Enforcement of Gender Roles in Iran

Early today I was reading a paper called “Transsexuality in Contemporary Iran: Legal and Social Misrecognition” (the link is at the bottom of the blog post). The paper is from a journal called Feminist Legal Studies so I assumed that it was feminist of some sort. In hindsight, I should probably have known that “feminist” meant “liberal anti-feminist”.

This paper talks about trans people in Iran and argues that they voluntarily choose to undergo sex reassignment surgery and transition to the opposite sex, regardless of whatever proof is brought forward to the contrary.

In the background section of the article they argue that a trans person is “someone who is discontented with their gender and does not abide by the gender roles assigned to them according to their biological sex”. The problem with this assertion is that there are countless people in the world who are happily gender non-conforming. By assigning this definition to transsexuality, the argument is being made that all gender non-conforming people are trans. However, this seems more like a definition of gender non-conforming people than of trans people (or at least of radical feminist GNC people, anyways).

This ties in with the standard “gender identity” arguments that always seem to get bandied about. Choosing to emulate the gender roles of the other sex doesn’t mean you ARE the other sex. It means that you prefer to conform to a different set of oppressive stereotypes. If I, a woman, decide to cut my hair so that it’s short and wear men’s clothes, it doesn’t mean that I am a man. It means that I think long hair is a pain in the ass and like having pockets.

The paragraph after the above quote contains important information that seems to have been completely ignored. In an overview of the procedure followed by Iranian psychiatrists and doctors, the article noted that “if TIP’s [Tehran Institute of Psychiatry] psychiatrists diagnose the applicant as a homosexual, the person will be considered mentally ill and referred to a different section for more psychotherapy treatment”. They also insist that “those who have received the diagnosis and the certificate for sex change surgery can live as a trans person without undergoing the surgery as long as they do not fall into sinful acts”.

If anybody every argues that Iran is a trans paradise, they need to be pointed to this quote. Iran might be a paradise if you are trans, but it is a hell for gay men and lesbian women. Homosexuality is not a mental illness and it does not require treatment. Iranian society needs treatment to be able to recognize that, to quote former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, “the state’s responsibility should be to legislate rules for a well-ordered society. It has no right or duty to creep into the bedrooms of the nation.”

In interviews the author conducted with Iranian trans people, they show standard belief in gender identity. One defined transsexuality as “a state of being, which shows a person’s soul, thoughts, logic, reasoning, mood, and interests are different from his/her jinsiyat [the Iranian term for biological sex]”. The author agreed and decided that trans people “change their sex (the material body) not their gender (the immaterial body)”. Someone’s “soul, thoughts, logic, reasoning, mood, and interests” are completely independent from their biological sex. I am female; I can like whatever the fuck I want and that doesn’t need to be based on my biological sex.

Later, it is acknowledged that “several recently produced documentaries have depicted Iranian trans people, as being either… oppressed entities and mostly homosexuals being forced to undergo sex change surgery, or as the exotic objects of investigation for the media.” However, this is completely overshadowed by the assertion that these documentaries ignore “the issue of transsexual people’s agency, as people who embody their desired gender within a social and legal system that denies recognition of their status”. This focus on transsexual people’s agency is ignoring the very real suffering of gay and lesbian people who are forced to undergo sex change surgery.

The article then quotes a doctor who carries out sex reassignment surgeries. She insists that “The need to change one’s body is symptomatic of transsexuality. By contrast, a homosexual accepts his/her body but seeks same-sex relations. If she/he demands surgery, then she/he is not a homosexual anymore.” There is one very good reason that I can think of why homosexual people would get surgery, and that is because they are faced with the fact that homosexuality is a crime, with a sentence of either imprisonment, corporal punishment, or death and want to be able to love freely without having a fiercely homophobic legal system hanging over their heads.

It is only towards the end of the article that the author looks at homosexual people. She blames “distinctions” created “between homosexuality and transsexuality” as a “result of structural homophobic law and a society that relegates homosexuality to pathology and relates transsexuality to a new model of masculinity at the individual level”.

If I ripped apart and shredded the entire article this blog post would be well over two thousand words long. Suffice it to say that the author here places the happiness of trans people who didn’t even need to transition in the first place (the characteristics of your soul are not dependent on whether you’ve got a penis or a vagina) above the misery of homosexual people. The complete lack of focus and care about gay and lesbian issues and struggles in Iran is astounding.

Resources

Saeidzadeh, Zara. “Transsexuality in Contemporary Iran: Legal and Social Misrecognition.” Feminist Legal Studies 24 (2016): 249-272. Link

Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. “LGBT Rights in Iran.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Iran

Gender Identity: A Brief Rant

In recent years a new concept has arisen in gender and identity politics. This concept is gender identity and it has quickly become accepted in liberal circles and in different levels of government.

What is gender identity? According to the Ontario Human Rights Code, “gender identity is each person’s internal and individual experience of gender. It is their sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.”

This definition does not make any sense when you look at it from a common sense point of view. First of all, this definition sounds like it was written by someone who never set foot in a biology class. It is not possible to be both a man and a woman. It is also not possible to be neither a man or a woman. The terms “man” and “woman” refer to biological reality, not internal feelings.

The concept itself is based on stereotypes and sex roles. Gender identity in women, for example, is seen as being feminine, submissive, and being happy with conforming to the restricting role society places on female people. For men, it is seen as being aggressive, masculine, outgoing, loud, and generally following the role that society has set out for men to follow.

The only condition that has to be met to be a woman is to have exclusively X sex chromosomes and female sex organs (vulva, vagina, ovaries, etc). The same is true for men – XY sex chromosomes (usually) and male sex organs.

The concept of gender identity completely ignores this. By associating being a woman with a set of feelings, proponents of gender identity ignore the harm this is doing. First of all, this removes the basis of sex-based protection. Womens’ shelters are being pressured to hire men – men who say they are women because they feel submissive or like wearing high heels and a dress (take, for example, Vancouver Rape Relief).

Gender identity is also harmful to children. Little girls are being taught that if they like playing with trucks instead of dolls and prefer male friends, they are actually little boys. Adolescent girls are taught that if they are uncomfortable with their boobs (most likely because they are now a target of objectification and sexual harassment) and hate being feminine (because it – femininity – is a restricting pain in the ass) they must actually be boys. Because, you know, no woman can defy stereotypes or try and live regardless of societal norms without calls that she must not be a woman after all.

Thirdly, many people whose “gender identity” does not correspond with their biological sex are gay. In trying to judge biological sex based on “internal feelings” instead of biological reality, the American Psychological Association and other professional organizations might as well add “displays an attraction to the same sex” to the DSM-5, because that is what it is doing. It takes little lesbian girls and little gay boys and tells them that they are actually little straight boys and girls.

The concept of gender identity is, to me, ridiculous. When the word “gender” was originally adopted by radical feminists it was another way of saying “sex roles”. But now it is something completely different. Now it has been completely co-opted to refer to a synonym for biological sex. What gender identity is, in essence, is a question. Which set of oppressive stereotypes would you prefer to have to conform to?

It has even been adopted by liberal feminists. These are the same feminists who argue that makeup is empowering and that your lipstick should be red enough or sharp enough “to kill a man”. Then again, you would expect liberal feminists to jump on the subtly-anti-woman bandwagon enthusiastically.

In the way it is currently used, “gender identity” really means personality. Instead of camouflaging it as a rights movement, proponents of gender identity should be more clear and make explicit the fact that they are arguing for a strict segregation of roles and duties for each sex – women do this, men do this. By assigning a personality or set of behaviours to a specific sex and then calling anyone who disagrees with them a bigot, proponents of identity politics are dangerously close to toeing an Orwellian line.

This insistence that gender identity determines biological sex (which, while it seems absurd, is true – if your gender identity is different than your biological sex you should attempt the impossible task of changing your biological sex instead of acknowledging that the whole concept is dumb) is silly. It’s not like children are sexless until they figure out whether they like trucks or barbies more.

Instead of being biological determinists, we should acknowledge that people can be people, no matter which sex they have.