Transgender rights in Iran are limited, with a narrow degree of official recognition of transgender identities by the government, but with trans individuals facing very high levels of discrimination from the law, the state, and from wider society.

Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the issue of transgender identity in Iran had never been officially addressed by the government. Beginning in the mid-1980s, however, transgender individuals were officially recognized by the government, under condition of undergoing sex reassignment surgery, with some financial assistance being provided by the government for the costs of surgery, and with a change of sex marker on birth certificates available post-surgery.

Iran allows people who identify as female to participate in women's sports if they have had genital reassignment surgery.

However, substantial legal and societal barriers exist in Iran. Transgender individuals who do not undergo surgery have no legal recognition and those that do are first submitted to a long and invasive process, including virginity tests, formal parental approval, psychological counseling that reinforces feelings of shame, and inspection by the Family Court. In addition, non-binary genders are not recognized in Iran and the quality of trans healthcare in the country, including hormone therapy and reconstruction surgeries, is often very low.

Iranian officials have said that transgender people have "a special physical and psychological condition", and they most usually classify this as "gender identity disorder", which is considered to be outdated by the ICD-11's most recent versions. Iran has no laws protecting trans people against stigmatization or hate crimes. Transgender individuals also face extreme social pressures to hide the fact that they are transgender, often being forced to move to a new city, cut ties with any previous relationships, and conform to the strict sex segregation in Iran. Harassment against transgender individuals is common within Iran, and trans people face increased risk of physical and sexual assault, exclusion from education and jobs, poverty, and homelessness. The Iranian government also monitors online transgender communities, often subjecting them to censorship, and police routinely arrest trans people.

The United Nations Human Rights Council has reported that "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender children are subjected to electric shocks and the administration of hormones and strong psychoactive medications".

There is evidence of third genders existing in civilisations in the region that is now Iran dating back thousands of years. A 2018 study of burial sites at Teppe Hasanlu found that around 20% of the tombs did not conform to a binary gender-divided distribution of artifacts or showed signs of the buried having performed masculine roles while wearing feminine dressing (or vice-versa). A bowl at the site was also discovered depicting a bearded man wearing female clothing shown sitting on the floor, a position that was usually reserved for women in the local iconography.

Surgery for intersex conditions have been practiced in Iran since the 1930s. In 1963, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini wrote a book in which he stated that there was no religious restriction on corrective surgery for intersex individuals, though this did not apply to those without physical ambiguity in sex organs. At the time Khomeini was a radical, anti-Shah revolutionary and his fatwas did not carry any weight with the Imperial government, which did not have any specific policies regarding transgender individuals.^[1]