Miss Major Griffin Gracy

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (born October 25, 1940), often referred to as Miss Major, is a trans woman activist and community leader for transgender rights, with a particular focus on women of color. She served as the original Executive Director for the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project, which aims to assist transgender persons, who are disproportionately incarcerated under the prison-industrial complex. Griffin-Gracy has participated in activism for a wide range of causes throughout her lifetime, including the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. Griffin-Gracy was born in the South Side of Chicago on October 25, 1940, and was assigned male at birth. Griffin-Gracy participated in drag balls during her youth, and described her experience in Chicago in a 1998 interview: [The drag balls] were phenomenal! It was like going to the Oscars show today. Everybody dressed up. Guys in tuxedos, queens in gowns that you would not believe— I mean, things they would have been working on all year...And the straight people would come and watch, they were different than the ones who come today. They just appreciated what was going on. Griffin-Gracy also believed that, at the time, she and her peers were unaware they were questioning the gender they were assigned at birth, and noted that much of the contemporary terminology surrounding gender identities did not exist. Miss Major reported that she came out as a transgender woman in the late 1950s. As a transgender woman, Griffin-Gracy was met with a lot of criticism and maltreatment from her peers. In a radio interview, she recalls the need for someone to always be by her side in order to avoid situations where her peers could single her out and violently attack her. At the start of her medical transition, Griffin-Gracy relied on the black market for her hormones. Over twenty years, she suffered from homelessness and participated in sex work. She also participated in other illegal activities, including theft, in order to support herself. Griffin-Gracy has five sons. Christopher was born in 1978. Her three other sons were adopted into her family after meeting them in a California park. The boys were runaways, and had meals together with Griffin-Gracy and her biological son. In September 2020, Griffin-Gracy announced that she and her partner, LGBTQ+ activist Beck Witt (a trans man himself), were expecting a child together. On 9th January 2021, Beck & Miss Major welcomed their son Asiah Wittenstein Major into the world. After having been kicked out of two colleges for the outward expression of her identity, Griffin-Gracy moved from Chicago to New York City. While some organizations, including gay bars in the city, would deny entry to trans women, she established herself within an LGBT community associated with the Stonewall Inn, a bar in Greenwich Village. She recounted, "We could go to Stonewall and everything would be fine, we didn't have to explain ourselves." On June 27, 1969, Griffin-Gracy was in the Stonewall Inn meeting with a girlfriend when the bar was raided, an action which initiated the Stonewall riots. Griffin-Gracy was a leader in the riots, but was struck on her head by a police officer and was taken into custody. She reported that a corrections officer broke her jaw while in prison. She had a five-year sentence at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora for a burglary conviction where she met Frank "Big Black" Smith who had participated in the Attica Correctional Facility riots of 1971. The two of them communicated regularly during her time there, him showing her great respect despite her gender identity. Smith talked Griffin-Gracy through the information that she needed to really help her community—to fix a problem rather than mask it. She was released from Dannemora in 1974 with new hope for her community. Griffin-Gracy moved to San Diego in 1978 and organized community efforts and grassroots movements. She initially started with work at a local food bank and later provided direct services for trans women who were incarcerated, suffering from addiction, or homeless. While in San Diego, the AIDS epidemic struck the United States, and as a part of her service, Griffin-Gracy found herself providing additional healthcare and multiple funerals each week. Griffin-Gracy then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid 1990s where she served on multiple HIV/AIDS organizations including the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center. In 2003, Griffin-Gracy began working at the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) shortly after it was founded by Alex Lee, although sometimes she is credited as the founder. She served as the Executive Director of the project, leading efforts to support transgender women who have been imprisoned, particularly women of color. Both within her organization and without, she has fought against criminalization and police brutality. She is credited for leading direct service efforts and personalized care to incarcerated trans women of color with TGIJP in addition to her leadership in previous organizations. Griffin-Gracy views the state of being transgender or genderqueer as one of "living outside the law" due to constant rejection from mainstream audiences, particularly in pursuing job or education opportunities. She also argues that while many people with transgender and queer identities are not imprisoned, their identities and means of expression are policed through social behavior and state policies. She frequently cites the prison industrial complex as a major factor in why transgender people are incarcerated, specifically people of color and those with low income. Griffin-Gracy has discussed the need for activism for transgender persons based in part on stories of discrimination from others. She herself began her journey as a trans activist after being made aware of how many young trans women were being murdered with no response from the world around them. In the 1970s, a friend named Puppy, a Puerto Rican trans woman and sex worker, was found dead in her own apartment. Griffin-Gracy held that there was evidence of a murder, but authorities ruled her death a suicide. Griffin-Gracy described the event and its impact on her in an interview: Puppy's murder made me aware that we were not safe or untouchable and that if someone does touch us, no one gives a shit. We only have each other...So I started looking out for myself … whenever we got into a car [we] would write down as much information as possible. We would try (to)...get a guy to walk outside the car so that everyone could see him, so we all knew who he was if she didn't come back. That's how it started. Since no one was going to do it for us, we had to do it for ourselves. This outlook has fueled much of her activism to date. Griffin-Gracy has frequently criticized the LGBT movement based on its exclusion of transgender persons from participation and positions of leadership, particularly trans people of color, those with low income, and those who have been previously imprisoned. Griffin-Gracy is a self-proclaimed feminist. Her view of feminism is a woman's ability to be both strong and sensitive, and to do so proudly. She made the decision to identify as a feminist when people began questioning her as a parent. She focuses her activism on the safety of young trans women today, a liberal feminist approach. She has noted that her favorite aspect of activist work is the education and hope that it provides to the women in her community. She wishes for the simplest human rights for trans youth, saying: I'd like for the girls to get a chance to be who they are. For young transgender people to go to school, learn like everyone else does, and then get out there and live their lives, not afraid or thinking that the only solution for them is death. In addition to her focus on basic human rights, Miss Major advocates for radical change in her community. She strives to bring attention to the intersectionality of poverty, race, and gender in situations related to incarceration, employment, and mental and physical health. She draws inspiration for her activism from Elizabeth Taylor and Angela Davis. A documentary titled Major! was released in 2015 and portrays Griffin-Gracy's role as an activist and mentor in the transgender community since the 1960s. She describes the film as not only a tool to present to young trans women their history, but as a reminder for herself that young women still need her help.

Linda A. Simpson

Linda A. Simpson was a Transgender Law Enforcement Officer. She was born in October 1953 at Westmoreland Hospital in Greensburg, Westmoreland County as Rick Simpson. She started Crossdressing at age 5 years old. She graduated from Mount Pleasant High School at Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania in 1971.  From 1970 and 1980 she was in Rock Band. 1970 she met partner her named Jeri. In 1977 She became Police Officer to prove she was is Macho Man in reality she was hiding her Gender Identity. In 1982 she married her partner Jeri. In 1994 she came out to her wife as Transgender. In 1995 she came out to Police Force. In 1996 she retired of Police Force. 1997 she had Sex Reassignment Surgery in Montreal Surgeon Yvon Menard. Today lives with her wife and help other Transgender Woman out. She also have Friend is another Transgender Woman named Kathie Barb.

Julia Grant

Julia Grant was the first transgender person to have her transition chronicled on a mainstream UK television documentary in A Change of Sex. In George and Julia, the first of five hour-long film documentaries directed by David Pearson for the BBC, her story attracted an audience of nearly nine million viewers. The series was transmitted on BBC2 as A Change of Sex, and described by Pearson as "intimate, frank and observational". Additional episodes were broadcast until 1999, charting new stages in her life. Grant survived bowel cancer, but suffered from multiple health problems, and died on 2 January 2019, aged 64, following a short illness.

Maryam Khatoonpour Molkara

Maryam Khatoonpour Molkara (Persian: مریم خاتون ملک‌آرا‎; 1950 – 25 March 2012) was a campaigner for the rights of transgender people in Iran, where she is widely recognized as a matriarch of the transgender community. Designated male at birth, she was later instrumental in obtaining a letter which acted as a fatwa enabling sex reassignment surgery to exist as part of a legal framework. In 1950, Molkara was born, and was the only child of her father's second of eight wives. Her father was a landowner. Molkara says she always preferred clothes, toys, and activities that were traditionally for girls. In her adolescence, Molkara went to parties dressed as a woman. Molkara came out as transgender to her mother, but she refused to accept her. This made Molkara decide to take feminizing hormones instead of immediately seeking out surgery. She also dressed and lived as a woman. In 1975, Molkara traveled to London and learned more about her identity. She states it was there she embraced that she was not gay, but transgender. Molkara started to write letters to Ayatollah Ruhollah 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 one of these letters, she said that her gender was clear since she was two years old, as she used to apply chalk to her face to imitate putting on makeup. He had already written in 1963 that corrective surgeries for intersex people is not against Islamic law, and his answer was based on this existing idea rather than developing a new fatwa for transgender people. He suggested she live as a woman, which included dressing as one. After this, she met with Farah Pahlavi, who gave her support towards Molkara and other transgender individuals wanting sex reassignment surgery. In 1978, she traveled to Paris, where Khomeini was then based, to try to make him aware about transgender rights. After the Islamic Revolution, Molkara started to face intense backlash due to her identity. She had to go through many questions, arrests, and death threats. She was fired from her job at the Iranian National Radio and Television, forced to stop dressing like a woman, 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. At the start of the Iran–Iraq War, Molkara volunteered as a nurse on the front lines. She said that some of the men she treated thought she was a woman due to her gentleness. Molkara continued to campaign for her right to get sex reassignment surgery. In 1985, she confronted Khomeini in his home in North Tehran: She wore a man's suit, carried the Quran, and she tied shoes around her neck. This was a reference to the Ashura festival, and also indicated that she was looking for refuge. Molkara was held back and beaten by security guards until Khomeini's brother, Hassan Pasandide, intervened. He took Molkara into his house, where she emotionally pleaded her case, yelling "I'm a woman, I'm a woman!" His security guards were suspicious about her chest, as they thought she could be carrying explosives. She revealed they were her breasts, as she developed them using hormone therapy. Having heard her story, Ahmad Khomeini was touched and took Molkara to speak to his father, where he asked three of his doctors about the surgery in an attempt to make a well-informed decision. Khomeini then decided that sex reassignment surgery was needed to allow her to carry out her religious duties. This resulted in Khomeini issuing a fatwa, meaning he determined sex reassignment surgery to not be against Islamic law. Molkara lobbied for the according medical knowledge and procedures to be implemented in Iran and worked on helping other transgender people have access to surgeries. She completed her sex assignment surgery in Thailand in 1997, because she was dissatisfied with the quality of the surgery in Iranian hospitals. The Iranian government paid for her surgery, and she was able to help establish government funding for many other transgender individual's surgeries. In 2007, she founded and subsequently ran the Iranian Society to Support Individuals with Gender Identity Disorder (ISIGID, انجمنPersian: حمایت از بیماران مبتلا به اختلالات هویت جنسی ایران‎), the first state-approved organization for transgender rights in Iran. Before this, she was using her own property in Karaj to help other transgender people receive legal advice and medical care, including post-op care. She continued advocating for other transgender people for years, bailing them out after they're arrested, even knowing she will likely face violence for doing so. Molkara died in 2012, after suffering from a heart attack at the age of 62.

Caroline Cossey

Caroline Cossey (born 31 August 1954 ) is a British model who often worked under the name Tula, which she also used for two memoirs. She appeared in the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only. Following her appearance in the film, she was outed as transgender by British tabloid News of the World. In 1991, she became the first trans woman to pose for Playboy. Cossey has since then fought for her right to legally marry and be legally recognised as a woman.

Tracey Norman

Tracey "Africa" Norman, aka Tracey Africa, is an American fashion model, and the first African-American trans woman model to achieve prominence in the fashion industry. Originally from Newark, New Jersey, Norman has modeled and been photographed for such publications as Essence, Vogue Italia and Harper's Bazaar India. Norman also had a magazine cover and life story spread in New York Magazine. Tracey herself does not identify as a transgender woman, but rather just a woman. It is the media that has put the term "transgender" as her identity.

Patricia Morgan (transgender woman)

 Patricia Anne Morgan (also known as Patricia Anne Glavocich,^[1] born Henry Peter Glavocich, 12 March 1939^[2][3] – died 1986?^[1]) was an American businesswoman and former sex worker who became, in the early 1960s, one of the earliest people to undergo gender reassignment surgery in the United States.^[4]

She was one of the patients of the pioneering surgeon Elmer Belt.^[5] In 1973, she published her autobiography, The Man-Maid Doll,^[3][6] in which she describes her experience of early experimental surgery in detail.^[7]

Patricia Morgan (1939 - ?1986) sex worker, business woman.

Henry Peter Glavocich was born in Jersey City, and raised in Hoboken, New Jersey. His mother left his father soon after his birth because he refused to feed them. At fifteen months Henry was put in an orphanage. When his mother remarried, she took him out of the orphanage, but he did not get on with his stepfather, and stayed with aunts and uncles.

At age eleven, after a mutual undressing with a girl downstairs, the juvenile authorities put him in a boys home. Each time he ran away they put him in the home’s jail, where he was raped.

After three years he was released to live with an aunt, where he was raped by her husband. Later, living with another aunt, he tried on his female cousin’s clothes.

At fourteen he started shining shoes, first in Hoboken, and then on 42^nd St in Manhattan. He became friends with Shelley, a male prostitute. He made good tips from gay men but refused their sexual offers. At fifteen he ran away and as Pat became a male prostitute.

Six months later he started dressing as female. With some friends he went shoplifting, and then with Shelley robbed a prospective trick. Pat was sentenced to three years at Elmira Reformatory, where he met the man he loved, William Hurst. William got out first, but was back inside by the time that Pat got out.

Pat returned to male sex work. He met a transsexual for the first time, and then Shelley and another of his friends went to California and returned as women.

Pat started taking female hormones, and began living full-time as female. She learned how to have sex with a man without his realizing that she had male organs. She was saving seriously for the $5,000 plus expenses for the operation. She was arrested as a female prostitute, got through the strip search without being read, and declared herself as a ‘boy’ only in court. She was released in that the prostitution law applied only to women.

She made arrangements through Harry Benjamin, and flew to Los Angeles in 1961 for surgery with Dr Elmer Belt. While waiting for a hospital bed, she was in a car crash with a drunken john. She sued the john, a movie producer, to cover her medical bills, and they settled out of court.

After four months in Los Angeles, Pat had a penectomy and her testicles implanted in her abdomen. Two months after that she had a vaginoplasty. Afterwards she was in pain, very weak and her money had run out.

She moved in with Shelley, but was gang raped by two of Shelley’s tricks. Later they were arrested and Pat was charged with living in a house of prostitution. She served 30 days in the prison hospital. She developed urinary problems and had to have a third operation with Dr Belt.

She hustled to raise the airfare to go home. Back in New York she took up prostitution again. She had breast implants to 42DD but then reduced to 38D. She also had her nose straightened. She was booked for prostitution when she accepted a ride in the rain. Her lawyer tried to get her off on the technicality that she was still a man, not having changed her name or birth certificate. The judge ruled that she was a female anyway, and gave her a suspended sentence.

She did change her name shortly afterwards to Patricia Anne Glavocich. Patricia Morgan was her professional name. She started a business of limousines with female chauffeurs, but it lasted only a year. She also did modeling.

Returning to prostitution she tricked with many celebrities, whom she diplomatically does not name. In 1971 William Hurst escaped from prison just before he was due to released. Pat thought that he was released, but he had changed so much that she did not love him any more. He was re-arrested for bank robbery and murder.

Pat developed a friendship with an older man who put up money for her to buy a candy store, and then the building that it was in, and the one next door. She became a landlady.

++In 1973 she published her autobiography as told to Paul Hoffman.

++Apparently she died in 1986, as there is a grave in the name of Patricia Glavocich in New Arlington, New Jersey.   She was then 46.

*Not the keynote speaker, nor the sociologist, nor the artist.

• Patricia Ann Morgan.  "How I Changed My Sex".  Female Mimics, 1,3, 1963. Online.
• Patricia Morgan as told to Paul Hoffman. The Man-maid Doll. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, Inc 123 pp 1973.

Find a Grave   

__________________________________________________________________

Arrangements were made in advance, but she still had to wait four months after arrival in Los Angeles before the operation. This would exhaust most people’s savings, and anyone in a more conventional line of work would lose their job!

According to this site, the US inflation factor from 1961 to 2007 is 7.1210. Therefore Belt’s operations cost over $35,600 in modern money.

On the second prostitution trial, the judge ruled that Pat was a woman. Another legal precedent that was never used elsewhere. See also Francis Carrick.

In my article on Elmer Belt, I mentioned that it was his standard procedure to push the testicles into the abdomen. Diane Kearney replied to this: “Pat Morgan was a friend of mine and she did have the final surgery but you make it seem she was simply a half woman for her entire life with testicles in her abdomen. Not true!”. If Diane is in Pat’s book under a pseudonym, she is well disguised. If she ever ever read Pat’s book, she must have forgotten it. On page 53 Pat summarizes what Dr Belt does with the testicles. I couldn’t find the reference when I first replied to Diane.

Now, which movie producers are known to have had a car crash in Los Angeles in 1961?

Justina Williams-The 1979 JET Magazine Article

From the November 1, 1979 Jet Magazine article written by D. Michael Cheers. Deep thanks to Roberta Black for scanning it. Note how OUR media used the correct pronouns several decades before the 2001 AP Style Book mandated it, and treated Justina with respect.


Justina Williams always knew that she was different.

Ms. Williams, 30, was born Johnny Williams, a man with a gender disorder. She said that although she had a man's genitalia, psychologically she was a woman. Further, she had glandular bust tissue, and chromosomally and hormonally she was female.

"From my early childhood years I was more feminine than masculine. I just naturally assumd that I was a girl," she told JET. "I used to fight with my sister to see who would comb the doll's hair. I never played with games or toys associated with boys."

While on sick leave two years ago from her job as an assembly line worker for General Motors' Cadillac Motor Car Division in Detroit, she went to New York and was admitted to Boulevard Hospital for a sex reassignment operation..

Two months later she legally changed her name to Justina. Fifteen months later, after 10 years of seniority at General Motors she was terminated.

Ms. Williams filed a lawsuit last month in Wayne County Circuit Court where she claimed her termination was illegal, and that she suffered from unlawful employment practices and other forms of discrimination because of her sex. GM says they plan to answer the suit within a month.

Among the charges listed in the complaint, Ms. Williams alleges that she was "repeatedly harrassed, tormented and humiliated with verbal abuse with the intention of making her workplace conditions so unbearable that she would be forced to terminate her employment for her physical and mental well-being."

"I tried to be a man." said Ms. Williams, who now supports herself on general assistance and food stamps. "From 1970 to 1974 I even grew a mustache, tried to generate an interest in girls, but I could not become interested in them. We could only be friends. I never dated a girl in my life. I never had sex with a woman, nor have I ever engaged in any homosexual activity.

"When I was 13 I read a magazine article about an entertainer who had a sex reassignment operation. I knew then that there was hope for me. My prayers were answered." she continued. "In 1969 I started taking hormone shots to soften my skin and develop bust tissue. I even dressed like a woman, but only when I wasn't at work.
"Now I am totally a woman and content with my body. I have sex, have orgasms and really enjoy macho men," she added. Ms. Williams said that she cannot have children because she does not have any ovaries or a uterus.

As for her future, "What I really want to do is study cosmetology and move to another location so that I can get on with my life. I want to form an organization to help other women who have gender dysphoria and have suffered like I have. But for right now I want to concentrate on being female. I haven't had time to do that yet," she said.


TransGriot Notes:
Ms. Williams lawsuit against GM was never settled, but she did fufill her dreams of becoming a cosmetologist. She also went to school and became a legal assistant. The organization she formed, the National Gender Dysphoria Association helped many people in the Detroit area transition and lead happier, healthier lives. NGDS provides gender counseling, electrolysis, legal advice and SRS guidance.
They can be reached at:

National Gender Dysphoria Organization
PO Box 02732
Detroit, MI 48202
(313)842-5258

 

The story of Maryam Hatoon Molkara (Iran)

The story of Maryam Hatoon Molkara (Iran)

 

New York Times International, August 2, 2004:

"As Repression Lifts, More Iranians Change Their Sex"

Guardian Unlimited, July 27, 2005: "A fatwa for freedom".
"Maryam Molkara was a woman trapped in a man's body. She was also living under Islamic law in the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini. Yet, as Robert Tait reports, her determination to confront the hallowed leader has made Tehran the unlikely sex-change capital of the world."
 

 

 

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New York Times  

International

August 2, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/02/international/middleeast/02iran.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1091489991-2sBf34Gerj3nlXAaASXZcQ

 

As Repression Lifts, More Iranians Change Their Sex

By NAZILA FATHI

Published: August 2, 2004

 

EHRAN, Aug. 1 - Everything about Amir appears masculine: his broad chest, muscled arms, the dark full beard and deep voice. But, in fact, Amir was a woman until four years ago, when, at the age of 25, he underwent the first of a series of operations that would change his life.

Since then he has had 20 surgical procedures and expects another 4. And Amir, who as a woman was married twice to men - his second husband helped with the transition and remains a good friend - is now engaged to marry a woman.

"I love my life and I'm happy, as long as no one knows about my past identity," said Amir, who asked that his full name not be published. "No one has been more helpful than the judge, who was a cleric and issued the permit for my operation."

After decades of repression, the Islamic government is recognizing that some people want to change their sex, and allowing them to have operations and obtain new birth certificates.

Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there was no particular policy regarding transsexuals. Iranians with the inclination, means and connections could obtain the necessary medical treatment and new identity documents. The new religious government, however, classed transsexuals and transvestites with gays and lesbians, who were condemned by Islam and faced the punishment of lashing under Iran's penal code.

But these days, Iran's Muslim clerics, who dominate the judiciary, are considerably better informed about transsexuality. Some clerics now even recommend sex-change operations to those who are troubled about their gender. The issue was discussed at a conference in Tehran in June that drew officials from other Persian Gulf countries.

One cleric, Muhammad Mehdi Kariminia, is writing his thesis on transsexuality at the religious seminary of Qum.

"All the clerics and researchers at the seminary encouraged me to work on the subject," he said in an interview. "They said that my research can help change the social stigma attached to these people and clarify religious decrees on the matter."

One early campaigner for transsexual rights is Maryam Hatoon Molkara, who was formerly a man known as Fereydoon. Before the revolution, under the shah, he had longed to become a woman but could not afford surgery. Furthermore, he wanted religious guidance. In 1978, he wrote to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was to become the leader of the revolution but was still in exile, explaining his situation.

The ayatollah replied that his case was different from that of a homosexual and therefore he had his blessing.

However, the revolution intervened and men like himself or those who had already changed their sex were harassed, even jailed and tortured. "They made me stop wearing women's clothes, which I had worn for many years and was used to," Ms. Molkara recalled. "It was like torture for me. They even made me take hormones to look like a man.''

It took him eight years after the revolution, in 1986, to get government permission to proceed with surgery. But he could not afford the surgery and did not have it until 1997, when he underwent a sex-change operation in Bangkok. The Iranian government covered the expenses. Four years ago, Ms. Molkara established an organization to help those with gender-identity problems. Co-founders include Ali Razini, head of the Special Court of Clergy, a branch of the judiciary that only deals with clerics, and Zahra Shojai, Iran's vice president for women's affairs. An Islamic philanthropic group known as the Imam Khomeini Charity Foundation has agreed to provide loans equivalent to about $1,200 to help pay for sex-change surgery.

To obtain legal permission for sex-change operations and new birth certificates, applicants must provide medical proof of gender-identity disorder. The process can take years.

It also involves considerable expense. In Tehran, the initial male-to-female surgery runs about $4,000. So far, Amir has spent $12,000 on medical procedures.

The people who pursue this route come from many different backgrounds.

 

(Page 2 of 2)

Dr. Bahram Mir-djalali, one of Tehran's few sex-reassignment surgeons, said one of his patients had been a member of the Revolutionary Guards who served five years in the war with Iraq. His operation was paid for by a Muslim cleric he had worked for as a secretary. After the surgery, the man-turned-woman divorced, and then married the cleric.

"When she came to see me years later, she was wearing a chador," the doctor recalled, referring to the black head-to-toe garb worn by religious women. "She took off the chador, and there was no sign of the bearded man I had operated on."

But many who cannot deal with the legal and financial obstacles to a surgical solution have to deal with humiliation in their daily lives.

One 27-year-old man said he ran away from home at the age of 14 because he did not dare tell his family of his urge to become a woman. He wants to be known as Susan and wears women's clothes at home but only emerges dressed that way at night. He says the constant need for secrecy has left him severely depressed, and he has attempted suicide several times.

"I have suffered all my life,'' he said, constantly adjusting his long curly hair to cover his sideburns. "People treat me as though I have come from Mars. Women pull my hair and laugh at me on the street. Most men I am attracted to reject me."

In a society where men enjoy a higher status than women, the stigma against any man who wants to be a woman is especially strong.

"They compliment a girl who behaves and dresses like a man as a strong person, but they look down at us and despise us," said Assal, who was disowned by her father for having surgery to become a woman.

Dr. Mir-djalali said he had to fight on many fronts to help more than 200 patients who had consulted him in the 12 years he had performed sex-change operations. Even if Iran's Muslim clerics are more understanding now of transsexuals' needs, others lag behind.

"We have a problem even deciding at which hospital to do the surgery because society considers these people deviant," he said. "Hospital officials have reacted negatively because they say other patients do not like the looks of my patients."

He said one patient's father pulled a knife on him in his office, and threatened to kill him if he touched his son. "What we really need to help these people,'' Dr. Mir-djalali said, "is a serious cultural campaign."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

 

 

 

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Wednesday July 27, 2005
 

The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1536658,00.html

 

A fatwa for freedom

Maryam Molkara was a woman trapped in a man's body. She was also living under Islamic law in the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini. Yet, as Robert Tait reports, her determination to confront the hallowed leader has made Tehran the unlikely sex-change capital of the world

It could take something extraordinary to move the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa. The novelist Salman Rushdie did it by challenging the sanctity of the Prophet Mohammed in the Satanic Verses, provoking Iran's austere revolutionary leader into pronouncing the death sentence. For Maryam Khatoon Molkara it required the equally dramatic step of confronting Khomeini in person and proving, in graphic terms, that she was a woman trapped inside a man's body.

To do so, she had to endure a ferocious beating from bodyguards before coming face-to-face with the Ayatollah in his living room, covered in blood, dressed in a man's suit and, thanks to a course of hormone treatment, sporting fully-formed female breasts.
"It was behesht [paradise]," Molkara, 55, says of the meeting 22 years ago. "The atmosphere, the moment and the person were paradise for me. I had the feeling that from then on there would be a sort of light." Light or not, the encounter produced, in turn, a religious judgment which - unlike the unfulfilled edict on Rushdie - has had an enduring effect that still resonates. Because today, the Islamic Republic of Iran occupies the unlikely role of global leader for sex changes

In contrast to almost everywhere else in the Muslim world, sex change operations are legal in Iran for anyone who can afford the minimum �2,000 cost and satisfy interviewers that they meet necessary psychological criteria. As a result, women who endured agonising childhood and adolescent experiences as boys, and - albeit in fewer numbers - young men who reached sexual maturity as girls, are easy to find in Tehran. Iran has even become a magnet for patients from eastern European and Arab countries seeking to change their genders.

Every Tuesday and Wednesday morning in Dr Bahram Mir-Jalali's Tehran clinic, young men and women gather in preparation for a new start on the opposite side of the gender divide. Many are desperate, seeing the operation as an escape from a confused sexual identity that has led to parental rejection and persecution by police and religious vigilantes.

Ali-Reza, 24, wearing thick make-up, has livid red burn marks on his arm after his father poured boiling water over him in a rage over his "sexual deviancy". "I have attempted suicide three times," he says. "The interpretation of my family was that having a child like me was a punishment from God. My parents were religious and traditional and they called me trash under the name of Islam."

Others voice feelings of spiritual renewal after the surgery. "It's like a rebirth," says Hasti, formerly Hassan, now reinvented as a svelte, leggy 20-year-old who is planning to marry her German fiance. "I've even forgotten my male birthday. I only remember my female birthday, the day when I received the operation. It was very painful but I feel happy whereas before I was always crying."

Dr Mir-Jalali, 66, a Paris-trained surgeon, has performed 320 gender operations in the past 12 years. Around 250 have involved the complex and physically painful process of transforming men into women by creating female genitals through a skin graft from the intestines. In a European country, he says, he would have carried out fewer than 40 such procedures over the same period. The reason for the discrepancy, he says, is Iran's strict ban on homosexuality, as required by the Qur'an.

"In Iran, homosexuality is treated as a crime carrying the death penalty," he says. "In Europe and north America, it is accepted. Transsexuals aren't homosexuals. Unlike homosexuals, they suffer from a separation of body and soul where they believe their own body doesn't belong to them. But in Europe they can have a free life. They aren't under the same pressure to change their sex. In Iran, transsexuals suffer from a lack of awareness, within their own family and in wider society. That increases the psychological pressure and contributes to the higher number of operations here."

Nevertheless, the surgery's availability has provided deliverance to a community which was once cowed and confined to a secret underground existence. Bringing it about has required a theological re-think from Iran's Shia Islamic rulers, accustomed to rigidly traditional stances on sexual matters.

Indeed, Islamic scholars are still trying to reconcile the fatwa with religious thinking. Hojatolislam Muhammad Mehdi Kariminia, a cleric based in the holy city of Qom, is writing a PhD thesis on transsexuality. "The basic humanity of the person is preserved," is his conclusion. "The change is simply of characteristics."

This situation would have been unthinkable were it not for the bravery and persistence of Molkara, who embarked on a personal odyssey that brought persecution and abuse in her quest for Khomeini's official blessing. Khomeini had pronounced on gender problems in a book written in 1963, when he indicated there was no religious proscription against corrective surgery. However, says Molkara, the statement applied only to hermaphrodites, defined as those bearing both male and female genital characteristics. It provided no remedy for those - such as Molkara - who physically belonged to one gender but were convinced that they were members of the opposite sex.

In 1975, Molkara - then working with Iranian television and going by her male name of Fereydoon - wrote the first of several letters to the Ayatollah, then exiled in Iraq in opposition to the shah.

"I told him I had always had the feeling that I was a woman," she says. "I wrote that my mother had told me that even at the age of two, she had found me in front of the mirror putting chalk on my face the same way a woman puts on her make-up. He wrote back, saying that I should follow the Islamic obligations of being a woman."

In 1978 Molkara travelled to Paris, where Khomeini was by then based, to lobby him in person. She was unsuccessful and the subsequent Islamic revolution, far from easing the transsexuals' path, cast them into darkness. Some were locked up in Tehran's notorious Evin prison while others were stoned to death. Molkara, meanwhile, was fired from her job, forcibly injected with male hormones and confined to a psychiatric institution.

Thanks to her contacts with influential clerics, Molkara was released and resolved to keep fighting. She lobbied several leading figures in the regime, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who later became president. All urged her to write once again to Khomeini.

"I couldn't continue like this," she says. "I knew I could get the operation easily enough in London, but I wanted the documentation so I could live." Desperate for the religious blessing that would confer legal protection in staunchly Islamic Iran, Molkara decided on a fateful step.

Donning a man's suit, she walked to Khomeini's heavily protected compound in north Tehran, carrying a copy of the Qur'an. In an additional piece of religious symbolism, she had tied shoes around her neck. The gesture - redolent of Ashura, the Shia festival depicting the heroism of the third imam Hossein - was meant to convey that she was seeking shelter.

At first, it failed to provide her with any. As she approached the compound, armed security guards pounced and began beating her. They stopped only when Khomeini's brother, Hassan Pasandide, witnessing the scene, intervened and took Molkara into his house.

There, Molkara - then bearded, tall and powerfully built - hysterically tried to explain her predicament. "I was screaming, 'I'm a woman, I'm a woman'," she says. The security guards, fearing Molkara was carrying explosives, were anxious about the band wrapped around her chest. She removed it to reveal the female breasts underneath. The women in the room rushed to cover her with a chador.

By then, Khomeini's son, Ahmad, had arrived and was moved to tears by Molkara's story. Amidst the emotion, it was decided to take Molkara to the supreme leader himself. On meeting the near-mythic figure in whom she had invested such hope, Molkara fainted.

"I was taken into a corridor," Molkara says. "I could hear Khomeini raising his voice. He was blaming those around him, asking how they could mistreat someone who had come for shelter. He was saying, 'This person is God's servant.' He had three of his trusted doctors in the room and he asked what the difference was between hermaphrodites and transsexuals. What are these 'difficult-neutrals', he was saying. Khomeini didn't know about the condition until then. From that moment on, everything changed for me."

Molkara left the Khomeini compound with a letter addressed to the chief prosecutor and the head of medical ethics giving religious authorisation for her - and, by implication, others like her - to surgically change their gender. It was the fatwa she had sought.

Subsequently, Molkara struggled to convince fellow transsexuals of their rights and to introduce the requisite medical standards for sex change operations to Iran. She only completed her gender change four years ago, ironically undergoing the surgery in Thailand because of unhappiness with procedures in her native country.

Today she runs Iran's leading transsexual campaign group and has become the community's spokesperson. But two security monitors in her living room attest to her vulnerability in a society still intolerant of sexual unorthodoxy. "It is hard to live with constant fear," she says. "I hope things are easier for the next generation of transsexuals. Every time a transsexual is arrested by the police I am called to bail them out. Outside the police station there will be a crowd of vigilantes waiting to beat me or stone my car."

A brief encounter with Iran's hallowed religious leader may have brought light. But for many Iranians, enlightenment has yet to dawn.
 

Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005