Transsexual In Iran!

[Miriam1]

Iranis are simply strange...they justified their argument on analogy that compares HUMANS to FLOUR!

[Seekknowledge]

Hayam I hope you will not complain about the Quran comparing humans to dust

I think Iranians are courageous people by facing this problems according to the Sharia unlike our own Sheikhs kudos to Iranians

[Geel_jire]

^ exactly what is the problem ?

 

some people want to have a sex change operation, and they justify it with lame analogies.

 

this is perversion of sharia ! (no pun intended)

[Lidia]

For those of you who are interested in this topic, there is a book called "women With Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity." By Afsaneh Najmabadi.

 

 

"[The author] examines the broad context of Iran's 1906 Constitutional Revolution through the lens of gender and sexuality. The author's provocative thesis holds that male homoeroticism and same-sex practices (particularly between older men and beardless adolescents known in Persian as amrad) were not only prevalent in Qajar Iran [1796-1925] but should be understood within a larger--and now disavowed--framework of premodern gender ambiguity. For Iran's nationalist reformers, modernity implied the eradication of this gender ambiguity through a process of "heteronormalization."

 

Afsaneh Najmabadi's interpretation thus contrasts with the more commonplace explanation of Middle Eastern modernity that stresses gender segregation and homosociality. This conventional view measures social progress chiefly in terms of women's participation in public life. Homoeroticism is thus seen as a consequence of gender segregation, that is, a deflection of "normal" sexuality rather than the product of long-held cultural traditions and norms.

 

According to Najmabadi, once Iran's fin-de-siecle reformers became conscious of contemporary European condemnations of homosexuality, they correspondingly understood the modernizing project in terms of a repudiation of homoeroticism. As a consequence, reform during the constitutional period and the early Pahlavi regime hinged on a total restructuring of Iranian gender relations, now to be understood in exclusively binary terms of male and female. (Ironically, early secular modernists and Iran's contemporary Islamist regime converge on this point.)

 

Just as damning are the "screens" that contemporary Iranian--and particularly feminist--historiography has erected to conceal the gender ambiguity of the premodern era. "From its inception," Najmabadi asserts, "Iranian feminism has been deeply enmeshed in [the] disavowal, denial, and eradication of male homoeroticism" (235). As a result of historical amnesia, the amrad have been excised from contemporary Iranian historical imagination. Likewise, the same-sex Sufi poetry that lies at the heart of Iranian notions of romantic love has been platonized, transcendentalized, and thus effectively masked.

 

To recapture the fluidity of gender relations in Iran in this period of transition, Najmabadi analyzes with great creativity a wide variety of visual and textual documentation. Her sources range from Qajar-era portraiture (in which lovers appear undifferentiated by gender) to Constitutional-era political cartoons (these ridicule Europeanized--i.e., clean-shaven--Iranian men) to nineteenth-century memoirs of European travel and early twentieth-century romantic novels. In a particularly striking example, Najmabadi deconstructs the iconography of Iran's "lion and sun" emblem. Over time, the lion (symbol of the state) became increasingly masculinized while the (fe)male curly-locked sun was stylized and stripped of gender altogether. In the book's final chapters, Najmabadi considers changes in marriage (from procreative contract to companionate monogamy) and the effects women's education had both within the household and the nation at large.

 

Najmabadi's insistence on invoking her thesis at every turn is slightly repetitious, and in places the writing could have been streamlined, but these are minor complaints. This richly textured study makes an important and original contribution to the literature on Iran. It should naturally appeal to gender theorists and students of nationalism as well."

 

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-162576106.html