GayCityNews.com – By Doug Ireland
The situation of the transgendered in Iran has been the subject of frequent media reports that paint a rosy picture of life for them in the Islamic Republic, and which characterize Tehran – in a recent description in the U.K. daily The Guardian – as “the unlikely sex-change capital of the world.”
Western journalists seem to find it exotic that, in Iran’s patriarchal society – in which sexuality and expressions of sexual identity are religiously codified with the force of law, women are restricted to second-class citizenship, and homosexuality is a crime punishable by death – sex reassignment surgery has mushroomed, with the approval of the country’s religious authorities.
This came about after Maryam Khatoon Molkara, then a 33-year-old pre-op transman, forced his way into an audience in the early 1980s with the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and founder of and undisputed authority in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Moved by Molkara’s pleas, Khomeini was eventually persuaded to issue a fatwa which declared that sex-change surgery was permitted since it was not mentioned as forbidden in the Koran.