Be Like Others

A hospital in the middle of Tehran. The waiting room is full of mostly young people, drawn there by their desperation. They can't live out their love and desire and so they want to alter their gender. In the Islamic Republic of Iran homosexuality is punishable by death, while the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced transsexuality legal twenty years ago. Around 450 sex changes are performed each year in Iran.
The film follows a group of people shortly before the difficult intervention. A tomboyish woman talks about her preference for other women, a young man goes to a women's hairdresser with his boyfriend. If he wears a veil, they are allowed to walk hand in hand through the streets. Even the parents get to speak. Everyone exhibits a deep insecurity. They suffer under a rigid system of morals that considers homosexuals sick and perverse. In the end they don't even know what is happening to them because they cannot get their feelings in order. Tanaz Eshaghian's documentary gives them time to look for words and to formulate their ideas. And we get the feeling that while speaking in front of the attentive camera, they come a little closer to understanding themselves.
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, a country with strict social mores and traditional values, sex-change operations are legal. Over 20 years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (religious edict) making sex change permissible for “diagnosed transsexuals.”
Yet homosexuality is still punishable by death. With Iran’s international arms negotiations dominating news headlines worldwide, a very private kind of drama is unfolding behind the scenes.
BE LIKE OTHERS, by Iranian-American filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian, tells the story of several 20-something men who are grappling to find their true selves in a setting that does not allow for gender non-conformity. Highly feminine and attracted to members of the same sex, yet forced to live in secret for fear of retribution, they adopt an identity legally allowed to them – transsexual. In pursuit of what one man calls simply “a decent life,” they pursue a drastic goal: gender reassignment surgery.
Shamed, silenced, or socially conditioned into denying their sexuality, these men subscribe, seemingly willingly, to the ideology of the Islamic state. For them a gender switch will be no more a sin than, as one religious cleric explains, “changing wheat to flour to bread.” As the story unfolds, we begin to understand the complex logic behind this belief – and the consequences of living in Iranian culture, where philosophy is freely discussed around the dinner table, yet action is grounded in rigidly conservative religious law.
For BE LIKE OTHERS, the locus of the action is the Tehran medical facility of the country’s best-established sex-change surgeon, Dr. Bahram Mir Jalali. Every week his waiting room is filled with new candidates for gender reassignment; Mir Jalali offers a ray of hope, helping patients organize government funding for their procedures while promising that “attracting men will be easier” for them than for today’s progressive Iranian women, who are less amenable to household duties.
It’s through the film’s protagonists that the human implications of the issues emerge. Anoosh, aged 20 and slightly pudgy, has the styling of an effeminate club kid. (In a moment of wry humor, he argues with his mother about the amount of makeup he wears in the street.) His handsome boyfriend, Ali, anticipates that the operation will free them both from societal shame and constant harassment from Iran’s vigilante morality police – and that it will eradicate his obvious discomfort around his desire for another man. Ali Askar, meanwhile, a tall, elegant boy with a soft and deferential attitude, comes from a rural village where his feminine ways have made him a target of constant abuse. In a poignant moment, he quietly reflects in his pre-operation hospital bed that were he “anywhere but Iran” he’d never touch “God’s work.”
And skeptical Farhad provides a fiery moment of truthtelling. Erupting in fury during an interview with ultra-onservative state radio, he says what others refuse to admit: that Iranian society literally forces young men like him to make a choice that they otherwise would never make.
Urging them forward is their unofficial mentor and advocate, Vida, a 24-year-old who says she was “reborn” 10 months previously when she became a “woman.” Eloquent and sharp-eyed, she counsels the boys on how to “fit in” before surgery and warns them of the dangers that await them afterwards. Without family support, she says, many post-op transsexuals fall by the wayside, ending up on the streets, in the sex industry, or even murdered.
Accompanying the protagonists as they prepare for surgery, then following them into the operating room and back into their everyday lives, BE LIKE OTHERS unleashes some powerful ethical questions. Are these young men capable of understanding the irrevocable nature of their decision? Are they ready to shed their natural-born rights to first-class citizenry in order to assume the second-class role of women? And is Vida a true example of fulfillment found through surgery, or a lonely pioneer desperate for compatriots?
At a time when the need for cross-cultural understanding is most urgent, BE LIKE OTHERS offers a poignant and very personal look at life in the world’s first modern theocracy, through the lens of the real people who are living at its fringes – those looking for acceptance through the most radical of means.
Production note
Shame is a real controlling force
Interview with the director
Question: Tell us about how you came up with the idea for this film.
Tanaz Eshaghian: I was reading the New York Times some time in 2004 and came across an article about how sex change operations are allowed in Iran. The article described how Ayatollah Khomeini had given a fatwa over 20 years ago, declaring that if someone is diagnosed as a transsexual by a doctor, he/she is allowed under Islamic law to be helped via a sex change. I was amazed. I simply couldn’t believe it. I kept wondering how this law was interpreted in a traditional society like Iran.
Question: What attracted you particularly to the subject?
T.E.: What drew me to it was the existence of a world within Iran that I’d never heard about and couldn’t even imagine existing. How is Iranian culture dealing with people whose gender or sexualities don’t fall into the traditional male-female divide? I wanted to see how Iranian culture is dealing with people who don’t fit into its traditional narrative. The way I’ve experienced Iranian identity has been as very conservative and tradition-bound, particularly with issues pertaining to sexuality and gender. The way you behave must always be decent and appropriate according to the cultural belief system.
Question: When did you start working on the film?
T.E.: A year and a half ago. I wrote a proposal and tried to interest potential funders in a film on transsexuals in Iran but at the time it was just something on paper, and no one had any real interest. Most people I spoke with said, “Oh okay, another transsexual film” and seemed underwhelmed. I tried to get some funding here and there but it didn’t happen, so I just decided to go to Iran and start shooting on my own with my own money.
Question: You needed permission to shoot in Iran. Was it difficult to get?
T.E.: I thought it was a subject that the government would give me permission for because sex change operations have the support and backing of the state. I think they probably also feel that it gives people in the West a sense of Iran as modern – something other than the usual anti-Iranian portrayals of it as an archaic culture or an anti-western one. The government had also previously allowed some short TV pieces on the subject to be made – for the BBC and French television – and so I had a feeling they would permit me to film as well. I went to the UN here in New York City and applied for official government permission to shoot. I did not hear anything from them. I’d already been in Iran for a month when my official permission was finally granted. I was allowed to shoot for about 35 days, with the government’s backing and help. I couldn’t believe I was able to film for that long! I thought maybe I’d be granted a week or two at the most. I was even sent letters of encouragement. Wherever I went, I carried my official letters stating that I was permitted to shoot.
Question: When did you start filming?
T.E.: I started shooting a few days after I got to Iran. I went to the clinic, had some tea, talked to Dr. Mir Jalali and everybody there, got a sense of things and then just kept on showing up and hanging around from then on. The clinic is open every Tuesday and Wednesday and to go there was by far the best part of this film’s shooting experience. Just sitting in the waiting room of the clinic and observing the guys and the girls who come in and out of there was fascinating. Some were looking for a sex change, others had complications after the operation. Sometimes very depressed parents came in to inquire about the procedure for their son or daughter. The conversations in the waiting room were incredible. I thought that just putting a camera in that waiting room and running it would be a fantastic documentary on its own!
Question: What about the doctor? Was he on board right away?
T.E.: I knew that the doctor was on board before I went. He had allowed other camera crews to film at the clinic. He is quite okay with what he’s doing because first of all it is legal and state sanctioned, and it also appears to be quite a progressive act. He also knows that he is a ray of light, the source of a solution for his desperate patients.
Question: So, day by day, you went to the waiting room, going from one person to another, seeing what was happening and just filming?
T.E.: Yes, I was just shooting what I saw, and while I was filming I was trying to figure out the logic of what was going on there. I wanted to understand why these people were interested in having a sex change, why they were willingly showing up there, and why are they were treating the doctor as a savior. What was going on that they were so desperate and they wanted these sex changes so badly? Whenever I found a scene that could give me a clue as to the rationale and mind-set that was driving these decisions, that was where I pointed the camera. I can’t tell you the conversations I heard in there and key aspects of the culture that were revealed within them. These people were trying to figure out what to do when you don’t fit into the norm. All the belief systems were coming out in this really entertaining dialogue.
Question: Was the fact that you’re a foreigner important in your relationship with your characters?
T.E.: I think that the fact that I came from another country and yet could relate to the people there with the cultural etiquette they are used to was very useful for me. On the one hand they got to see me as an American, which was fun for them and intriguing. Because I was from the “outside” I think they were more open to me. They would take pains to explain things to me if I didn’t understand something, which was great. I think my “Westerner” status made them feel that whatever they said to me didn’t really matter in the same way that it would if they said it to someone who lived in Iran – who would potentially be able to use it against them one day. But on the other hand they also felt a bond with me because I could speak the language and understand from a cultural vantage point where they were coming from.
Question: This is obviously an intimate portrait of an extraordinary subculture. But to a western audience it’s also an extraordinary glimpse into a culture we don’t know and don’t see very often.
T.E.: My idea going into it wasn’t so much to make a film about a subculture. My thinking, my belief was and is that you can really understand the logic of any culture at its margins, through those who don’t fit it. At its fringes you can understand what everybody else is upholding and taking to be “common sense.” That was my interest – what is “common sense” here with regards to understanding gender and gender roles and expectations.
Question: What did you feel was the motivation for why people were having sex changes?
T.E.: My observation while filming, and what I tried to communicate in the film, is that what is compelling these guys to voluntarily come to the clinic and go under the knife is one of the primary foundations of the culture: the desire to avoid shame to the exclusion of all else. Shame is a real controlling force in people’s lives there. Partly what is driving these boys to operate is that in their natural state they are perceived as disgraceful. They constantly feel that people are thinking, “Why do they look like this? It’s disgraceful and immoral.” I think it must be unbearable for them to feel that way. It’s the worst thing in a communal culture to feel so, and so you look for anything to end it. It is better to both feel and say to others, “No, I’m not filthy or someone you should look down on. I’m ill. This is a medical condition and it’s a scientific problem, not a moral one. You can’t judge this – it’s beyond judgment because it’s medical.” It takes it out of that shame system and brings it into a medical discourse. I think that is a really key drive that compels people to do this. The characters really feel that this could be the answer to those awful feelings and the self-disgust that comes from people shaming you all of the time.
Question: So this will allow them to stay in their family and in their culture?
T.E.: No. It doesn’t necessarily mean that your family will accept you – a family is disgraced if their boy becomes a girl. What the families want is for these boys to just stop it and stop moving their bodies that way. You’re a man, be a man. But these boys can’t do that, they can’t help it. They cannot do what their families want, which is to act like a manly man and be attracted to women and walk stiffly. They look for a solution that will at least allow them to be attracted to the gender they are naturally attracted to without feelings of shame, sin and wrong-doing and move around in society without harassment.
Interview: Olivia Barker, 15. Dezember 2007