ONLY ON AP: In Iran, trans people can face discrimination despite fatwa скачать в хорошем качестве

ONLY ON AP: In Iran, trans people can face discrimination despite fatwa

(21 May 2018) Nahal smokes yet another cigarette on her mother's balcony overlooking Tehran, one of the few peaceful places the 19-year-old transgender woman has in Iran, where her identity can bring harassment and prying, judging eyes on the street. Nahal, who identifies herself as a "transsexual", recalled how she had hardly started high school before being forced to leave over her classmates' instance she dress as a man. Her manicured fingernails, painted pink, brushed away her long brown hair as she looked through old photographs of her childhood, recounting how even her own family has struggled to accept her. "A transsexual doesn't want others to understand him or her, they just want people to love them. I really mean it. I myself haven't been able to even see my relatives because of this." It shouldn't be like this for Nahal in the Islamic Republic, which - perhaps to the surprise of those abroad - has perhaps the most open mind-set in the Middle East toward trans people. The Shiite theocracy's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a religious decree, or fatwa, 30 years ago calling for respect of transgender people, opening the way for official support for gender transition surgery. Nevertheless, the general public still harasses and abuses them, and families often shun them. Discrimination in the workplace has forced some into prostitution and others into committing suicide. "People on streets call me 'womanish;' they ask, "Is she a man or a woman?" says Nahal, who asked to be identified only by her first name as some in her family are angry with her. "Sometimes they say: 'May God cure him!'" Of Iran's 80 million people, estimates suggest under 50,000 are transgender, meaning their gender identity does not match the sex or gender they were identified as having at birth. Like in other parts of the world, they can face harassment. The ruling clerics' relative open-mindedness on transgender people hardly means tolerance of gender diversity. Homosexuality is illegal. Gay men can face the death penalty while lesbians can face flogging after three convictions and death for the fourth. Iran's former hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously told students at New York's Columbia University in 2007: "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like you do in your country." A Human Rights Watch report in 2010 outlined how Iranian security forces allegedly abused those it suspected of being LGBT people, though Iranian officials have denied that. In the ruling clerics' view, gender reassignment surgery aims to cure a "disease" and re-fit a person into a recognized binary of straight male or straight female. Those who choose not to undergo surgery and get new documents can face arrest by police for dressing in a way that contradicts their government-recognized gender. But even with those caveats, the Islamic Republic's stance opens a startling margin of space for transgender people. It dates back to only a few years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. A transgender woman, Maryam Khatoonpour Molkara, managed to push her way through the guards to meet Khomeini while dressed in men's clothes. Molkara explained to the supreme leader how she felt her true gender was different from her physical sex. After consulting with doctors, Khomeini sanctioned gender-transition surgery in a groundbreaking fatwa. Iran's current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, later gave Molkara a black veil to officially recognize her as a woman, upholding Khomeini's fatwa, she said. She died in 2012 at the age of 62. Afterward, they can receive new identity documents and financial aid for the surgery. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter:   / ap_archive   Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​ Instagram:   / apnews   You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...