Earning the state’s certification that one is indeed in need of SRS opens the self and its narration to subjection via medicalization while also authorizing a spiritual actualization of self endorsed by the state. Spiritual, religious and moral truth of one’s gender and sexuality is laced through the impersonal materiality of a documentary archive required for certification, one that is to be made rather than found for it is created in tandem with a casting away of any similarity with the morally despised role of kuni. This negative determination is produced only in close proximity and intimate knowledge of the refused role and the negative path of determination, for legal approval and state sponsorship of SRS must pass through the knotted relation to and distinction from “same-sex playing,” even if at some level same-sex playing is a matter of one’s transsexual everyday practice. This is to say that the state can and does permit the transsexual in pursuit of trans certification and SRS approval to practice a sexuality that is not otherwise so sanctioned. Thus, in the process of becoming – a becoming that may extend indefinitely – the transsexual in a male body may continue to live and be loved by her man, all under the watchful eye of institutional authority. This material reality along with overlapping social cliques and public meeting places draws same-sex players and transsexuals into close and continuous knots of becoming and self-definition. In short, the Revolutionary Islamic State creates spaces of emergent subjectivities, as Najmabadi puts it, “safe havens” for gays and lesbians because of the unusual state sanction of transsexuality.
By way of illustration, a vignette: In the office of the resident clinical psychologist at the Navvab Safavi Emergency Center of the Office for the Socially Harmed of the Welfare Organization, the weekly transsexual support meeting is underway.
The previous week, … [the physician] had talked about the importance of ‘knowing oneself ’ (khaudshinasi – literally ‘selfology’), and had asked everyone to contemplate that topic for the following week’s conversation. He opens the day by asking if the group members had engaged in ‘knowing oneself.’ He is dismayed to see that his proposition had not been taken seriously. Shahla, an MtF, blurts out that she had had no time for it. What was she doing then? “I was busy with my boyfriend, cooking, making sure I make myself up in the style he likes.” [The physician] is clearly annoyed, “are you that dependent on him?” Shahla is not fazed, “of course, I am really in love with him.” … Yasaman, also an MtF, who was there the previous week in a black chador but on this day has shown up in his/her army uniform, is expected by the group to explain [the change of dress as change of gender habit]. “Yes, I do consider myself MtF, I do want to go for SRS, but I am also prepared to take my time. Once I change sex, I won’t be able to pursue some of my ambitions. In any case, when I am in masculine clothes, I enjoy doing manly things; when I am in feminine clothes, I like to do womanly things.
(Najmabadi, 2014: 280)
These avowals suggest a recoil from the depth model of self-reflection that frames the clinical setting and a dispersal, but also a holding, of the trans subject in the agency of conduct. Najmabadi calls this dispersed subject the “subject-of-conduct” and shows convincingly that both models of conduct and deep interiority are interlaced through the trans and same-sex playing community.