“Maryam Khatoon Molkara”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

As early as 1975, Molkara wrote letters to Ayatollah Khomeini, then in exile in Iraq, asking for religious advice about being assigned a wrong gender at birth and having to break out of it. In 1978, she traveled to Paris, where he was then based, to try to make him aware about transgender rights. After the Islamic Revolution, she was fired from her job at television, injected with male hormones against her will and detained in a psychiatric institution. Because of good contacts with religious leaders, among them Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, she was released.^[2]

Molkara continued to campaign for being able to get sex assignment surgery. She confronted Khomeini in his home in North Tehran: She wore a man's suit, carried the Quran and was held back and beaten by security guards, until Khomeini's brother Hassan Pasandide intervened. She was allowed to talk to Khomeini and successfully convinced him with her story to allow her to get a sex assignment surgery. Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1986 that allowed her to do that. Molkara lobbied for the according medical knowledge and procedures to be implemented in Iran and worked on getting other transsexuals to do the surgery. She herself completed her sex assignment surgery in Thailand in 1997, because she was dissatisfied with the quality of the surgery in Iranian hospitals.^[2]^[3]

In 2007, she founded and subsequently ran the Iranian Society to Support Individuals with Gender Identity Disorder (ISIGID, انجمن حمایت از بیماران مبتلا به اختلالات هویت جنسی ایران), the first legally registered advocacy group for transgender rights in Iran.^[5]

References

1. ^{{cite news|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-ayatollah-and-the-transsexual-534482.html|title=The Ayatollah and the transsexual|last=McDowall|first=Angus|author2=Stephen Khan|date=25 November 2004|work=The Independent|quote=That Maryam Khatoon Molkara can live a normal life is due to a compassionate decision by one man: the leader of the Islamic revolution himself.|accessdate=25 April 2011|location=Tehran}}
2. ^¹²{{cite news|url=http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/07/28/iran_transsexuals|title=A fatwa for transsexuals|last=Tait|first=Robert|work=Salon.com|quote=One woman's courage in appealing to the late Ayatollah Khomeini has made Tehran the unlikely sex change capital of the world.|accessdate=25 April 2011|deadurl=yes|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110607014405/http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/07/28/iran_transsexuals|archivedate=7 June 2011|df=}}
3. ^¹{{cite news | last = Fathi | first = Nazila | title = As Repression Lifts, More Iranians Change Their Sex | work = The New York Times | date = August 2, 2004 | url = https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0DE0D91F3DF931A3575BC0A9629C8B63 }}
4. ^{{cite news | title = A Fatwa for Freedom | work = The Guardian | date = July 27, 2005 | url = http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jul/27/gayrights.iran| location=London| first=Robert| last=Tait| accessdate=2010-05-12}}
5. ^¹{{Cite web|url=https://www.outrightinternational.org/sites/default/files/OutRightTransReport.pdf|title=Human Rights Report: Being Transgender in Iran|last=|first=|date=|website=Outright. Action International|archive-url=|archive-date=|dead-url=|access-date=2018-08-06}}