Iran's transexual revolution

[afdhere]

iran is such a country of contradictions. who knew?

this is from the independent in the u.k.



**************

Iran's transexual revolution

An unlikely religious ruling has made Tehran the
sex-change capital of the world. Caroline Mangez went
to meet the brave souls who have swapped gender in
this rigidly conservative city, where women wear the
chador and homosexuality is punishable by death

Published: 13 November 2005

I know because I've experienced both worlds: as a man
in Iran I have more freedom and choice than as a
woman," muses 30 year-old estate agent Milad
Kajouhinejad, 30, loosening his tie and unbuttoning
his shirt to reveal a hirsute chest. It gives him
pleasure, this manly gesture, just as it gives him
pleasure to carry an attaché case and sport the full
beard of a practising Muslim. Until three years ago,
he could do none of these things. "I never used to go
to the mosque, either," he adds. "I did not want to
have to wear a chador. Now I can pray in boxer shorts
if I feel like it, and I never miss prayers," he says.


Milad gives thanks to Allah five times a day and,
while doing so, always offers a special prayer to the
late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, "without whom," he
says, "every transexual would have had to leave Iran.
He was the first to issue a fatwa authorising a man or
woman to change their sex."

More than 15 years after Khomeini's death, the
cleric's unlikely religious judgement means that Iran
now has one of the world's largest populations of
transexuals, and the fatwa itself has become the stuff
of legend. "A theology student told me that he
delivered his verdict after he was contacted by a
couple who no longer experienced any physical
pleasure. He advised them to change sex and, once the
woman had become a man and the man a woman, then to
remarry," says Mahnaz Javaheri, 42, the mother of
Athena, a 20-year-old who, as she puts it, "needed to
be freed of her man's body". A devout Muslim, Mahnaz
says that if the three imams she consulted hadn't
given their permission, she would never have let her
son Hadi become Athena, "even if it meant him
committing suicide. These three great ayatollahs all
said that he should have the operation as soon as
possible."

The real story behind Khomeini's fatwa is scarcely
less dramatic than the apocryphal version. He issued
it in 1983, after a man named Fereydoon, who had made
several unsuccessful attempts to gain an audience with
the Iranian leader, eventually forced his way into
Khomeini's private rooms. Fereydoon persuaded the
cleric that he was a woman trapped in as man's body by
revealing the breasts he had grown thanks to a course
of hormone treatment.

Before this extraordinary moment, Khomeini's
administration had routinely harassed and arrested
transexuals, lumping them together with Iran's gay
community. According to Iranian law, homosexuality is
punished by lashings, prison and even, in the case of
persistent offenders, the death penalty.

"Before Khomeini delivered his verdict, there was a
lot of corruption. Hundreds of gays and lesbians used
to meet in Laleh Park, right in the heart of Tehran.
By authorising transexuals to change sex, the imam
separated the wheat from the chaff," Milad says
pragmatically, delighted to be the man he always felt
he was back in the days when he was a she called
Mahboubeh, "the beloved". The only traces of this
other life are two minuscule pinkish piercings in his
ears, where his mother Fatima used to try and get him
to wear earrings, and the black-and-white photograph
in their family album which shows Mahboubeh, aged
three, crying because her hair has been put in
bunches.

"All the restrictions that women in Iran are subject
to applied to me," says Milad. "I wasn't allowed to go
out, let alone consult a doctor about my problems, and
of course I had to wear the veil in public. I used to
hide boy's clothes in my satchel to play with the kids
in the street after school."

He sees the past as a procession of bad memories -
with one or two compensations. "I was a big hit with
the girls in my class. They came from strict families,
so it was a chance for them to have a boyfriend
without seeming to be up to anything."

"Yes, they knew we couldn't take what was most
precious to them, their virginity," concurs Amin, 28,
formerly Milad's best friend at school, who has also
undergone a sex-change operation. "So they were very
relaxed. No one ever made fun of us. In Iran, a man
who behaves like a woman is despised, looked down on.
But a girl who behaves and dresses like a man is
respected for her strong character."

Mahboubeh was nine when her father, a long-distance
lorry driver, caught her in a clinch with one of her
girlfriends. He didn't say anything but was convinced
that his daughter was turning into a homosexual. In
1986, to "awaken" Mahboubeh's femininity, her parents
forcibly married her to a 30-year-old cousin. She was
only 12 but, on the eve of her wedding, a state doctor
confirmed that she was an "adult woman" by
establishing that she had breasts and was
menstruating. After being raped, she ran away.

"After the police took me back to my father, he agreed
to let me get a divorce when I told him that otherwise
I would commit suicide," he says.

Some years later, at university, Mahboubeh discovered
a book on transexuals in the library - and with it the
existence of Milad within her. Since Iran's clergy
prides itself on its ability to pronounce on every
aspect of the faithful's lives, it was to them that
she turned. "First I saw a state doctor and then, for
a year and a half, I was passed between experts and
psychiatrists. I was given hundreds of tests, a brain
scan. In the end, a clerical judge gave permission for
my operation."

"On grounds of sexual identity disorder," the
accompanying medical certificate reads.

At this point, the young woman, who was by then 26,
was rejected by her parents. "We needed someone to
prepare us," her father says now, "to explain that
afterwards we wouldn't be able to see any difference
between him and other men."

"We didn't like it at first," explains Fatima, the
mother who Milad still helps in her kitchen - unlike
the other three sons in her now-reconciled family. "My
family threw me out," recalls Milad. "I had to find
money... I drove a taxi from six in the morning to
midnight. The rest of the time I slept in my car."

The procedure took years and cost thousands of pounds,
between two and three times as much as the £2,000 an
Iranian surgeon charges for turning a man into a
woman. "I applied to the committee of imam Khomeini's
charity for financial assistance which they give to
people, well, to people like me. They give us
interest-free loans up to £700."

Milad had read on the internet that four operations
would be enough. Skin grafts, nerve grafts, muscle
grafts - he has had 23 operations in three years and
will have the last one before the end of the year. "My
surgeon, Dr Khatir, has done such a good job that soon
a woman won't notice a thing," he says. "He is a
pioneer. He was doing this before the revolution. I am
the only person in Iran, and perhaps in the world, to
have gone as far, medically speaking. The last
operation was the hardest..." Two bouts of four hours
at a time on the operating table; his friends crying
in the corridor, him thinking he was dying, saying his
final prayers, a scarf clamped between his teeth to
stop him screaming, and which he only took out to tell
Dr Khatir, "Go on, I'd rather die than stay a woman."

Milad still saves all his money to spend on removing
his unwanted femininity. "My birth certificate, my
identity card and my driving licence were changed when
I stopped being a woman, in 2001. For the deep voice,
the build, the beard, there are the hormones... I'll
be taking them all my life." Milad, who claims to have
as much success with women now as before, wears a
wedding ring "so they don't hassle me. When I've
finished all the operations and I have enough money,
I'll think about marriage."

Amin, who is still Milad's best friend, is already
engaged. He is a respected member of the Guardians of
the Revolution, a very strict military organisation;
no one there knows about his operation. "No one in my
wife-to-be's family knows my former identity either,"
he says. "All trace of it has been erased. I would be
too afraid that they would object to our marriage.
Everyone in my family was fine about it until my
father died. But since my two sisters learnt that,
under sharia law, as the only male heir of the family
I was entitled to twice their share of the
inheritance, they have refused to see me."

In male-dominated Iran, girls who have the misfortune
to be born in a boy's body are a laughing stock.
Setareh, now a 24-year-old woman, has first-hand
experience of this from the two years' military
service she had to do when still called Saeed. "Life
in barracks was agony. While I felt more and more like
a woman, I was being ordered to speak in a deeper
voice, to be more masculine. To stop people making fun
of me, I ended up wanting to look like a Hizbollah
fighter, growing my beard long and trying twice as
hard in training. It was in the army that I fell in
love with Ali, the day he fought with three soldiers
who were trying to rape me at knifepoint. I was 19, he
was nearly 21. It was Ali who encouraged me to set
about changing sex so that I could marry him."

They have persuaded Ali's parents that Setareh is the
sister of the Saeed they used to know. "Every time my
parents-in-law ask me about Saaed, I blush and say he
has gone on a long trip," says Setareh, who never
takes off her chador. "Ali insists I wear one, just as
he likes me to devote myself to housework." Giving
pleasure without being able to feel it - "I was
warned" - Setareh is perfectly reconciled to her lot.

With one eye glued to a religious chat show, Magnaz,
the mother of 20-year-old transexual Athena Javaheri
recalls: "At first we thought this odd idea of
dressing as a woman came from his grandmother who
loved dressing him up as a girl and getting him to
dance."

Now, she says her main concern is whether her former
son will be able to give her any grandchildren.

Athena has torn all the pictures of her as a little
boy out of the family album. In the photographs from
the 1960s, her father Hussein, who is 52 now, looks
like Jim Morrison. Twenty five years of revolution,
however, have made him a conventional man who doesn't
let Athena go out without a chador.

"I couldn't accept it," he says, "my only son! I beat
him until he tried to commit suicide. Then the doctors
had to explain to me that he wasn't homosexual before
I would agree to the operation."

According to some transexuals, their legal status in
Iranian society has prompted hundreds of gay Iranians
to apply for permission for sex-changes, which, if
granted, would allow them to continue their
relationship without fear of arrest. "The best
psychiatrists don't make any distinction between a
transexual and a homosexual," claims Amin. "So, if
you're a woman, you just have to go the chemist and
inject yourself with testosterone to obtain a permit
to be operated on. Many women then have a bit of
breast reduction to be able to indulge their deviancy.
When they get arrested, the permit is a big help."

But legal recognition is not the same as social
acceptance. Transexuals in Iran continue to suffer not
just ostracism, but physical attacks. For every
happily assimilated Milad and Athena, there are newly
made men and women on the streets of Tehran who can
never reveal the truth that lies behind their chador
or business suit.

[Basra-]

Caudubillahi.

[Cawar]

Afdhere

This is what I was talking about!!!!! which skinny do you think would be intrested in knowing this filth???

And you say we dont force others to accept our bizzare behaviours but to leave us alone, its you ppl that are provoking the God fearing pupulations of the world, and any wrath that comes your way, before that of God is the consequence of your misjudged actions, not to mention your miscontrued minds and bahaviours.

[Quruxley]

"which skinny do you think would be intrested in knowing this filth?"

Cawar I have to agree.

afdhere you little tart What relevance does this hold to our community?

[Gogarad]

Iranians by far are the WROST human kind ever..They have no sense of intelligence or astuteness..they would do anything just to fit in .Acudubilah..what a disgusting nation.

Afdhere, horta raag isfuula mahaane wax kale kama hadashiid miya?

[afdhere]

cawar & quruxleey,

it may not hold revelence to a straight somali... but it is important to queer somalis. and trust me, there are many, many transsexuals in the somali community.

however, iran is muslim. and as a community who is mostly muslim, that is enough relevance.

afdhere

[afdhere]

gogarad,

your comments are too racist for me to even tackle. please, change your heart... for your sake

afdhere

[Gogarad]

[quote="afdhere"]gogarad,

your comments are too racist for me to even tackle. please, change your heart... for your sake

afdhere[/quote]

Awww..Did I hurt your feelings pumpkin? I am sorry, But I HATE Iranians/some Afghans whom change their faith and names once they step into the western world.

[Cawar]

Afdhere

We are having trouble as it is to accept you amongst us, you Bisex freak(and maybe beacuse we came to know you!), what makes you think we want to hear this, why dont you bring this to somali queer websites if thats the case??? I dont see many khajacs here as you claim and I am sure many would agree with me!!!!

[afdhere]

gorgarad,

walalo, hatred is not good. iranians and afghanis are like all people. they are human beings with hearts. i think it is very racist for you to talk about how they are "the worst" people.

you hurt my feelings... because i'm a human being... and it deeply bothers me when someone is racist... to any other human being.


cawar,

do you really expect many queers to be claiming they are queer on this site? why, so that you guys can tell them day in and day out how they are going to hell? come on, now.

scientifically, we know that a certain percentage of ANY society is queer. don't fool yourself ... into getting that hoop of "oh, no, not us!"

afdhere

[dhuusa_deer]

[quote="Gogarad"]Iranians by far are the WROST human kind ever..They have no sense of intelligence or astuteness..they would do anything just to fit in .Acudubilah..what a disgusting nation.

Afdhere, horta raag isfuula mahaane wax kale kama hadashiid miya?[/quote]

actually they're not.

The only reason you believe in Islam is BECAUSE of Iranians.

They are the ppl who invented monotheistic dieties -- read on Zoroastrism.

BTW, somalis are infinelty worse then Iranians. Iranian have a nation, they DON'T kill each other over clans. Oops...they don't have clans.

[Gogarad]

[quote="afdhere"]gorgarad,

walalo, hatred is not good. iranians and afghanis are like all people. they are human beings with hearts. i think it is very racist for you to talk about how they are "the worst" people.

you hurt my feelings... because i'm a human being... and it deeply bothers me when someone is racist... to any other human being.
[/quote]

Oh sweetheart, what can I say? I am a Racist person and I can't do anything about it..You will have 2 get use to that I guess..Not all of us have such a humanly heart like your self..Thats what makes us all different..Right?

Dhusa, I am not interested to hear your non sense this afternoon love..so there u go have this bone and munch on it till later..ok? good boy..now go that way

[dhuusa_deer]

goga,

when out of words, always retreat behind childish name calling and faglames.

I thought inaad eheed naag weyne, I guess I was wrong.

[Gogarad]

When did I call you names now?

And doesn't mean I wish not 2 answer u that I am out of words...Get ur head together..

Yes u were dead wrong!!!

[Quruxley]

Gogarad,I'll buy him one kubad you buy him the other?eh?:lol:

afdhere,These men are free to do as they please.Were you not just the other spreading womens rights and I remember one point you made to me was how unfair the gender difference was in our society.Whats with the xayasiis then ninyow?Each man to his own hadaba....