Month: February 2005

Obligatory disclaimer: I am not Ms. Lauren, nor was meant to be; I am Charles Johnson, guest blogging on Ms. Lauren’s behalf while she takes a much-deserved break. You can normally find me at Rad Geek People’s Daily.

Here’s a fascinating read (thanks, LiveJournal feminist community) from several days ago in the Los Angeles Times, on the growing acceptance of transsexuals in Iran–a move that has been embraced by, of all people, the radical Islamist clerics who also staunchly defend unflinching patriarchy and violent suppression of homosexuality:

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, gay male sex still carries the death penalty and lesbians are lashed, but hundreds of people are having their gender changed legally, bolstered by the blessings of members of the ruling Shiite clergy.

“Approval of gender changes doesn’t mean approval of homosexuality. We’re against homosexuality,” says Mohammed Mahdi Kariminia, a cleric in the holy city of Qom and one of Iran’s foremost proponents of using hormones and surgery to change sex. “But we have said that if homosexuals want to change their gender, this way is open to them.”

Not that it’s easy in Iran. The Islamic Republic remains a fundamentally traditional, conservative society, laced by harsh judgments and strict mores. A blizzard of clerical decrees is unlikely to make a mother eager to see her son become a woman or enlighten leery co-workers who squirm at hearing their colleague’s voice drop a few octaves. And the government’s response is fractured, with some officials remaining opposed to sex change.

“The people our age, they all know and accept us,” says Toumik Martin, a brusque 28-year-old businessman who was born a girl named Anita, leaning in close to be heard over the cacophony of ambiguous tenors bouncing off the waiting room walls. “Our problem is with the parents. They don’t know how to differentiate between transsexuals, gays and lesbians.”

…

Iran isn’t the only Muslim society that appears to be growing more accepting of sex changes while still shunning homosexuality. … But no Muslim society has tackled the question with the open-mindedness of Shiite Iran. That’s probably because the father of the revolution himself, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, penned the groundbreaking fatwas that approved gender reassignment four decades ago.

Khomeini reasoned that if men or women wished so intensely to change their sex, to the point that they believed they were trapped inside the wrong body, then they should be permitted to transform that body and relieve their misery. His opinion had more to do with what isn’t in the Koran than what is. Sex change isn’t mentioned, Khomeini’s thinking went, so there are no grounds to consider it banned.

“There is no reason why not,” says Kariminia, the cleric. “Each human being is the owner of his body, and therefore he can make changes.” … “Islam has recognized the rights of transgender. We can’t say to anybody that they must be a man or a woman,” Kariminia says.

You really should read the whole thing.

I’d just like to add a few slightly pointed, but entirely non-rhetorical, questions. (I have my own opinions on these things but I think that they’re very tricky topics and I want to raise the questions and hopefully provoke some discussion more than push any particular point.)

1. On the other side of things, some trans activists have tried to argue that critiques of patriarchy ought to be subsumed, or in some places modified, by critiques of a more fundamental form of oppression: the constrictions imposed by the so-called “gender binary.” I wonder what they think about Iran, where trans acceptance is steadily growing and has support among even the most fanatically conservative sectors of society, but where pervasive, thoroughgoing, and violent male supremacy remain widely defended by some of the very same clerics. The rise of Khomeini have made it possible for people who were born as girls to take up life as a man and people who were born as boys to take up life as a woman. But to become a woman still means to be given a chador; while gender identity has become fluid and changeable, gender politics remains the same, and the growing acceptance of trans people in Iran seems to be proceeding without posing any challenge at all to patriarchal norms or traditions. What does that say about whether or not the “gender binary” is really any kind of fundamental explanation for patriarchy (rather than, say, just a symptom of the way that patriarchy happens to be tricked out in certain periods of American and European history)? Not that trans acceptance isn’t important or good enough in its own right to cheer on–it is!–but shouldn’t, well, something more be happening in Iran if the “gender binary” is fundamental in the way that some people have claimed it is?

2. On the other side of things, the moderate liberal wing of the gay rights movement–Human Rights Campaign and their crew–have repeatedly defended a political strategy of working for legal protections based on sexuality but not gender identity, and have told the trans community and their supporters that they are framing their demands only in terms of sexuality because it’s better to get something than nothing. I wonder whether they feel the same way about the inverted case in Iran. In Iran, the struggle for trans rights is rocky and uncertain, but there is growing acceptance and support from what you might think are the unlikeliest of sources; meanwhile homosexuality remains a capital crime. Political battles on behalf of trans rights are far more likely to succeed than political battles for gay liberation and trans rights together. Should the gay community in Iran just grin and bear it and chip in their support for trans activism in Iran for the good of the Iranian “TLBG community”?

   Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m demanding all-or-nothing politics here, or saying that the surprising acceptance of transsexuals in Iran is bad or even neutral without gay liberation. (The lack of gay liberation is bad, but that’s not the fault of the growing trans-acceptance.) I may be a radical kook, but I also think that piecemeal progress is the only kind of progress that there is. But there’s a difference between what is better than what you have now, and what you should be demanding; the first is always going to be much broader than the second. And the question here for the HRC crowd is how it makes them feel when the shoe is on the other foot, and prominent trans activists are saying things like “Approval of gender changes doesn’t mean approval of homosexuality. We’re against homosexuality,” or “Our problem is with the parents. They don’t know how to differentiate between transsexuals, gays and lesbians”? Yes, we should cheer on whatever victories we win in this world, but when the demands of trans activists in Iran are framed in such a way as to specifically exclude any questioning of violent oppression on the basis of sexuality in favor of sticking to the more politically palatable questions about gender identity, shouldn’t we find that just a bit problematic, and shouldn’t we insist on these points of criticism even while we cheer on what advances the make? And shouldn’t we feel the same way for precisely the same reasons while the reverse is happening in America?