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Transsexuality in Iran has gained much attention and media coverage in the past few years, particularly in its questionable depiction as a permitted loophole for homosexuality, which is prohibited under Iran's Islamic-inspired legal system. Of course, attention in the West is also encouraged by the "shock" that sex change is available in Iran, a country that Western media and society delights in portraying as monolithically repressive. As a result, Iranian filmmakers inevitably have their own agendas, which are unsurprisingly brought into the film making process—from a desire to sell a product that will appeal to the Western market, to films that endorse specific socio-political agendas. This paper is an attempt to situate sex change and representations of sex change in Iran within a wider theoretical framework than the frequently reiterated conflation with homosexuality, and to open and engage with a wider debate concerning transsexuality in Iran, as well as to specifically analyze the representation of transexuality, in view of its current prominent presence in media.

Transgender identities and sexualities find a visibly accepted presence in the medieval history of India, especially in the Mughal era. Historical accounts and studies have indicated the prestige and power enjoyed by the third gender in the Mughal Empire to the extent that some of the writings have located them as an integral part of Mughal courts of law, holding some key positions of the royal palaces. In the extant literature on transgender, the analysis of their position as depicted through Hindustani Cinema in the Mughal period remains inadequate. The cinematic representation of the transgenders in the Mughal period can certainly offer a wide window to analyse their status in the given era, as this period has been documented as one of the most liberal periods for the transgender in Indian History. The present article aims to fill this gap through a mise-en-scene analysis of Hindustani Cinema based on the Mughal Empire during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Hindustani Cinema has offered a marginalised space on-screen to transgender people for a long time by putting them only in humorous and comic roles. By providing an intense analysis of all the films based on the Mughal period in Hindustani Cinema, the present article argues that even period films are not devoid of the politics of representation of contemporary times.