Homosexuality is prohibited in Islam and is illegal in Iran, but a Muslim cleric in Iran has ruled that a sex change operation is a human right; he is so convinced of this human right that he’s advocating on the behalf of transsexuals, and he’s so fascinated by the individuals he studies that he dreams about them at night.  

Hojatulislam Kariminia, a Muslim cleric who addressed the consequences of sex change operations — which were condoned by Ayatollah Khomeini 41 years ago — in his doctoral thesis, declared: “I want to suggest that the right of transsexuals to change their gender is a human right.”  

Mahyar is one such individual in Iran who claims that she is a woman encased in a man’s body, and she’s willing to hawk off a kidney to pay for the sex change operation; Mahyar has already had her testicles removed, and she is waiting for the next surgical step, in which surgeons will create female sex organs out of parts of Mahyar’s intestines.

If we are to believe Dr. Mirjalali, the most prominent sex change surgeon in Iran, Mahyar is far from being the only Iranian who wants a sex change; Dr. Mirjalali has performed 320 such operations in the past 12 years, while he states that his European counterparts only perform about 40 operations in 10 years.  

One of Hojatulislam Karimini’s stated aims is to “introduce transsexuals to the people through my work and in fact remove the stigma or the insults that sometimes attach to these people.” Indeed, while the religious establishment has decreed sexual reassignment permissible, it still rubs against the grain of mainstream Iranian society. Iranian law, however, is also supportive of postoperative transsexuals; they may legally change the gender on their birth certificates and passports, something that will not be possible until April of 2005, with the Gender Recognition Act 2004,  in the much more socially lenient United Kingdom.  

While a more inclusive sexual revolution is postponed for the indefinite future, the transsexual revolution in Iran has already quietly begun.  

Mimi Hanaoka