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Iran is using transsexuality to enforce heterosexuality, writes Jason Foster.
When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed last month that there are no
gay people in Iran, his comments were met with worldwide scorn.
Speaking at Colombia University, the Iranian leader was responding to a
complaint about anti-gay persecution in the Islamic republic when he
said, “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran
we do not have this phenomenon.”
Critics were quick to ask why Iranian law needs to prohibit homosexual
acts if there are no homosexuals in Iran. Some also mentioned the
homoerotic poetry in classical Persian literature as evidence against
Ahmadinejad’s claim.
Then there were those, like British newspaper The Guardian (September
26), which argued that the President’s statement is “undermined by the
paradox that transsexuality and sex changes are tolerated and
encouraged under Iran’s theocratic system”. The Iranian regime is
believed to authorise more sex-change operations than any other country
in the world, and Ahmadinejad’s government has increased public funding
for surgery and hormone therapy.
However, transsexuality and homosexuality are not the same thing, and
it’s not hard to see what Iran is up to by allowing one while
suppressing the other. As the Iranian cleric, Mohammed Mahdi Kariminia,
told the Seattle Times, “Approval of gender changes doesn’t mean
approval of homosexuality. We’re against homosexuality. But we have
said that if homosexuals want to change their gender, this way is open
to them.”
So by banning homosexual sex while accepting gender reassignment, Iran
is not just trying to help genuine transsexuals, but also denying that
genuine homosexuality exists. The message is: there are no real
homosexuals – just people who should actually be the opposite sex. Nor
does the point about Persian culture necessarily contradict Iranian
policy. In pre-modern Iran, where men had little sexual access to women
other than their wives, male-to-male sex was an alternative to straight
sex that didn’t require any homosexual identity.
According to Harvard University’s Professor Afsaneh Najmabadi, sex
between men was “seen as what men did before they settled into
heterosexual procreative sex with wives (or even afterwards, so long as
they performed their reproductive obligations), rather than as what
marked them as a particular human type”.
Historically, Persian homosexuality was only tolerated as an act
between an adult male and an adolescent boy, who took the part
conventionally assigned to women. In this way it remained within a
heterosexual paradigm that assigned different roles to masculine and
feminine partners. This difference was marked in man-boy relationships
by the fact that young males ceased to be acceptable objects of men’s
desire when they started wearing a beard, as Persian men usually did.
Thus, adult males could satisfy their lust without compromising their
heterosexual obligation to always assume the masculine, penetrative
role in sex. Those who flouted the rules of masculinity were despised
as false males, and while famous poets like Sa’adi and Hafiz sometimes
extolled homosexual desire, they were highly critical of men who took
the passive role in male-to-male intercourse. Even the Persian word
closest to ‘homosexuality’ (bachibazi) only refers to a man taking the
masculine role with young male, who sometimes took a feminine identity.
After Western ideas about the sinfulness of all homosexual desire began
spreading through the Middle East in the later 19th century, Iranian
society started paying more attention to the Koranic condemnation of
male-to-male sex. But while modern Iran’s total prohibition of
homosexuality is relatively new, its commitment to reinforcing
heterosexual norms is centuries old in Persian culture.
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Opinion 
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