Get a Sex Change in Iran

The poster for Be Like Others [2], a documentary airing on HBO tonight, looks like a CD cover for a glam rock band. One gay-looking Adonis sits on the arm of a red leather couch, his arm linked with his sexually ambiguous lover. She or he smiles coyly, hands resting on his inner thigh. This suggestive tableau is in fact a snapshot from Iran, and not even some futuristic Iran after the street protesters have won.

Since the reign of the Ayatollah Khomeini, sex change operations have been legal in Iran. Khomeini once ran into a man who wanted a sex change, the filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian explains [3] in an interview, and he was “very moved.” He said: “You were born in the wrong body and this is a medical issue. It has nothing to do with issues of sin or being a degenerate. You’re allowed to have your body match your soul if it’s done medically.’”

Coming from the Ayatollah, this all sounds very enlightened and queer theory-esque. Except, as the film explains, “homosexuality is still punishable by death.” We are so used to thinking of “transgender” as the last stop on the gay train to freedom and self expression that it takes a minute for these twin realities to sink in. For the reigning powers in Iran, homosexuality exists at the opposite end of the spectrum from transgender. The former is a sin and degenerate. The latter is a useful tool for the regime to restore someone with aberrant behavior to the expected gender norms. As a result, dozens of young men and women in Iran resort to sex-change operations as a step toward a happy, normal life—a step that, the filmmaker suggests, rarely leaves them satisfied.

Those two on the couch, the Adonis Ali and Anoosh, have always been in love. But they cannot be together or get married until Anoosh has the operation to change his penis into some approximation of a vagina and gets injected with female hormones. The surgeon, though, can’t deliver the fairy tale ending. Identity, especially for the transgendered, is a many-layered and complicated thing. As the film makes clear, Islamic law can dictate what happens to the bodies, but it can’t force normalcy or happiness to follow.

When they first arrive at the transsexual clinic of Dr. Bahram Mir-Jalali, the patients experience great relief. They’ve felt trapped in the wrong bodies, and society has sensed something off about them. Nobody will hire them, police harass them. After years of telling him he’s insane, Ali Askar’s father one day suddenly prepares him a “big breakfast with honey” and a “super nice tea.” In a flash of intuition, Askar realizes his father has put rat poison in the tea. This final break with his family drives him to the clinic.

The doctor listens sympathetically and reassures his patients. “He can’t help himself,” he tells some distraught parents from a small town whose young son puts on lipstick and dresses. “What’s going on in his sister’s head is going on in his head.” Vida, the den mother who recently had her own operation, hangs around the waiting room trying to get parents to be supportive, convincing the “girls” to dress respectably, and generally setting the boundaries. “I’m not saying I won’t speak to someone who’s gay,” she explains to a new arrival. “But I can’t be friends with him.”

After the initial relief, though, the patients start to sense that they are blooming in a very tight space. One of most painful scenes unfolds the day before Askar’s operation. He’s trying hard to convince himself he’s making the right decision. His neighbors are nosy, he can’t get a job, he doesn’t want to be gay, he says. (“In the West two men can get married, but what’s the point of that?”) After the operation, “everything will be fine.” But it’s obvious he’s working too hard at it. Finally, the interviewer asks him straight out: If he didn’t live in Iran, would he get the operation? “No,” he says. “I wouldn’t touch God’s work.”

With this final quote, Eshaghian is suggesting that the regime is forcing these operations on people who don’t want them, and might otherwise live as gay, or cross-dressing, or some other, more ambiguous identity. But there is a subtler point here, too. Ali Askar might have come to the same conclusion if he lived elsewhere. But his choice feels forced because he does not have any of these other choices; a drastic operation is the only action he can take. Identity, in other words, needs time and a space and a natural way to grow before it fits. It’s not like a uniform: It can’t quickly be put on, before we are ready, just so others can know easily who we are.

Compare the Iranian patients to the cast of characters in Diagnosing Difference [4], a new documentary about the American transgender community. Among them are a beautiful Cuban who wears heavy make-up, brags about her breasts, but insists, “I love my dick. I’m a woman with this body.” And then a corresponding man with frizzy long hair who goes by “Holy Old Man Bull” and “happily” says he loves his vagina. Designed to convince the psychiatric establishment to retire the term “gender identity disorder,” the film feels much more like propaganda than art. Still, it’s a useful corrective to the Iranian clerics’ version of normal.

I found Eshaghian’s film so moving because it gets closer to the universal truth about being transgender than do the confident activists in Diagnosing Difference. Recently, I wrote a story for the Atlantic about transgendered children [5]. They identified themselves as the other gender almost as soon as they could talk, and their parents’ responses were not all that different than Khomeini’s. They treated it purely as a medical condition and urged their children to live as, and ultimately change their bodies into, the opposite gender. But as one doctor told me, the hardest thing for him to do was to get parents—even the most progressive parents—to hold off on making a decision and let the kids live in an ambiguous place.

This suggests that even in an age of shifting sexual identities and gender roles, gender itself is a hard barrier to get around. Researchers are nowhere near finding a gene or hormone or any convincing medical explanation for why some people are born transgender. They remain a medical mystery, and a social one. The people I met in my reporting were much more like Eshaghian’s characters than like Holy Old Man Bull. They were ultimately not as broken and miserable as Ali-Askar, because they usually had their families’ support. But like him, they could not easily find a way to do what they most wanted, which is to “be like others.”

Photostill of ALI and Anoosh in the documentary “Be Like Others” a Susan Norget Film Production.

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