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GENUS OF SEX OR THE SEXING OF JINS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2013

Abstract

In recent decades, Iran has witnessed radical transformations concerning the conceptualization of and procedural standards for changing sex. Psychologists, medical and legal practitioners, law enforcement officials, and scholars of fiqh have debated the advisability (in debates among health and legal professionals) or the permissibility (among scholars of fiqh) of sex-change. This article asks what historical transformations of the concept of jins/genus have informed the debates and enabled the contemporary dominant concepts and practices that shape them. How has jins come to mean sex and how does this matter? The article first maps out the historical genealogy of these reconfigurations. What were some of the 19th- and pre-19th-century concepts that could be considered disparate precedents to this cluster around sex/jins? It then reviews some of the late-19th- and 20th-century reshaping of biomedical knowledge and marital practices that have contributed to the contemporary meanings of jins.

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Articles
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

NOTES

Author's note: Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Barnard College (2005), University of Connecticut (2007), University of Pittsburg (2007), American Historical Association 2009 annual conference, University of Washington (2009), UCLA (2009), and University of Heidelberg (2009). I am thankful to organizers and participants for giving me the chance to present it and for their insightful feedback. My late friend, Natalie Kampen, pushed me persistently to transform it into an article. I dedicate it to her memory. I have also benefited enormously from critical commentary by Kathryn Babayan, Claudia Castañeda, Alireza Doostdar, Behzad Karimi, Sara Omar, Arafat Razzaque, and Carole Vance. I am grateful to all and to Elizabeth Angowski, Anoushe Modarresi, Reza Salami, Ali Akbar Vatanparast, and Kirsten Wesselhoeft for their invaluable research assistance. My gratitude to the four anonymous readers of IJMES, who also provided me with very helpful suggestions, and to Beth Baron and Sara Pursley for insistent encouragement.

1 For these debates, see Najmabadi, Afsaneh, Professing Selves: Sex and Desire in Contemporary Iran (Durham, N.C.: Duke University PressGoogle Scholar, forthcoming).

2 I use “sex-gender” as a hyphenated term in order to indicate its relative non-bifurcation into two categories in Iran, except in the domain of women's rights activism and related feminist scholarship.

3 Persian-English Dictionary, P. 0374, http://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/contextualize.pl?p.1.steingass.1861001 (accessed 9 February 2006). Its usage in Arabic and Turkish seems to be of a similarly recent origin (correspondence with Dror Ze'evi, 31 July 2004). According to Sara Omar (correspondence, 12 January 2009), in Arabic, “one can date a quasi-attestation to ‘jins’ = ‘sex’ to as early as 1828–29! Ellious Bocthor's Dictionnaire français-arabe (revu et augmenté par Caussin de Perceval) (3rd ed. Paris 1864) lists the following: For ‘sexe’ he first gives the French definition ‘différence physique constitutive du mâle et de la femelle’ and then the Arabic ‘farj’. But under ‘sexuel’ (which he specifies as ‘qui tient au sexe, qui le caractérise’) his gloss is ‘jinsî’! . . . (see page 320). Bocthor is known to have invented/coined a number of new words in Arabic. . . . This maybe one of such words, coined by Bocthor.” Despite this lexical move in the early 19th century, its widespread use in Arabic does not seem to have emerged until the early decades of the 20th century. See El-Rouayheb, Khaled, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 158–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Massad, Joseph, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar, 32, n. 106, 171–72.

4 In fact, one of jins's earliest modern reconfigurations appears as close to our contemporary race/ethnicity, when Iranian modernists began to write about jins-i Īrānī. For a recent discussion of this issue, see Kurzman, Charles, “Weaving Iran into the Tree of Nations,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37 (2005): 137–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 149. This is an issue that deserves more research, since in the writings of many intellectuals of the 19th century, such as Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani, issues of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality were critically interwoven with themes of backwardness and progress. The usage of jins as racialized ethnicity has been generally replaced by the later concept of nizhād, especially in the pan-Iranist currents of 20th-century Iranian nationalism.

5 My focus in this research is on Persian sources. While I have checked some related Arabic sources and many of my arguments may be pertinent to the larger Islamic discourse, I generally do not assume so, except when depending on others’ scholarship on this topic.

6 As Cyrus Schayegh has persuasively argued, while European biomedical sciences were embraced, the embrace involved a national claiming: European scientific achievements were of ancient Irano-Islamic parentage. See Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900–1950 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2009), chap. 2. For the Ottoman Empire, Dror Ze'evi has persuasively argued that while the classical single-sex model of the human body—with the woman as the imperfect version of man, and a single notion of desire that did not differentiate according to the sex-gender of the object of desire—was dropped in the 19th century, it was not replaced with one determinate model. Ze'evi, Dror, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East 1500–1900 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006).Google Scholar This was also the case in Iran until recent decades.

7 For a fuller discussion of this point, see Najmabadi, Afsaneh, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005).Google Scholar

8 The use of nature and natural in this context calls for further historical work. The classical concept of fiṭra in this very same constitutive moment became ṭabī‘a. Fiṭra connoted a person's “born-with” characteristics; it was an all-inclusive category, not divided into physical and mental. Ṭabī‘a came to mark what we now think of as more physiological characteristics of a person. For example, in classical Islamic discourse, all persons were thought to be born with a Muslim fiṭra that would then be corrupted if brought up by non-Muslim parents. The later meaning of ṭabī‘a came closer to nature as distinct from the social and cultural.

9 See Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, trans. Hurley, Robert (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).Google Scholar

10 The Tehran police (established in late 1878), for instance, was only marginally interested in “sex crimes.” The police reports indicate a concern with theft, public drunkenness, and negligence of duty (on the part of members of the new police force itself!) more than any other offense. See Anisah Shaykh Rizaʾi and Shahla Azari, eds., Guzarish-ha-yi Nazmiyah az Mahallat-i Tihran, two vols. (Tehran: Sazman-i Asnad-i Milli-i Iran, 1998). While in 1886 public coffeehouses were ordered closed “because of corrupt practices prevalent in these locations,” the dominant “corrupt practice” of interest to the police was female prostitution (ibid., 1:99). Not until perhaps the late 1920s and the 1930s do we have a government in Iran that would be intensely invested in regulating its subjects. See Cyrus Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong. A category of crimes in national law specifically named sexual (jarāʾim-i jinsī, as distinct from sinful acts punishable by religious sanctions—ḥudūd and ta'zīr) was so named at a much later date.

11 See Rosenthal, Franz, “Ar-Razi on the Hidden Illness,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52 (1978): 4560Google ScholarPubMed, which includes a section on Ibn Sina's concept as well. For a summary, see Dallal, Ahmad, “Pre-Modern Scientific Discourses on Female Sexuality” (which is more comprehensive than the title would suggest!), in Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, vol. III (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 405Google Scholar.

12 I am using “deviation” for the Persian/Arabic word inḥirāf. Conceptually, it is linked to the notion of the straight path (ṣirāt-i mustaqīm) that, if followed, would take a person to the desired destination, thus linking it to an important Islamic ethical injunction. This is a different configuration from the notion of perversion that emerged in 19th-century psychology. See Davidson, Arnold I., The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, chap. 3. It is this word (with its affiliated chains of meaning) that has now become the word for “sexual deviation,” inḥirāf-i jinsī. Thus “sexual deviation” in the contemporary Iranian psychobiomedical register continues its meaning of derailed desire, linked with the presumption of natural heterosexuality of this earlier moment.

13 For a discussion of minoritization of sexual types, see Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1990).Google Scholar

14 This concept is borrowed from Tickner, Lisa, “Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference,” Genders 3 (1988): 92128Google Scholar.

15 The awkward phrase “Persian (in Iran)” signals the limitations of this research; it is focused on material written in Persian in Iran or about Iran. I have no knowledge of what is written in Persian in Afghanistan or Tajikistan, nor have I researched the subject in the many other languages of Iran (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, Baluchi, etc.).

16 There has been a lively debate in the Iranian diasporic gay press over this distinction. See, for example, Avaz, “Tafavut-i ‘Hamjins-gara’ ba Hamjins-baz va Bachchah-baz dar Chist?” (What Is the Difference between “the Same-sex-inclined” with the Same-sex-player and Child-player?), in Homan 9 (October–November 1994): 27–33. Avaz seems unaware of the emergence of the concept of hamjins-garā in the 1960s and 1970s Iranian discourses of psychiatry and criminology, and suggests that hamjins-garā is a new expression of unknown origin in Persian (pp. 29 and 32). Indeed, in the 1950s–1970s, several other expressions were employed as well in sexological, marital advice, health, and popular general-interest journals. These included: hamjins-khvāhī (desiring same-sex), in Khvandaniha, 28 June 1958, p. 26 and 22 July 1967, pp. 41–43 (in the latter article, hamjis-dūst, same-sex lover, is also used); hamjins-ju'i (seeking same-sex), in Khvandaniha, 12 February 1963, p. 40; hamjins-ṭalab (desiring same-sex), in Zan-i Ruz, March 1974, p. 102. My point is not to criticize the adoption (consciously or not) of the concept from this earlier discourse for one's own identification, but that the ahistorical consciousness may have contributed to the progressist invocation of hamjins-garā against hamjins-bāz and bachchah-bāz. In Avaz's essay and in almost all subsequent writings on this topic, relations marked as hamjins-garā are attributed all desirable positive adjectives: they are loving, egalitarian, and freely chosen; the others are exploitative and based on disparities of power and privilege. This critique was relentless in the pages of Homan and has continued in other gay publications that followed it. The move to make this differentiation, given the overwhelming hostile culture inside and outside Iran that these early gay activists faced, is totally understandable, but it did set from the start a tight normative frame for their antiheternormative project. See Sima Shakhsari, “From Hamjensbaaz to Hamjensgaraa: Diasporic Queer Reterritorializations and Limits of Transgression,” unpublished paper.

17 I am grateful to Claudia Castañeda for pointing me in this direction. For a similar move, but in a very different context, see Davidson's discussion of the significance of “pervert” used as an adjective rather than a noun. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality, 62–63.

18 Mahmud Iran-panah, ed., Majmuʿah-i Tan va Ravan: Siks Zindagi Ast: Anchih kih Lazimast az an Bidanid (Body and Psyche Series: Sex Is Life Itself: What You Need to Know about It) (n.p., 1999).

19 When a severe earthquake hit the area around Qazvin in 1962, the popular storyteller Subhi Muhtadi, who was fundraising in a gathering for the earthquake survivors and was refused by a “good-looking young man” (on the grounds that this was the government's responsibility), was said to have retorted, “This young man likes to aid his earthquake-survivor brothers in-kind [kumak-i jinsī].” Khvandaniha, 15 June 1974, p. 16. The newspaper column, working on Tehrani perceptions of Qazvinis as people who have a proclivity for male–male sex, was occasioned by reports of aid to African famine victims. For a similar column, suggesting that some television personalities could aid the African victims “in-kind,” see Khvandaniha, 29 June 1974, p. 17.

20 For a full elaboration of a similar approach, see Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality, chap. 5, “Styles of Reasoning: From the History of Art to the Epistemology of Science,” where he concludes, “We shall not understand the concept of perversion until we examine its rule-governed behavior with other concepts to see what kinds of statements can be made with it. . . . Even the identical sentence need not constitute the same statement. A statement is defined by a ‘field of stabilization.’ . . . This field of stabilization assures the possibility of the repeatability of statements, but also imposes particularly exacting restrictions on this repeatability” (p. 140, emphasis in original). The continued belonging of jins to distinct registers works in part against stabilization.

21 I am taking the notion of sex as a universal/unique signified/signifier from Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume 1, where he argues that the emergence of “an analytics of sexuality” (148, emphasis in original) has made it possible “to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere: sex was thus able to function as a unique signifier and as a universal signified” (154).

22 Dallal, “Pre-Modern Scientific Discourses,” 404.

23 Over a century into these transformations, the work of sex has become so ubiquitous that it has now turned back onto classical texts themselves. In a recent translation of Ibn Sina's Qanun into Persian, bāh (coitus) has been translated into sexual instinct (gharīzah-i jinsī), shahwa (lust) into sexual desire (ārizū-yi jinsī), iḥtilām (becoming overpowered by lust in sleep) into sexual dream (khvāb-i jinsī), shahwa wa-ḥarakātuhā (lust and its motions) into lustful desire and sexual motions (ārizū-yi shahvānī va ḥarakāt-i jinsī), li-l-dhakar wa-l-unthā into “in the two sexes of male and female” (dar dau jins-i nar va māddah). These examples have been selected from Ibn Sina, Qanun, vol. 5, trans. ʿAbd al-Rahman Sharafkandi (Tehran: Surush, 2007), 217–25, and compared with respective passages in al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, vol. 7 (Beirut: Nublis, 1999).

24 The dominant term classically is shahvat (lust); in recent decades, this term has been taken over by mayl (inclination, desire)—itself a significant shift in need of further historiographical research.

25 The famous prophetic hadith, “gossip is a greater sin than fornication,” makes sense as excesses of homologous passions—satisfying passions in sinful ways are being compared and ranked.

26 In books of medicine, there is often a discussion of women who possess too long a clitoris, said not to desire men and to take female lovers. Frequently this diagnostic statement is followed by the recommendation of clitoridectomy.

27 I am only at the beginning of this work, so what follows is preliminary and at times speculative.

28 There is a huge literature on this topic. See Dallal, “Pre-Modern Scientific Discourses,” for an excellent summary.

29 Ibid., 401.

30 See, for example, Yusuf ibn Muhammad Yusufi Hiravi, Kitab-i Tibb-i Yusufi: Mausum bi Jamiʿ al-Favayid, a 16th-century text printed in the 19th century, ed. Mirza ʿAbd al-Mutallib Kashani (Tehran: 1285 ah [1868]).

31 For a rich analysis of Safavid medical texts, with a focus on their differential gender presentation, see Behzad Karimi, “Mauqiʿiyat-i Zanan dar Guftman-i Pizishki-i ʿAsr-i Safaviyah” (Status of Women in the Medical Discourse of the Safavid Era), unpublished manuscript.

32 Tafrishi, Mirza Abu al-Hasan Khan, Patuluzhi-i Tibbi: Matlaʿ al-Tibb-i Nasiri (Medical Pathology) (Tehran: Karkhanah-i Karbalaʾi Muhammad Husayn, 1883), 5Google Scholar.

33 Shirazi, Sayyid Muhammad, Bulugh al-Ibtihaj fi Sihhat al-Izdivaj (Maturing of Joy in the Health of Marriage). Published in IstanbulGoogle Scholar, no publisher, no date.

34 Shirazi, Bulugh al-Ibtihaj, 3. The French text may well have been the 17th-century book Conjugal Love, or, The Pleasures of the Marriage Bed, penned by the French surgeon Nicholas Venette, which had already gone through eight printings before his death in 1698. One of the most popular of all the European sex manuals, it had a reputation as “the Bible of the French peasantry,” was often revised, and was translated into numerous languages. My thanks to Pat Simons for this lead.

35 Shirazi, Bulugh al-Ibtihaj, 21–22.

36 Ibid., 5, and more extensively when discussing how a fetus becomes male or female, 101–22.

37 I want to emphasize that when thinking about transplanted categories, my concern is not to demonstrate or trace “origin” of transplant. Rather, I ask what does that transplanting, appropriation, and embracing mean for importers? What work do transplanted categories perform in their new habitus and in relation to the many other discursive practices that inform their meaning there?

38 For a full discussion, see Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong.

39 Stall, Sylvanus, What a Young Husband Ought to Know, Sex and Self series (Philadelphia, Pa.: Vir, 1897)Google Scholar; Hidayat-allah Khan Suhrab, Rahnuma-yi Shauhar-i Javan dar Marhalah-i Izdivaj (Guidance for Young Husbands for the Stage of Marriage) (1929). Suhrab's locations, both in the army and in Shiraz, are significant issues for further research. Several of the early translators of this genre were from southern Iranian cities (Shiraz, Dizful, Ahvaz), which had become (over the previous century, but especially after the 1917 Russian Revolution removed the Tsarist government as a competing influence) an expanding domain of British cultural, economic, and political presence. That English books had become available at local booksellers indicates the commerce in books between southern Iran and British India. Suhrab's translations included other titles from the same series, Rahnuma-yi Mardan az Nazar-i Bihdasht va Zanashuʾi (Guidance for Men on Hygiene and Marriage) and Rahnuma-yi Pisaran (Guidance for Boys). The second title is probably a translation of the 1909 book What a Young Boy Ought to Know. In later decades, more titles from the series were translated into Persian by Nusratallah Kasimi, a physician and a publicist during the Pahlavi period whose translations continue to be reprinted. These include Anchah Bayad Yik Javan Bidanad (What a Young Man Ought to Know), (n.p., n.d., at least four reprints, first published in 1937); Anchah Bayad Har Zan-i Shauhardar Bidanad (What Every Married Woman Ought to Know), 6th reprint (Tehran: Kumish, 1994); Anchah Bayad Har Mard-i Zandar Bidanad (What Every Married Man Ought to Know) (Tehran: Shirkat-i Muʾallifan va Mutarjiman-i Iran, 1990); and Anchah Bayad Har Dukhtar Bidanad (What Every Girl Ought to Know), 8th reprint (Tehran: Kumish, 2006 [first published in 1974]).

40 For a discussion of the significance of translating Self into Personal directives, see Najmabadi, Professing Selves, chap. 8.

41 For the significance of Dar al-Funun, see Maryam Ekhtiar, “The Dar al-Funun: Educational Reform and Cultural Development in Qajar Iran” (PhD diss., New York University, 1994).

42 Muhammad Ali Tutia's books include Amraz-i Zuhravi (Muqaribati) (Venereal Diseases) (n.p., 1931); Malish va Tamas (Massage and Touch) (Tehran: n.p., 1932), on the ill consequences of “unnatural regenerative relations, such as masturbation, tribadism and rubbing [ṭabaq-zanī, musāḥiqah], and Sapphism”); and another on male same-sex practices (ubna and liwāṭ). For a full discussion of Tutia within the context of the establishment of medical sciences and practices, see Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong, chap. 6.

43 Tutia, Malish va Tamas, 82.

44 Ibid., 83.

45 Suhrab, Rahnuma-yi Shauhar, 159–62.

46 For a persuasively argued and historically rich analysis of this issue, see Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong.

47 In recent decades, and especially in the post-1979 period, there has been a new coming together of this popular psychology discourse with Islamic writings on sexual desire, needs of the youth, marital relations, and so forth.

48 Published by Kanun-i Maʿrifat, a highly respected publisher of the period, which had earlier published Encyclopedia of Sexual Knowledge and other texts. For a fuller discussion of this genre, see Najmabadi, Professing Selves, chap. 2. At least twelve different translators have retranslated this text. Each translation has gone through numerous reprints, as high as nineteen over one decade, sometimes by different publishers. These numbers are very incomplete; I have compiled them through searching the online catalogue of the National Archives and Library, which made it legally obligatory for publishers to send it two copies of all publications only in 1990. The later editions are translated from a new edition of the English as revised by Gloria Stone Aitken and Aquiles J. Sobrero (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965). The first English edition appeared in 1935. One translation, that of Tarazallah Akhavan (Tehran: Gulshaʾi, 1997), which was reprinted at least eight times by this publisher, at least nine times by Arghun, and by two other publishers as well, has been used to produce an audio version for the blind.

49 I owe the expression “vernacular science” to Tani Barlow. Barlow invokes the emergence of vernacular sociology in China as a field that was discursively productive for and related to how advertisements marketed particular sets of modern girl commodities. She analyzes advertisements themselves as pedagogical texts, popularizing scientific notions about health and hygiene, skin care, women care, and so forth. See Barlow, Tani, “Buying In: Advertising and the Sexy Modern Girl Icon in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s,” in The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, ed. Weinbaum, Alys Eveet al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 288316.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50 Ittilaʿat, 15 November 1933, p. 1, and continued in the next issue, 18 November 1933, p. 1. Khvajah-nuri's many books include Rumuz-i Ravani-i Mudiriyat (Psychological Secrets of Management) (Tehran: n.p., n.d.); Ravankavi: Ganj-i Pinhan-i Darun-i Khaud ra Kashf Kun (Psychoanalysis: Discover the Hidden Treasure of Your Inner Self) (Tehran: n.p., n.d.); Ravankavi ya Tariqah-i Sahl bara-yi Shinakhtan-i Ihsasat-i Makhfi-i Khaud va Digraran (Psychoanalysis or the Easy Way to Know Your and Others’ Hidden Feelings) (Tehran: n.p., 1963); Ravankavi va Darman-i Tars, Tanbali, Kamru'i, Ya's, Hisadat (Psychoanalysis and Treating Fear, Laziness, Shyness, Hopelessness, and Envy) (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1957).

51 Ittilaʿat, 7 August 1934, p. 2.

52 See Amin, Camron, The Making of the Modern Iranian Women: Gender, State Policy, and Popular Culture, 1865–1946 (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2002).Google Scholar

53 Ittilaʿat, 25 December 1934, p. 2 and 26 December 1934, p. 2. Quote from first part.

54 This proposition echoes Thomas Laqueur's analysis in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

55 Ittilaʿat, 27 May 1948, p. 2. Mayl-i Jinsi dar Zan va Mard (Sexual Desire in Women and Men), translated by ʿAbdullah Tavakkul, no date, no publisher, probably published by Kanun-i Maʿrifat.

56 Ittilaʿat, 9 June 1948, p. 6.

57 The book, possibly the Freud section of Die Heilung durch den Geist: Mesmer. Mary Baker-Eddy. Freud (Leipzig, Germany: Insel-verlag, 1931), was published by Kanun-i Maʿrifat. Earlier its publication was advertised in Ittilaʿat, 11 July 1948, p. 2, and Ittilaʿat, 6 September 1948, p. 2.

58 Ittilaʿat, 23 September 1948, p. 7.

59 For samples of such advertisements (the graphics of which deserve analysis) from this same period see Ittilaʿat, 20 April 1948, p. 5; Ittilaʿat, 2 August 1948, p. 3; Ittilaʿat, 11 August 1948, p. 3. Similarly, in academic medical literature until the early 1950s, jins continued to be used in its meaning of genus. Hasan Mirdamadi's Mikraub-shinasi-i Mir, for instance, translated antigène as pādgin, explaining in a footnote that gène came from Latin genus and as such it had common roots with the Persian gin, which was used in contemporary language in such words as hamgin, meaning hamjins. Mir's Microbiology (the back of the book has the title in French as Prècis de microbiologie et sérologie) (Tehran: Raushanaʾi, 1937), 422; see also p. 428, where homogène is translated as hamgin and hamjins.

60 Hasuri, HasanRaftar-i Jinsi bar Payah-i Siksaufiziulauzhi (Sexual Behavior on the Basis of Sexo-physiology) (Tehran: Tahuri, 1968, reprinted in 1973 and 1979)Google Scholar. The English title as printed on the back cover is: A Textbook of Psychophysiological Sexology.

61 Hasuri, Raftar-i Jinsi, 1.

62 Both quotes from Hasuri, Raftar-i Jinsi, 5.

63 See note 21 above.

64 See Cilardo, Agostino, “Historical Development of the Legal Doctrine Relative to the Position of the Hermaphrodite in the Islamic Law,” The Search 2, no. 7 (1986): 128–70Google Scholar; and Sanders, Paula, “Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, ed. Baron, Beth and Keddie, Nikki (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 7495.Google Scholar

65 For a fuller elaboration, see Najmabadi, Professing Selves, chap. 5.

66 See, for instance, the interview with Dr. Shahriar Kohanzad, one of the top sex-reassignment surgeons in Iran, in the special dossier in the monthly magazine of the Welfare Organization of Iran, Mihr-i naw 4 (November/December 2009): 23–44 on transsexuality. The interview runs from pp. 40 to 43. The entire dossier is framed by the notion of “contradiction between soul and body” (tażadd-i rūḥ va jism).

67 Muhammad Mahdi Karimi-nia, Taghyir-i Jinsiyat az Manzar-i Fiqh va Huquq (Sex-change from the Perspective of Fiqh and Law) (Qum: Intisharat-i Markaz-i Fiqhi-i Aʾammah-i Athar, 2010), 42–43.

68 Ibid., 46.

69 Johnson, Mark, Beauty and Power: Transgendering and Cultural Transformation in the Southern Philippines(Oxford: Berg, 1997), 104.Google Scholar

70 Sinnott similarly notes, “Thais often use specific terms for homosexual or transgendered individuals, such as ‘gay,’ ‘tom,’ ‘dee,’ ‘tut,’ or ‘kathoey’ rather than trying to reach for an overarching term that could encompass all these categories, such as ‘homosexual,’ ‘third sex/gender.’” Sinnott, Megan, Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004), 8Google Scholar.

71 Sinnott, Toms and Dees, 63.

72 See the early Homan article, referenced above, defining the “musts” of homosexual relationships, but this is now common discourse in many sites. For a critique, see Shakhsari, “From Hamjensbaaz to Hamjensgaraa.”