Yasmene Jabar (1956 - ) artist, activist, comedienne.

Diana was raised in Noxubee County, Mississippi and then on a farm near Salisbury, North Carolina. She found out about transsexuality by buying Harry Benjamin’s book and the Erickson Foundation pamphlets by mail order from Michael Salem who had an ad in Playboy.

"By the time I got my license to drive a car, I was going out dressed as a girl-- just going shopping, to the movies or out to eat. Sometimes I would talk a cousin into going with me so I would not be alone, at first it was scary but I got used to it quickly and to the fact that I passed as female better than I did as male."

She transitioned socially in 1974 taking hormones purchased at a black-market pharmacy. Diana worked at an impersonator club, Orleans, in Charlotte, N.C.

"The club was run by an older woman named Olean who always wore a long blonde wig, and false eyelashes and lots of makeup, who looked more like a drag queen than the real drag queen".

Diana also worked stealth in a massage parlor to save for her operation. She had surgery from Dr Stanley Biber, 1976, at the age of 20.

She married a Syrian man she met at college and became Diana Salameh. They were together seven years, and he gave her the name Yasmene which means ‘desert flower’. However she finally divorced him for philandering. By this time Yasmene had become a Muslimah.

She returned to Macon, Mississippi to take care of her handicapped mother. She was then an artist making dolls and Santas with a studio in Macon, where she was declared Business Person of the Year 1994.

Her second husband was a Jordanian living in Germany whom she met on the internet. They had a traditional Muslim wedding in Jordan and lived there for many years.

Yasmene set up the web sites Cafe Trans Arabi and the International Transsexual Sisterhood, the first to help trans women in the middle east, and then expanded to help trans women wherever they are. In 2005 she was involved in the Trans Eastern Conference (TEC) in Istanbul.

Personal problems resulted in Yasmene's web sites being discontinued at the end of 2006.

She has returned to living in the US, and has been working a a stand-up comedienne.

She was an early proponents of the concept of Harry Benjamin Syndrome (Yasmene's take) but did not stay with the HBS groups.

• Colin Crawford. Uproar at Dancing Rabbit Creek: Battling over Race, Class and the Environment in the New South. Perseus Books, 1996: 75-6
  
• “The Beautiful Sister: An interview with Yasmene Jabar”. Huriyah Freedom: A Magazine for Queer Muslims. Sep 7, 2004. Online at: transdada2.blogspot.com/2004/11/beautiful-sister-interview-with.html.
  
• http://butterfly-sisterhood.tripod.com.
  
• http://yasmenejabar.tripod.com.
  
• www.granny-maes-place.com.

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For some reason Yamene has become part of a miscellaneous group of trans women who are reprinted with their before and after images in several dumb sites professing a false shock that transsexuality exists. 

Ismail bin Yaha (1951–) dancer, preacher, healer.

Ismail was raised in Kedah province (map), in northwest Malaysia. He earned a living sewing clothes and dancing in female roles in local dance troupes.

In his twenties he became more and more aware that the dancing and his female clothing were contrary to Islam, but he could not give them up. One night during Ramadan he had a vision of heaven. He vowed to change, but not before a dance performance a few days later. Then he fell into a trance for three days.

On emerging he gave up dress-making, female clothing and dancing. He conducted a special purification for his house in that the materials had been purchased from a Chinese kafir.

He then dressed in the white robes of an alim and began preaching to his neighbours about hellfire. As the others knew him from before, his radical transformation was taken as divine intervention. The religious bureaucrats feared that he would be taken as a prophet. They interviewed him, declared him to be impious, and his preachings to be tempting but false. However he went on to a more prestigious role as a healer.

• Sharifah Zaleha Syad Hassan. "Versions of Eternal Truth: Ulama and Religious Dissenters in Kedah Malay Society". Contributions to Southeast Asian Ethnography, 8, 1989: 43-69.
• Michael G. Peletz. Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times. London & NY: Routledge, 2009: 187-8.

Fatime Ejupi (1926–?) peasant, soldier, councillor.

Fatime was the fourth daughter of a Muslim peasant family in Kosova. Lacking a son, the parents deemed the child to be a boy, Fetah.

Widowed at an early age, the mother was left the difficult task of guiding her son through the rites of boyhood. This was essential in that a widow with only daughters had no right to retain her husband's house and land. She managed to avoid the synét (circumcision) and postponed the search for a bride indefinitely.

In 1944 the 18-year-old Fetah was recruited by Tito's People's Liberation Army to fight the Axis occupation. Only after two years in the army was he examined by a doctor, who declared that he was a woman, and he was discharged.

Back in his village he was appointed to the revolutionary community council where he campaigned for rights for Muslim women, in particular the ending of veils and seclusion.

The village became aware that Fetah was a 'woman'.  In 1951 Asllan Asllani decided to marry Fetah. He was still in male clothing and resisted. Asllan 'seized' Fetah and made her his bride. At the wedding she returned to the name Fatime and changed to wearing the wide harem trousers.

They had a son and two daughters. Fatime later claimed to a journalist that she was content. The mother died without granting forgiveness for the loss of her only son.

• René Grémaux. "Mannish Women of the Balkan Mountains". In Jan Bremmer (ed). From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London & New York: Routledge,1989:162-3. Reprinted as "Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans" in Gilbert Herdt (ed). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. NY: Zone Books, 1994: 270-1.

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Fetah was not a typical sworn virgin in that he was raised as a boy from birth.  Grémaux suggests that Fetah switching back to Fatime indicates that the Sworn Virgin tradition was already in decline by the 1950s, however Fatime’s untypicality means that her case does not support the suggestion.

Note that the gender changes are both initiated by men, the father and then Asllan.  Fetah’s only time of choice was that he chose to stay a man after being discharged from the Army.

Maryam Hatoon Molkara (1950 - ) activist.

Fereydoon Molkara worked in television before transition. In 1978, before the Iranian Revolution, Fereydoon wrote to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was then in exile, requesting religious guidance. Khomeini replied that the case was different from homosexuality, and said that she should follow the Islamic obligations of being a woman.

After the Revolution, Fereydoon, like all other transgender persons in Iran, was seriously harassed. She was made to wear men’s clothing, forced to take male hormones, and confined in a psychiatric hospital.
In 1983, she tried approaching Khomeini directly and was badly beaten up by his bodyguards before succeeding. However Khomeini did give Fereydoon a religious authorization for sex-change surgery. This has been taken to be a fatwa that covers other transgender persons as well.

Subsequently Maryam struggled to organize transgender persons in Iran, and introduce medical standards. However she was not happy with procedures in Iran, and had surgery in Thailand in 2001. She runs the major transsexual campaign group in Iran, and frequently has to bail out trans persons who have been arrested.

• Nazila Fathi. “As Repression Lifts, More Iranians Change Their Sex”. The New York Times. Aug 2, 2004. www.nytimes.com/2004/08/02/international/middleeast/02iran.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1091489991-2sBf34Gerj3nlXAaASXZcQ.
• Robert Tait. “A Fatwa for Freedom”. The Guardian. 27 July 2005. www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1536658,00.html.
• Angus McDowell. "The Ayatollah and the transsexual". The Independent. 25 November 2004. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-ayatollah-and-the-transsexual-534482.html.

  EN.Wikipedia.

Maryani (1960 - 2014) sex worker, teacher.

++ updated April 2014.

Maryani was raised as a Catholic boy in Yogyakarta, Java. She grew up up be waria*, and for many years was a sex worker and drank alcohol.

She then converted to Islam. She has since adopted an eight-year old girl, and in 2008 turned her house into Indonesia’s first Islamic school specifically for waria. As mosques are gender segregated, there is no place for waria to pray. Twice a week a group of about 20 waria, many tired because of their night-time employment, come to study the Koran and pray. They also study baking and beauty therapy to provide employment opportunities other than sex work.

Maryani says: “I'm thankful to God I've been given this fate, that I live like this".

In 2013 she made the umrahm, the minor haj pilgrimage.

She died at age 53, which resulted in the temporary closing of her school, but it reopened a few weeks later.

• Aubrey Belford. “Indonesian transgendered find refuge in Islamic school”. France 24.11 Nov 2008. www.france24.com/en/20081111-indonesian-transgendered-find-refuge-islamic-school.
• “Photo Story: The Third Sex : Getty photographer looks at life as a transgendered Muslim.” The Vancouver Sun. Nov 11, 2009. www.vancouversun.com/news/2210885/story.html. 
• Prodita Sabarini. "A transgendered person goes on ‘umrah' ". The Jakarta Post, July 05 2013. www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/07/05/a-transgendered-person-goes-umrah.html. 
• "Indonesian Qur’an school for transgender women reopens". GayAsia News, April 23 2014.  http://gayasianews.com/2014/04/23/indonesias-quran-school-for-transgender-women-reopens.

*= wanita (woman) + pria (man)

Sally Mursi (1966 - ) medical student, dancer.

Sayed 'Abd Allah Mursi was raised in Cairo. He was a student at Al-Azhar’s Medical School for Boys in Cairo, one year from graduation, when she transitioned to Sally with surgery in 1988.

Her doctor was Dr Ezzat Ashamallah, a Copt. They were both summoned to the State Prosecuter’s office and investigated for public disorder. However no charges resulted, although Ashamallah was expelled for a time from the Physician’s Syndicate, and they were both featured in almost every Egyptian newspaper and magazine.

Sally approached a sheik, Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, then mufti and now Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, and he issued a fatwa that her change was necessary for her health but that before the operation she should for one year dress, behave and comply with all obligations of Islam for women, except for marital obligations. This fatwa was the first Sunni ruling about sex changes.

Sally was refused a transfer to Al-Azhar’s Medical School for Girls, and she has won two legal rulings against the school, but it has ignored them, and also blacklisted her at other medical schools.

She was accused of trying to get out of military service, and was ordered to report for induction into the army. Army doctors examined her, and finding that she was a woman, concluded that Sayed was not medically fit for military service.

Sally worked as belly dancer in nightclubs under the name of Rahma, where she was out as transgender, and this drew the customers, although she had to battle the Ministry of Culture which refused to issue her a dancing permit. Her show was raided twice by the vice squad.

She has completed a degree in literature at Cairo University. She has been married twice to men.

• Azza Khattab. “Sally’s Story”. Egypt Today. July 2004. http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1737.
• “An Appeal from Transsexuals”. Transgender Egypt. 12 Jun 2008. http://tgegypt.com/?p=10.

NL.Wikipedia 

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The Transgender Egypt article says that Sally was intersex, and the Egypt Today article implies that she wasn’t. I first went with the former, but then reversed after Jasmine's comment.

Dr Ashamallah says that sex changes have been done in Egypt since 1920, but gives no details.

Seyfi Dursumoglu (1932 - ) impersonator.

Since the 1960s, Seyfi has been popular with millions of Turks, doing his drag act with sharp-witted and topical comments. He performs as Huysuz Virjin (=Petulant Virgin), but would always end his show appearing as his male persona in a suit.
In 2007 he was banned by the Turkish Supreme Board of Radio and Television (RTÜK) on the grounds that “it is not pleasant to watch a man in women's clothes and that he will set a bad example for children”.
Since then he has appeared only in his male persona and only on a private television channel.

• “Deviating from the Path: A cross-dresser's troubles with a resurgent Islam”. Economist. Jan 10, 2008. www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=10499110.
• http://sozluk.sourtimes.org/show.asp?t=seyfi%20dursunoglu.

Ali Saleem (1979 - ) performer.

Born in Islamabad, Ali is the son of a now-retired colonel in the Pakistani army, and a government official.

Saleem describes himself as ‘a woman in a man’s body’, who fantasized about growing up to be a woman since he was a child.

He built a reputation impersonating former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Diane Spencer, Princess of Wales and actress/singer Noor Jehan. Bhutto herself asked Ali to do his impersonation of her and burst out laughing.

He has now become famous as Begum Nawazish Ali, a flirtatious widow on The Late Night Show on Aaj TV, where she poses taboo questions, that journalists regularly avoid, to imans, celebrities and politicians. Pakistan’s military government has threatened to ban the program.

Saleem is openly bisexual.

The show was finally banned in July 2007.

• Isambard Wilkinson. “How Pakistan's 'Dame Edna' has upset Musharraf”. Daily Telegraph. 22/04/2006. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/04/22/wpak22.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/22/ixworld.html. No Longer Available
• Ali Saleem interviewed by Sohema Rehan “I get to have the best of both worlds”. Newsline. January 2006. www.newsline.com.pk/NewsJan2006/startrekjan.htm.
• “Begum Nawazish Ali”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begum_Nawazish_Ali.

There is a very good video clip here on Ali and Nawazish. Usually I filter out clips that show us putting on makeup etc, but I make an exception for this one.