The Paradise of Islamic Gender Transition in Western Media

عربي

Words by Musa Shadeedi
Artworks by Omar
Translated by Hiba Moustafa
This piece is part of the “Sana wara Sana” issue

Note: the author chose to use “transsexual” (mutahawilin & mutahawilat) as it is the term that is still commonly used in Arabic-speaking societies today, rendering the article’s content more approachable to a broader audience. Using a term that is closer to the period the article discusses plays a role in making this choice, for the term “transgender” (3abirin & 3abirat) had not yet been coined by LGBTQ+ activists.

Despite the US witnessing 292 homicides of “transsexual” (transgender) individuals since 2017, and despite lawmakers in 37 US states having introduced at least 142 bills to restrict gender-affirming healthcare for transsexual, no one is designating it as a transphobic country. And, despite the West’s claim to champion the trans community globally, the only Muslim state that allows its citizens to receive gender-affirming surgeries rooted in its respect for the right to transition has been under Western attack for years. This article examines how transsexual people gained this right in Iran and why the West constantly attacks the Islamic Republic for it. The piece begins with the story of Maryam Khatoon and gender-affirming care in Iran, using it as a lens to critique Western and Arab media portrayals of such surgeries as a form of anti-LGBT ‘conversion therapy’—ultimately revealing how transphobic and anti-Iranian agendas intersect.

Maryam Khatoon

The heroine of this story is Maryam Khatoon Molkara (1950 – 2012), an Iranian transsexual rights activist. She was widely recognized as a “matriarch of the trans community in Iran,” as she became the first transsexual person in Iran to legally undergo sex reassignment surgery with the permission of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. She met then-Shahbânu (Empress) Farah Pahlavi five years before the Islamic revolution to try to win her support for her transition, and in the 1970s, she went to see Ayatollah Behbehani to obtain a fatwa to legitimize her surgery. He performed an istikharah,¹ letting the Quran fall open and interpreting her problems according to the page that was revealed. It was the Surah Maryam. This is why she adopted the name Maryam.

He said it meant I should have the surgery, but he said I should write to Ayatollah Khomeini, who was then in Iraq and was one of the leading Shia religious experts.

 In 1975, she wrote a letter to Khomeini, and in 1978, she tried to meet him in his exile in Paris, but failed. Following the Islamic Revolution, the 1980 Iran-Iraq war, and the political tension in Iran, Maryam was fired from her job at the Iranian National Radio and Television, forbidden from wearing feminine clothing, and injected with male hormones against her will. In 1984, at the peak of the war, she wrote another letter to Khomeini to re-explain her case. She received a similar reply: “Religiously, you are obliged to be a woman.” But Khomeini misunderstood her: he thought she was an intersex, but she was designated male at birth.

[During the war], she volunteered as a nurse on the front lines, where she treated a man who was in contact with high-profile officials in the Revolutionary Council and helped her be introduced to Khomeini. Reminiscing about her attempt to meet him at his residence, wearing male clothing, holding the Quran and wrapped in the Iranian flag:

The officers stopped me, but Morteza Pasandideh, Ayatollah Khomeini’s older brother, intervened and allowed me to enter. The officers were suspicious of the cloth I had wrapped around my chest. They thought it was explosives. After removing it, they realized it was my bra. The women of the house immediately brought a chador for me. I fainted because of all the stress, but I received the fatwa I was after.

The meeting lasted only for half an hour, but she received a written approval that changed her life and that of many transsexual people. Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation covered the costs of her gender-affirming surgery. That day, Khomeini gifted her a chador, and once again, she wore feminine clothing. Describing their encounter, she said:

It was like paradise. The atmosphere, the moment and the person were like a paradise for me. I had the feeling that from then on there would be some sort of light.

In 2000, Maryam founded an organization to advocate for transsexual rights. Co-founders included Ali Razini, head of the Special Court of Clergy and Zahra Shojai, Iran’s vice president for women’s affairs. Yet, The Independent described her as “someone who has volunteered to go under the veil,” underestimating her struggle and depicting her journey towards freedom as a journey towards self-oppression.

Maryam has permanently transformed Iran. According to The Guardian, official statistics estimate that there are 15,000 and 20,000 transsexual people in Iran, though unofficial estimates put the figure at up to 150,000. Iran carries out more gender change operations than any country in the world besides Thailand. State support increased after Ahmadinejad took office in 2005. His government provided grants of £2,250 for operations and further funding for hormone therapy, and also proposed loans of up to £2,750 to allow those undergoing surgery to start their own businesses. Today, part of the tourist packages to Iran include gender-affirming surgery.

Artwork by Omar

Gender Transition for Sunnis

This attitude was not limited to Shias. Following Khomeini’s 1988 fatwa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt (1986 – 1996) and Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi (1996 – 2010)  issued a fatwa allowing sex reassignment surgery if it was necessary to treat “al-khunutha al-nafsiya” (psychological hermaphroditism). He opens the fatwa[1] quoting a hadith: Allah does not send down any disease, but also sends down the cure. He then refers to another hadith relayed by al-Bukhari about Prophet Muhammad not forbidding a mukhannath (hermaphrodite) in Medina from entering his wives’ quarters; Muslim men were not allowed to enter them. This could be interpreted to mean that the person who is “naturally a mukhannath” is not to be blamed, and that the condemnation of those who by word and deed resemble women must be confined to those who do it deliberately. This is a long-held opinion by Ahl as-Sunnah or the Sunnis. In his commentary of Sahih al-Bukhari in Fath al-Bari, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (1372 – 1449 AD) argues:

A mukhannath is a man who assumes the manner of women in speech and walk. Anyone who is born that way is not to be blamed, but he is asked to try his best to change his mannerism or avoid it. It is forbidden to commit it intentionally.

This, however, unlike Iran, has not brought any change to Al-Azhar University’s policies nor Egyptian laws. ²

The existence and acceptance of Hermaphroditism in Islamic Fiqh (jurisprudence) and authoritative tafsir (exegesis) texts accept people who, today, identify as non-binary. They describe gender expression in a more complex way than the West, which imposes “trans identity” on everyone who does not conform to binary gender norms. 

Western Media

Though Islam and its various schools of thought contain the legal foundations that would legitimize gender transition, several Western and Westernized local platforms have tried to link Khomeini’s fatwa to Islamist Homophobia, interpreting it as a cure for homosexuality, particularly in Iran, as if gay people there were forced to undergo a transition to survive. In this way, the rights of transgender individuals become part of the “conversion therapy” used against homosexual people. It seems that regardless of the interviews they may or may not conduct, many Western media articles conclude with statements that echo anti-Iran narratives, revealing their own political undertone.

In 2014, the BBC published an article titled “The gay people pushed to change their gender,” followed later that year by an Arabic translation. The author interviewed homosexuals preparing to undergo gender transition for various reasons, as well as transsexuals who were “unsure” about their transition decisions – they all had fled Iran and some were interviewed while seeking asylum. The article – arguably insensitive to the power imbalances and exploiting of the asylum seekers’ vulnerability – briefly claims that “It’s not official government policy to force gay men or women to undergo gender reassignment,” meaning that they contradict themselves. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz picked up the story with the headline “Gay Iranians Coerced Into Gender Reassignment Surgery,” revealing the political motivations behind producing such content.

In 2015, Euronews posted a report on gender transition in Iran, interviewing a trans woman who said, “I’ve never felt any regrets.” Yet, the report ends with a statement that parrots anti-Iran and Islamophobic Western human rights organizations’ views: “People should not be forced to change sex to survive.”

In 2017, the American website QUARTZ published an article titled “‘Everyone treated me like a saint’—In Iran, there’s only one way to survive as a transgender person.” It opens with a statement about the criminalization of homosexuality in Iran. It then claims that doctors intimidate people into not undergoing sex reassignment surgery and do not facilitate them, as reported by the aforementioned articles, and states that insurance companies often refuse to cover some forms of transition-related care, even though the costs remain high relative to the average income. The article then highlights the many difficulties that transsexual people may face, including difficulty finding a job or renting a house, and families not accepting their decisions and/or getting married. And of course, it has to refer to hijab as one of the ways trans women are oppressed in Iran, and concludes with the expected statement that “gay people in Iran decide to undergo the surgery because the alternative is death.” Tellingly, the article was built on sources from international organizations based in the United States and Canada, with the exception of Sara, a trans woman who spoke highly of the government for the help she got in her transition.

Thus, we see that Western media narratives seem to contradict themselves, both discussing the ease of getting sex reassignment surgeries and then labeling this as part of “conversion therapy” meant to force or coerce homosexuals to abide by surrounding restrictions, and the difficulties they face.  Again, these reveal the anti-Iranian sentiments shared by Western media outlets.

In 2020, deputy editor of The Sun Mark Hodge wrote an article titled “SEXUAL ‘CLEANSING’ Iran is forcing thousands of gay people to have gender reassignment surgery against their will or face execution.” The article relied on statements made by an Iranian activist named Shadi Amin, who fled Iran in 1983 – four years before these surgeries were permitted in the country –  due to her involvement with the Marxist guerrilla movement Fadaiyan-e-Khalq,  which engaged in armed struggle against the Iranian regime. She now lives in Germany. The second source Hodge relied on was the British gay activist Peter Tatchell, who has a problematic obsession with “Eastern” sex, to say the least. He co-founded OutRage!, a British political group focused on lesbian and gay rights, which controversially advocated for maintaining American and British troops in Iraq so they might “protect” gays and lesbians from the increased violence they faced – violence that was, in fact, a direct result of the invasion itself. This dynamic is what Rasha Moumneh refers to as “gay rights colonialism.”³ Of course, Israel wouldn’t miss the chance; The Jerusalem Post reposted the article word for word.

Artwork by Omar

Arab Media

While Western media has portrayed gender transition as something that homosexuals are forced to undergo in Iran. A 2005 article in the state-owned Saudi AlArabiya website referenced the aforementioned article in The Independent (2000) to attack Iran, by portraying it as a gay-friendly country where homosexuals have free rein due to laws permitting gender transition.

In 2015, the Egyptian newspaper Rose al-Yusuf published an article titled “Iranian men, sissies in veils!,” which denounced Iranian men as effeminate. It featured a photo of Maryam Khatoon and parroted not just the not just the Western narratives discussed above, but also regional ones, stating, “Sex change is better than execution.” To further denounce Iran’s tolerance gender tolerance, the article refers to the Iranian actor and director Saman Arastoo, considering his transition as “An evidence of acceptance of transsexuals in Iran,” particularly because he “Was able to continue his acting and professional career following the surgery without facing any problems, becoming a leading figure in the Iranian transgender community.” A Manshoor article echoed the same view, indicating that this speech became part of a broader pattern adopted by Arab media platforms.

In other words, media directed to LGBT allies portray gender-affirming care in Iran as “coercion” forcing gay individuals in Iran to transition, and media directed toward opponents depict it as a loophole that allows them to continue practicing their homosexuality. Both narratives serve the purpose of attacking Iran, showing little concern for the transgender individuals themselves. 

Conclusion

The majority of Western media coverage, as well as Arab media influenced by it, marginalizes the struggles and gains of transsexual people, placing gay men and their freedom at the center, as the standard against which the freedom of trans people are measured. It’s as if the freedom of the former is more important than the latter. This move also aligns with homonationalist rhetoric in the way it links trans freedom in Iran to homophobia, portraying these freedoms as political oppression and forced conversion in order to detract from the gains that Iranian transsexual people have fought for. It is as if the media – which has long spoken about gay rights while ignoring trans people – cannot bear to talk about trans individuals without addressing the explicit oppression of gay people in Iran, which is an issue in its own right. It also seems that the media are infantilizing trans people in Iran, casting doubt on their sexual choices, attempting to convince them that their transition is merely the result of government pressure, and ignoring their desires to transition at a specific moment.

This is all despite the fact that Iranian authorities do not use the permissibility of sex reassignment surgeries to justify their broader violations or to depict Iran as a land of freedom for transgender people – unlike the way Western and Zionist authorities exploit it in their pinkwashing policies.

Homonationalism sidelines all the hard-won gains of liberation movements across the Global South, reducing the region to portrayals of state oppression. This allows Western people to feel moral superiority while reinforcing the image of the “Other” – especially in relation to Muslims. This framework lumps racism, transphobia, and Islam (particularly Shiite Islam) together in one category characterized by presumed backwardness. It’s as if Western people cannot appreciate their culture without devaluing that of Muslims. They cannot feel their freedom except by destroying the freedoms of Muslims and equating them with oppression and evil. Western Media diminish the gains Maryam and others have sacrificed their lives to make – by continually centering the experiences of affluent white gay men, as if no one else has the right to life itself.

What happens when the rights people fight for are used as a weapon against them? This article examines gender transition in Iran, the only Muslim country that legally recognizes the right to undergo gender-affirming surgery based on a 1980s fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini. Yet, this legal recognition has not been received as a gesture of respect for gender identity. Instead, it has been instrumentalized in Western media to repeat the same old narrative about the “oppressive East.” So, does the West really care about trans rights, or is there only one narrative that is allowed to exist?