Trans subjectivities in Iran: epistemic misrecognition

ABSTRACT

Gender Affirmation Surgery (GAS), or Amali Tasdigi Jinsiyat in Persian, was permitted by Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa in 1982. Although GAS is allowed under Islamic law, trans subjectivities in Iran are misrecognized. Here we investigate the construction of trans subjectivities in Iranian society through an intersectional analysis of different power relations. We analyse discourses and practices of gender at structural, institutional and individual levels. We build on the concept of ‘epistemic misrecognition’ to explain how Iranian trans people’s status is misrecognized both inside and outside Iran, which has made Iranian trans people and their experience invisible in society. Furthermore, we employ the notion of ‘subjectivation’ to describe the multiplicities of trans subjectivation in Iranian society. We apply Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse forty-six semi-structured face-to-face interviews conducted during 2015–2018.

KEYWORDS:

• Institutional misrecognition
• subjectivation
• trans normativity
• translessness
• trans diversity

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our deepest gratitude to the research participants who agreed to share their knowledge and experience. Furthermore, we are thankful to the reviewers for their constructive feedback and generous comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use this term as it is the English translation of the term amali tasdighi jinsiyat in Persian. It is also the most recent term used among Iranian trans people and activists referring to the surgery for biological change of sex in order to affirm the gender of the person. It implies that it is the sex or the body that is changed, not the gender.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bahar Azadi

Bahar Azadi is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Paris 1- Sorbonne. Her postdoctoral research is on female genital mutilation and sexual violence among male refugees and migrants in France. She received her doctorate in philosophy from University of Paris Descartes-Sorbonne. She dedicated her thesis to the trans subjectivation in Iranian society after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran. She is currently a part-time researcher in unit U1037 Inserm at the Faculty of Medicine Bichat, University of Paris 7. Her main area of interest is the subject of transidentity, subjectivation and resistance.

Zara Saeidzadeh

Zara Saeidzadeh is a senior lecturer and researcher in Gender Studies at Örebro University, Sweden, where she has defended her PhD thesis on ‘Trans and Sex Change in Iran: A Socio-Legal Study of Gendered Policies and Practices’ in June 2020. Zara has carried out research in projects on Iranian Transgender Advocacy Network at Lund University Sweden (2017) as well as TransRights project in Sweden together with Dr Sam de Boise and Professor Jeff Hearn (2017-2018). Zara’s current work focuses on socio-legal study of trans* citizenship drawing on status (mis)recognition and needs of trans* women in Sweden within family and workplace.