I noticed HRT is technically allowed and debatebly encouraged under Shariah so am now reading wikipedia articles about Trans rights in Iran

  • Jankatarch@lemmy.worldOP
    175·
    3 days ago

    Not really? 1980s trans rights movements in Iran were mainly spearheaded by the activist “Maryam Khatoon Molkara” who convinced the supreme leader of then that gender reassignment surgery should be a religious right.

    She is a really cool figure to learn about btw. Continued advocating for Iranian trans rights after that.

    And yes there was and is still a shit ton of discrimination, even for people that have lots of connections.

    There is still extremely violent oppression to gay people for example so they often havs to go through sex-reassignment surgery as a depressing-that-this-is-needed loophole.

    I am not trying to paint Iran like some form of “misunderstood lgbtq+ paradise,” they are not that.

    Simply wanted to mention there are in fact progressive movements there. A lot of people seem to believe in “all brown people are religious extremists.”

    • theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world
      29·
      3 days ago

      Yes, really.

      in Iran, homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. But the government has provided a way out for the nation’s gays and lesbians: a sex-change operation. Fully paid for by the state, the procedure would allow these people to conform to Iran’s theocratic standards of sexuality.

      a culture so steeped in hatred of gays and lesbians that it deems a sex change preferable to simply accepting differences in sexual orientation. The shift in policy came more than two decades ago, when Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini issued a fatwa (religious decree) declaring sex changes permissible for “diagnosed transsexuals.”

      https://web.archive.org/web/20090416140030/http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/2008/08/26/f-homosexuality-iran-sex-change.html

      A lot of people seem to believe in “all brown people are religious extremists.”

      I do not believe that all brown people are religious extremists, but this is an extremely poor example to use for proving this misguided belief wrong, because it is actually an example of religious extremism.

      • Jankatarch@lemmy.worldOP
        61·
        3 days ago

        Ah you replied just as I was fixing my comment. It’s fucking dystopian yes, but this was not “the reason Iran got sex-reassignment surgery.”