Pre-1979 There is evidence of third genders existing in civilisations in the region that is now Iran dating back thousands of years. A 2018 study of burial sites at
Teppe Hasanlu found that around 20% of the tombs did not conform to a binary gender-divided distribution of artifacts or showed signs of the buried having performed masculine roles while wearing feminine dressing (or vice-versa). A bowl at the site was also discovered depicting a bearded man wearing female clothing shown sitting on the floor, a position that was usually reserved for women in the local iconography. Surgery for intersex conditions have been practiced in Iran since the 1930s. In 1963, Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini wrote a book in which he stated that there was no religious restriction on corrective surgery for intersex individuals, though this did not apply to those without physical ambiguity in sex organs. At the time Khomeini was a radical, anti-Shah revolutionary and his
fatwas did not carry any weight with the Imperial government, which did not have any specific policies regarding transgender individuals.
After the revolution The new religious government that came to be established after the
1979 Iranian Revolution classed transgender people and
crossdressers with
gays and
lesbians, who were condemned in Shah's era and faced the punishment of
lashing or even death under Iran's
penal code. One early campaigner for transgender rights was
Maryam Hatoon Molkara, a transgender woman. Before the revolution, she had longed to become physically female but could not afford surgery and wanted religious authorization. In 1975, she began to write letters to Khomeini, who was to become the leader of the revolution and was in
exile. After the revolution, she was fired, forcibly injected with male
hormones, and institutionalized. She was later released with help from her connections and continued to lobby many other leaders. Later she went to see Khomeini, who had returned to Iran. During this visit, she was subjected to beatings from his guards because she was wearing a binder and they suspected she could be armed. Khomeini, however, did give her a letter to authorize her sex reassignment operation, which she later did in 1997. Due to this fatwa, issued in 1987, transgender women in Iran have been able to live as women until they can afford surgery, have surgical reassignment, have their birth certificates and all official documents issued to them in their new gender, and marry men. Khomeini's original fatwa was reconfirmed by the second supreme leader of Iran,
Ali Khamenei, and is also supported by many other Iranian clerics. Hojatoleslam Kariminia, a mid-level cleric who is in favor of transgender rights, has stated that he wishes "to suggest that the right of transsexuals to change their gender is a human right" and that he is attempting to "introduce transsexuals to the people through my work and in fact remove the stigma or the insults that sometimes attach to these people." In 2010, the
Iranian Legal Medicine Organization formulated the first national standardised protocol of the diagnosis and treatment of
gender dysphoria. In 2014, the Transgender Studies Center was founded as part of the
Mashhad University of Medical Sciences. == Discrimination ==