Other reasons to change your identity papers

I told my mom that when I called the embassy and told them I wanted to renew my identification papers, they were surprised since identification papers aren't typically "renewed." She thought for a moment then gasped, "Maybe they thought you were getting a sex-change!" Aside from changing identity papers to reflect the new regime, Iran will also change identity papers if you are switching sex. I had forgotten about this.

A few years ago when I was still in grad school, I met Afsaneh Najmabadi who wrote "Women With Mustaches and Men Without Beards," which is about the evolution of gender and sexual identity in Iran. At the time, I was totally shocked to learn that Iran performs more sex change surgeries in the world, only second to Thailand. This was shocking to me because homosexuality is literally against the law in Iran and punishable by death. So why is transexuality okay?

The reason why it's allowed (and actually subsidized--the government will pay for most of the surgery!) is because it's believed that if you're a gay man, it's illegal to desire other men... but if you're a gay man who undergoes a sex change, then you are then officially a woman, so it's okay to desire men at that point. This is why the government will change your identification papers and birth certificate for you--so there is no trace of your previous sex at all. They want sex to be completely black and white.

"I think in Iran it is better; in Iran they say you need to know your identity - either you have to be a boy or a girl."

Many decades ago, the Ayatollah Khomeini even declared a fatwa that sex changes were okay and encouraged as a "solution" to homosexuality. When I spoke to Afsaneh, she said that this so-called solution had actually opened a kind of Pandora's Box of gay possibilities: While it's illegal to be gay, it's legal to be "pre-op" as long as you carry papers authenticating that you are (these papers have no expiration date), so now gay people all go to the doctor to get the pre-op certificate so they can be openly gay in case they're caught by police. There are parks and food courts all over Tehran that are popularly known to be gay pick-up spots now because of this phenomena.

There are all kinds of problems also though: For example, women in Iran are forced to ride in the back of public buses, so where does a pre-op person ride "legally"? If he is pre-op to become a man, he is legally supposed to sit at the front of the bus, but if he still looks like a woman, that's illegal too. There's also the issue of hundreds of gay Iranians being pressured into having sex changes when they are only gay, not trans.

Apparently, people now fly to Iran to get sex-change surgeries because the doctors there are so practiced and the surgery is performed so often. Here's a fascinating photo-essay.