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.
Western journalists present the contemporary Iranian theological discourse on transsexuality that has developed in the ensuing years since Khomeini's fatwa as a curiosity that contradicts the West's prevailing view of Islamic attitudes toward all things sexual.
But Afsaneh Najmabadi, an Iranian who is a professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, in a January 2005 article on Iranian.com wrote that she feels "uneasy" when reading these "celebratory" portrayals of Iran's attitude toward the transgendered.
"Every time I read one of these reports I want to say BUT, BUT, BUT, because there are some scary things going on that have gone almost unnoticed," she wrote.
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