“Maryam, another MtF,” challenges Yasaman’s commitment to their shared identity as transsexual only to face a pile up of other criticism as Houri and Shahla expand on the topic of the necessity of flexible gender habit to accommodate changeable work opportunities and the ups and downs of romance. “Yes, if my current relationship doesn’t work out and I have to go back to work, I’d switch clothes to be able to get better jobs” (281).
Yet none of these SRS potentials would consider themselves gay or same-sex players and this without necessarily sharing in a homophobia of aversion, although certainly, some do voice extreme discomfort or shame at being “mistaken” for kuni or even about sex had under the assumption that both partners were of the same sex or, in a more extreme case, when a husband and wife had sex though the wife felt herself to be male and others, including both female intimates and male friends, saw her as male identified. Trans identity in becoming is neither forced into a single path nor is it frayed or worn thin by the necessity to present as the “wrong” gender habit. Each member of the support group capably calculates with that necessity and risk of disapproval while also refusing the judgement of others who so calculate. This flexible sensibility loops back upon itself to escape the exposure of gossip and shame by avowing and embracing the potential “realities” of unpredicatable fates, including the surprising evidence of God’s “creativity” in creating the transsexual, as one testimony puts it.
In the early pages of Professing Selves, Najmabadi presents us with her regretful realization that she could not in good conscience write an ethnography of the contemporary trans community in Tehran. This insight came early in the twelve-year project, as she began to frequent trans support groups, activist spaces and clinic and court archives. She resolves her conundrum by steering between the patterning of ethnography and an impersonal history of law and institution, all the while narrating snippets and fragments of stories told to her in over a decade of conversation and careful listening. As fragments of an archive of encounter, they have the uncanny effect of unweaving the categorical order of the state and dissolving the analytic lexicon of medicine and academic studies, while religious themes are not uncommon in the dreams and fantasies that Najmabadi reports. Several of these bear out what still other trans individuals reveal, namely, that for many their motivation or inspiration for transitioning is best expressed in a vision of their own body in death.