It Is Hard Being Trans Around The World

Last week I wrote about being trans in Indonesia, today it is about being trans in Iran.

Transgender In Tehran: Arsham's Story
Radio Free Europe
December 21, 2017

Under Iran's conservative Islamic regime, people can legally change their gender, even though homosexuality remains illegal. But they are still pressured to conform to conventional roles. Arsham, a young transgender woman in Iran, faces daily harassment from strangers and questioning by the morality police over her refusal to wear a hijab. She shared videos of her daily life with correspondent Masih Alinejad of RFE/RL's Radio Farda [The video is at the end of this post].

But for gay men it is a choice between literally losing your head or having Gender Confirming Surgery (only in this case it is not GCS but forced surgery).

“Everyone treated me like a saint”—In Iran, there’s only one way to survive as a transgender person
Quartz
By Neha Thirani Bagri
April 19, 2017

In Iran, homosexuality is a crime, punishable with death for men and lashings for women. But Iran is also the only Muslim country in the Persian Gulf region that gives trans citizens the right to have their gender identity recognized by the law. In fact, the Islamic Republic of Iran not only allows sex reassignment, but also subsidizes it.

Before the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran there was no official government policy on transgender people. After the revolution, under the new religious government, transsexuals were placed in the same category as homosexuals, condemned by Islamic leaders and considered illegal.

Things changed largely due to the efforts of Maryam Khatoon Molkara. Molkara was fired from her job, forcibly injected with male hormones and put in a psychiatric institution during the 1979 revolution. But thanks to her high-level contacts among Iran’s influential clerics, she was able to get released. Afterwards, she worked with several religious leaders to advocate for trans rights and eventually managed to wrangle a meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini, the “supreme leader” of Iran at the time. Molkara and her group were able to eventually convince Khamenei to pass a fatwa in 1986 declaring gender-confirmation surgery and hormone-replacement therapy religiously acceptable medical procedures.

The moral police are everywhere and if you are trans the government steers you toward having surgery and if you are gay it is your death sentence, so what would your choice be if you had to chose between death and having surgery?

Worse, a trans person who is not legally recognized can be accused of homosexuality and face the death penalty. In fact, in some cases gay people in Iran decide to undergo the surgery because the alternative is death. “The sex change operation is most of the time forced on trans people by the culture and by the government,” says Ghahreman.

Even with surgery life is still hell. Many trans people, lesbians  and gays flee the country and seek asylum.