Several years ago, Marie’s real name was Asgar. She worked as a truck driver and sported a moustache. However, all her life she felt as if she was born into a wrong body. When Marie found out that the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeiny’s government permitted sex-change operations, she applied and was accepted into the program. Before undergoing the operation, she informed her former wife of her intentions. Together, she and her wife told their children that Asgar was going on a long trip with his truck. After the sex-change operation, Marie’s former wife told their children that Asgar had died in a car accident. Marie was then introduced as a distant aunt. For a while things went well, but when an Iranian gossip magazine revealed her true identity, Marie’s children cut all their ties with her.
She now lives in a small apartment in downtown Tehran. She can’t return to her old job, because women in Iran don’t work as truck drivers. Alone, abandoned by her children and friends, she spends her days with shady people in dark alleys. From a medical perspective, her operation has been very successful, but Marie knows that her decision has left her completely alone in this world.
Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the issue of transsexuality in Iran had never been officially addressed by the government. Beginning in the mid-1980s, however, transsexual individuals were officially recognized by the government and allowed to undergo sex reassignment surgery. As of 2008, Iran carries out more sex change operations than any other nation in the world except for Thailand. The government provides up to half the cost for those needing financial assistance, and a sex change is recognised on the birth certificate. In 1963, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini wrote a book in which he stated that there was no religious restriction on corrective surgery. At the time Khomeini was a radical, anti-Shah revolutionary and his fatwas did not carry any weight with the Imperial government, which did not have any specific policies regarding transsexual individuals.
After the Revolution, the new religious government that came to be established after the 1979 Iranian Revolution classed transsexuals and transvestites with gays and lesbians, who were condemned by Islam and faced the punishment of lashing or even death under Iran’s penal code. One early campaigner for transsexual rights was Maryam Hatoon Molkara, who was formerly male and known as Fereydoon. Before the revolution, she had longed to become physically female but could not afford surgery and wanted religious authorization. In 1975, she began to write letters to Ayatollah Khomeini, who was to become the leader of the revolution and was in exile. After the revolution, she was fired, forcedly injected with male hormones, and institutionalized.
She was later released with help from her connections and continued to lobby many other leaders. Later she went to see Khomeini, who had returned to Iran. During this visit, she was subjected to beatings from his guards. Khomeini, however, did give her a letter to authorize her sex reassignment operation, which she later did in 1997. Due to this fatwa, issued in 1987, transsexuals in Iran have been able to live as women until they can afford surgery, have surgical reassignment, have their birth certificates and all official documents issued to them in their new gender, and get married to men. Khomeini’s original fatwa has since been reconfirmed by the current leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, and is also supported by many other Iranian clerics.
However, there is still a great deal of stigma attached to the idea of transsexualism and gender reassignment in ordinary Iranian society, and most transsexuals, after completing their transition, are advised to maintain discretion about their past. Once a transsexual individual has undergone sex reassignment, that person legally becomes the new sex – male, in the case of transsexual men, and female, in the case of transsexual women. All legal documents, such as birth certificates and passports, are also changed accordingly.
Hojatoleslam Kariminia, a mid-level cleric who is in favor of transsexual rights, has stated that he wishes “to suggest that the right of transsexuals to change their gender is a human right” and that he is attempting to “introduce transsexuals to the people through my work and in fact remove the stigma or the insults that is attach to these people.” UNHCR’s 2001 report says that sex reassignment surgery is performed frequently and openly in Iran, and that homosexual and cross-dressing people, although unrelated to transsexualism, would be safe as long as they keep a low profile. However, the Safra Project’s 2004 report considers UNHCR’s report over-optimistic.
The Safra Project’s report suggests that UNHCR underestimated legal pressure over transsexual and LGBT matters. The report further states that currently, it is not possible for presumed transsexual individuals to choose not to undergo surgery – if they are approved for sex reassignment, they are expected to undergo treatment immediately. Those who wish to remain “non-operative” (as well as those who cross-dress and/or identify as genderqueer) are considered their biological gender, and as such they are likely to face harassment as being homosexuals and subject to the same laws barring homosexual acts.
Be Like Others, documentary film written and directed by Tanaz Eshaghian about transsexuals in Iran. It explores issues of gender and sexuality while following the personal stories of some of the patients at a Tehran clinic. Although homosexual relationships are illegal (punishable by death) in Iran, sex reassignment operations are permitted. In 1983, spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini passed a fatwa allowing sex-change operations as a cure for “diagnosed transsexuals”. Be Like Others shows the experiences of male and female patients at Dr. Bahram Mir-Jalali’s Mirdamad Surgical Centre, a sex-reassignment clinic in Tehran.
One of them is Ali Askar, a 24 year-old man who faces harassment from other men due to his feminine appearance and behaviour. He does not want to become a woman but sees no other options for him in Iranian society. He decides to go ahead with the surgery despite death threats from his father and finds support from Vida, a post-operative transsexual he meets at the clinic. By the end of the film, Ali has become a woman named Negar.
She has been disowned by her family, experienced depression and has had to work as a prostitute. 20 year-old Anoosh is another young man who has been ostracised due to his femininity. His boyfriend feels more comfortable when Anoosh dresses as a woman, and in contrast to Ali, Anoosh’s mother is supportive of his desire to change sex. The end of the film shows Anoosh (now Anahita) happy and engaged to her boyfriend.