Epistemic violence against trans* people in Iran: unethical medico-legal processes of gender-affirming care
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we investigate the ethical and epistemic implications of the medico-legal process of gender-affirming care (GAC) in Iran by focusing on Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on gender-affirming surgery (GAS), as well as legal and medical policies and practices. Hence, we show how despite the legal provisions for gender transition in Iran, trans*Footnote1 individuals face systemic violence and dire living conditions – challenges that are intensified by the entanglement of the medical requirements with the processes of legal gender recognition. Employing Beauchamp and Childress’ (2013) principles of biomedical ethics and Kristie Dotson’s (2011) concept of epistemic violence, we show how the Iranian medico-legal process of gender transition fails to respect the ethical principles of autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice for trans* individuals. Analyzing the legal and medical regulations and processes, we also highlight the ethical breaches that, through testimonial quieting and silencing, contribute to pervasive violence against trans* individuals. Hence, we argue that the process of GAC not only infringes trans* individuals’ rights but also subjects them to multiple forms of violence. To overcome the unethical medico-legal process of gender transition and to remedy epistemic violence against trans* individuals, we propose separating the medical process of GAC from the legal process of gender recognition.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it