Suicide, disownment, persecution: LGBT+ community pushed to the brink in Iran

14-02-2022

MARIWAN, Iran - It was the early hours of February 6, when 28-year-old Sara*, a transgender woman from the city of Mariwan in Iran’s western Kurdistan province called her friend Hanar to check up on her. Hanar’s brother answered the phone, telling Sara that Hanar had done what she had said she would do for a long time. She had taken her life.

Screams filled the Mariwan graveyard the next morning as friends and family stood over the grave of Hanar, who was named Rebwar Ibrahimi at birth, but decided to go by the name Hanar to better reflect the gender she identified as. It was also the nickname her friends, also transgender, referred to her as.

Sara was the first of the friendship group to find out that Hanar had committed suicide earlier that morning. She wanted to check up on Hanar because she had already expressed her suicidal thoughts to Sara on several occasions.

“She would always tell me about her pain, she did not like men’s clothes and did not want to act like a man, but we could not come out in public because the city is very small,” Sara told Rudaw English, crying over the death of her friend. “She wanted to undergo surgery, but when she asked a religious cleric last year, he told her that the surgery is forbidden in Sunni Islam, and she could not even tell her family about her problems.”

Sara was evidently shaken up as she recalled the amount of times Hanar had asked her to commit suicide together.

“She was talking about suicide more during the past few months. She told me ‘if you dare, let us commit suicide together and get out of this pain’, but nothing I told her seemed to have any effect,” Sara added.

At the end of their last encounter on February 5, Sara found it unusual how tightly Hanar had hugged her before leaving.

“At around 3 am I gave her a call, but her brother picked up and said she had killed herself and her body was at the hospital,” she said, and just like that, another member of the LGBT+ community had fallen victim to the deeply entrenched cultural and traditional norms of Middle Eastern society.

LGBT+ life in Iran

Despite the Iranian government subsidizing sex reassignment surgeries for transgender people, endorsed by a decree from Iran’s former top Shiite religious authority Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, the process still requires the consent of the person’s family and the approval of specialized physicians.

The decree, however, is not implemented in the Sunni majority areas, mainly located in the predominantly Kurdish-populated western part of the country.

As opposed to the cosmopolitan cities of Iran, the transgender community in Kurdish cities confronts a very difficult reality. Many either conceal their true gender identities, or attempt to migrate to more accepting countries where their rights are guaranteed.

Rozhan is a transgender woman from a poor neighborhood of Mariwan. She is one of the many from her community who want to leave the country.

Rozhan had previously attempted to migrate from Iran, but the smuggler stole her money and she never made it to her destination.

“Those who commit suicide are brave people, because living as a transgender in Iran is like dying every day,” she told Rudaw English. “I revealed that I am a transgender a few years ago, and my family have been avoiding me ever since, and I often get threats from my relatives saying they will kill me.”

Life as a transgender woman has been anything but easy for Rozhan. She has been assaulted numerous times and has been discriminated against.

“I once met someone through social media, he then came to my house with two friends and sexually assaulted me, then they broke my nose and beat me up, took my phone and money and left,” she said. “Last year I decided to leave Iran, my family wanted me to leave to preserve their honor, but I was not lucky and the smuggler took the $10,000 my family had loaned to me and deceived me. I was caught in Greece and was deported.”

For many members of the LGBT+ community in the Middle East, the desire to escape the repression and scrutiny they face at home leaves them with no other option but to embark on the difficult journey to seek safety abroad. Most refugees and asylum seekers receive a temporary sanctuary in neighboring countries, allowing them to take in a brief breath of relief. However, the refugees from the LGBT+ community do not encounter this safe haven in neighboring countries and are instead met with the same hostility they fled from.

“Intolerance towards LGBTI individuals is also pervasive in a number of countries of first asylum and LGBTI asylum‐seekers and refugees may be under a continuous threat of human rights abuses due to discriminatory laws and hostile societal attitudes,” according to a UN refugee agency resettlement assessment tool for LGBT+ refugees last updated in 2019.

"In some contexts, LGBTI refugees struggle to access the services available to other refugees such as health care, education, self-reliance assistance as well as registration and refugee status determination. Local integration options in the first country of asylum thus may be limited or prove to be non-existent."

According to a UNHCR study from December 2015, almost 80 percent of the agency’s 106 offices indicated that they prioritize LGBTI refugees for resettlement.

Sex reassignment in Iran

There are many people in Iran’s Kurdish areas that, like Rozhan, are stuck in a body they are not comfortable in and do not identify with.

“I have no hope left, I get harassed when I go out and receive derogatory comments, and my family will not allow me to undergo surgery, so I am technically in a prison,” Rozhan said. “I do not know why this society does not leave us alone, we do not harm anyone, why are they not the same towards us.”

There are other transgender people who have managed to convince their families to allow them to go through a sex reassignment surgery, but they too have left their home cities.

Kawa* is a 38 year old transgender man who is originally from the city of Sanandaj, but after undergoing a surgery to change his sex four years ago, he has been residing in Iran’s capital of Tehran.

“I always behaved like a boy as a kid, my family initially loved that, but as I grew up, they wanted me to act more like a woman, when I told them of my situation, they did not agree to the surgery at first, until they gave their approval with the help of a few specialized physicians,” Kawa told Rudaw English.

Despite undergoing surgery, Kawa is still not living in peace.

“I do not like returning to Kurdistan, because whoever knew me before now looks at me as a criminal, they laugh at me, some might think the situation of transgender men is better, but all transgender people have a pain that no one understands,” he added.

While Iran boasts of giving its transgender population the right to undergo sex reassignment surgeries, members of the LGBT+ community face constant prosecution in the country.

Alireza Fazeli Monfared, a 20-year-old from Ahvaz, Khuzestan province, was murdered on May 4 for identifying as non-binary and gay. Following the hate crime, Amnesty International called on Tehran to hold those responsible for the murder accountable, and to end the criminalization of the community.

“The organization is renewing its calls on the Iranian authorities to repeal laws which criminalize consensual same-sex relations in Iran, including through the application of the death penalty and flogging, and which ban clothing, hairstyles, and other forms of gender expression that do not conform to strict binary gender ‘norms’ enforced by the establishment,” read a statement from the rights watchdog.

“Amnesty International reiterates its serious concerns that these laws legitimize and act as official incitement to or justification for systematic discrimination and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) individuals in Iran, including in state custody, on the street, at school and workplace or in the home,” it added.

In a January report, the watchdog “urged Iran to free an Iranian LGBTIQ+ activist held for the last three months on charges linked to an appearance in a documentary on gay rights in Iraqi Kurdistan.”

“Zahra Sedighi-Hamadan had been based in Iraqi Kurdistan but was arrested by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on 27 October while seeking to flee to neighboring Turkey,” Amnesty said.

In their world report on global human rights violations in 2021, Human Rights Watch said that “although Iran permits and subsidizes sex reassignment surgery for transgender people, no law prohibits discrimination against them.”

As Iran’s Kurdish LGBT+ community suffers from continuous prosecution and harassment, the situation is not much better for the community living across the border in the Kurdistan Region.

The body of Doski Azad, a transgender woman from Duhok was found in late January when Duhok police received a call informing them of the location of her body, murdered by her brother three days before.

At the time, an informed source told Rudaw English that the perpetrator had left the country, and to avoid being tracked, he had not traveled through the Kurdistan Region’s airports and instead drove north to Turkey.

Family and honor are two of the main pillars of Kurdish society. Any perceived damage to a family’s reputation can see a member being disowned, or even killed, in the name of honor. To many, a failure to marry and have children disrupts the social order. To be of any sexual orientation other than straight or to identify as a different gender than assigned at birth not only puts that person’s life in danger, but is interpreted as causing damage to a family’s reputation.

The stigma can be passed to their siblings or other relatives, adding even more pressure on people who already have a lot to lose by being open with their sexuality or their gender identity.

The US government issued a strongly worded statement through its consulate in Erbil, urging the Kurdistan Regional Government to find the perpetrators of the so-called “honor” killing of Azad and to subject them to the “fullest extent of the law”.

In spite of huge efforts made by activists from the Kurdistan Region, Iran, and Iraq, the community continues to live in fear for their lives.

*Names have been changed to protect identities

Additional reporting and translation by Dilan Sirwan