To Örebro University

Sex change surgery has been practised in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa in 1982. Therefore, a medical and judicial process of transition has been regulated accordingly. However, this has not resulted in either the legalization of sex change surgery, nor in the recognition of transsexual identity within Iranian substantive law. Sex change surgery is allowed through Islamic law, rather than substantive law, in response to the existing social facts and norms, on the one hand, and structural cooperation with medical system, on the other. In this article, I argue that the Iranian heteronormative law’s understanding of transsexuality has amounted to the misrecognition of trans persons’ status within law and society. Using semi structured interviews, intersectional content analysis, and feminist methodologies, the findings indicate that transsexual bodies have gained meaning through religious and medical discourses within a framework of power relations, and that Iranian transsexual persons have reconstructed and redefined gender and gender relations in a way that informs their understanding of gender and sexuality beyond the existing Islamic legal and social norms. Moreover, intersectional analysis of the interviews demonstrates how the legal misrecognition of transsexuality creates space for a discourse which in itself leads to the misrecognition of other gendered identities, such as homosexuals and transwomen.

Sex-changesurgeryhasbeenpracticedthroughamedico-judicialprocessinIranbasedon 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 this article, I examine how trans men who undergo or plan to undergo medical transition construe their masculinity or mardanegi (I follow IJMES's transliteration guide - Persian to English) in Persian language, through certain gender practices that manifest their manhood as manly, real and psychologically well. I argue that trans men in Iran practice masculinity in ways that is not only in strong entanglement with women but also is distanced from non-trans heterosexual men, trans women and gay men. Drawing on 14 semi-structured interviews with trans men in Iran as part of a bigger project on sex change in contemporary Iran, I explain that trans men's masculinity in Iran is a localized, traditional-modern kind of trans masculinity that distinguishes itself from other gender groups due to trans men's specificity of gender location.