Despite fatwa, transgender in Iran face harassment
Ayatollah Khomeini issued fatwa in 1988 calling for respect of transgender people
Nahal smokes yet another cigarette on her mother’s balcony overlooking Tehran, one of the few peaceful places the 19- yearold transgender woman has in Iran, where her identity can bring harassment and prying, judging eyes on the street.
Nahal recalled how she had hardly started high school before being forced to leave over her classmates’ insistence she dress as a man. Her manicured fingernails, painted pink, brushed away her long brown hair as she looked through old photographs of her childhood, recounting how even her own family has struggled to accept her.
“I no longer see my relatives,” she said. “Maybe I’m a sign that if your own children will have a similar problem later, you can accept it.”
It shouldn’t be like this for Nahal in the Islamic Republic, which — perhaps to the surprise of those abroad — has perhaps the most open mindset in the Middle East towards transgender people. The Shia theocracy’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a religious decree, or fatwa, 30 years ago calling for respect of transgender people, opening the way for official support for gender transition surgery.
Nevertheless, the general public still harasses and abuses them, and families often shun them. Discrimination in the workplace has forced some into prostitution and others to kill themselves.
“People on the street call me ‘ womanish;’ they ask, ‘ Is she a man or a woman?’” says Nahal, who asked to be identified only by her first name as some in her family are angry with her. “Sometimes they say: ‘ May God cure him!’”
Of Iran’s 80 million people, estimates suggest under 50,000 are transgender, meaning their gender identity does not match the sex or gender they were identified as having at birth. Like in other parts of the world, they can face harassment.
The ruling clerics’ relative open- mindedness on transgender people hardly means tolerance of gender diversity. Homosexuality is illegal. Gay men can face the death penalty while lesbians can face flogging after three convictions and death for the fourth.