast, known professionally as ‘breast-conserving surgery’] instead of a full mastectomy [removing the entire cancerous breast]. Yet these poor confused girls are voluntarily giving up their breasts.

“They are regressing in the name of sexual and gender freedom,” she told C&F Report in a phone interview. “They are so deceived.”

“That this conference was endorsed by a supposedly mainstream gay group should rip the closet door open for everybody to see what’s really there,” Harvey said. She noted that HRC, which carefully cultivates a respectable image in the media and on Capitol Hill, holds fundraising dinners at the most exclusive country club in Columbus. (HRC now crusades for “transgender equality” in addition to homosexual and bisexual rights.)

“This is the ultimate Pandora’s box, yet most people don’t know that this sort of thing is now fully a part of the ‘gay’ agenda,” Harvey said. “We should have seen this coming in the ‘70s when medical and psychiatric health professionals went down the road of saying homosexuality was normal and not a disorder.

It’s almost like she’s saying that transsexuality is at least as bad as being gay. In fact, a cursory search of the CFW website indicates that “homosexual” and “transgender” make a virtual portmanteau–almost as if the religious right naturally connects them.

Where was I? Right! This mindset wouldn’t make any sense if sex changes were generally recognized as valid. The prejudice would diminish at some point, would disappear. Transsexual people would graduate from second-class citizenship. They don’t. None of this stuff depends on being pre-op or post-op or non-op; none of it depends on being out or stealth or militant; none of it depends on conforming to any expectations or on legal requirements in a given area. The bigots never differentiate, because to them all transsexual people are the same. Here: do you see anything in this Concerned Women for America post on splENDA about surgery? Why would you?

There are a bunch of reasons they accept no substitutes–I think at least some of them have to do with punishing and controlling people for being “unnatural,” and using scapegoating to defend cherished ideas about the way things are supposed to be. Is this starting to sound familiar? The religious right has no reason to dispute such a boon prejudice, or to defend the interests of a hated minority against the bigotry it finds so useful in so many other situations. Therefore, the religious right will probably be happiest if transpeople live in misery and squalor. Or just die.

And look! This hypothesis happens to test out: the religious right does hate transpeople. They do object whenever transpeople attempt to achieve security, visibility, or acceptance. They object whenever transpeople seek easier access to The Surgery. Their stance on transsexuality trends reactionary and punitive whenever the subject comes up. They don’t see a sex change as a cure. They see it as a new advance of the disease. (Hat-tip to Lisa for the link.)

Wacky, I know. But that’s the religious right for you.

I am not posting this as a thought experiment–or an exercise in obfuscation. I am posting this in an effort to highlight the truth. This idea that some gay people seem to have that transpeople can benefit or might benefit from some loophole in our culture’s traditional hatred of gender incongruity is wrong. They don’t. They won’t. I’m not sure what the actual causes of that actual mindset are, why it’s so important that so much misery and hatred be left out of the equation. I don’t know why it doesn’t make more sense to acknowledge that the religious right considers this other group evil for related reasons and to attack those reasons on their real terms.

But it’s pointless to daydream about a natural alliance based on natural affinity, when the reality is so much shabbier.

That brings me to Catherine Crouch, the Paul Haggis of queer cinema:

Last year, Frameline Films in San Francisco canceled the showing of lesbian filmmaker Catherine Crouch’s film, The Gendercator, because some believed it to be transphobic. The film, a science fiction comedy, imagined a future in which the Religious Right ruled the world and in which lesbianism and homosexuality were treated with mandatory sex reassignment surgery. In debates and discussions following this and similar cancellations, the argument was advanced by those who supported the bannings of the Gendercator that the scenario the film proposed was preposterous, that sex reassignment surgeries would never be approved by fundamentalists or the Religious Right, and that to suggest they might was an attack on transgender persons and their advocates.

I seem to recall a little more specificity there. The plot wasn’t about “fundamentalists” approving sex changes. The story Crouch came up with was about how the religious right in this country allied with transsexual people to force gay men and lesbians into sex changes:

One of her friends appears to be a man and tells Sally, “They made me do it. They’ll make you too.” They explain to Sally that in the early 2000s the evangelical Christians took over the government and legislated their strict family values, legally sanctioning only “one man, one woman” couples. Advances in sex reassignment surgery have made it possible to honor an individual’s choice of gender AND government policy. Sally is comfortable in the middle of the genders, an unacceptable choice in 2048.

It’s entirely possible that in some distant future, this region will be stuck with an entirely different group of dominionist religious people. It’s entirely possible that they will think sex changes are ideal. It’s entirely possible that they will hate gay people and gender non-conforming people except for transpeople. It’s entirely possible that, given all those circumstances, that transpeople will collaborate with them to force other queer people into sex changes.

But dystopian spec-fic scenarios aren’t about just any unrecognizable world. They’re funhouse mirrors: they spin current social trends into possible–if exaggerated–conclusions. Crouch was writing about our fundamentalists, our transpeople, and the possible results of our traditional beliefs and current behaviors. And she was criticized because her dystopian vision–her ideas about where we might be heading–were not exaggerated or intense or satirical but just plain wrong.

Christian fundamentalists in this country won’t force queer people into sex changes, won’t latch onto transsexuality as a solution to nonconformity. Transpeople won’t join them in forcing queer people into sex changes. Is that a trivial point? Because it’s the truth. Christian fundamentalists have found it much more effective to demonize transsexuals and to get their congregations to try to stomp them out of existence. They don’t just hate and fear transsexuals. They’ve turned that hatred and fear into a public-relations strategy.

They’re sensible to do so, since most people here feel some discomfort with transsexuals and are reluctant to see transsexuality as valid. If that weren’t true, craven political opportunists like Andrew Sullivan would be camped outside Riki Wilchins’ house.

That’s why people got upset. You can’t see an alliance between people like Mike Huckabee and people like Calpernia Addams in the descendant future unless you’re ignoring the present. A truce between transpeople and the religious right–the willingness of the religious right to accept sex changes or transpeople, the ability of transpeople to sell themselves as useful allies–would require a comprehensive change in us. A complete reversal of transphobia, and a wholesale reconstruction of our beliefs about what makes men and women.

Sex changes are not part of some dystopian nightmare theocracy’s solution to differences it can’t live with. They happen right here, under very different circumstances and in the face of very different pressure from our very own nightmare theocrats. It’s offensive to pretend that these too-powerful, too-organized, and too-mainstreamed people aren’t gunning for transpeople when they are.