 As early as 1975, Molkara wrote 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 1978, she traveled to Paris, where Khomeini was then based, to try to make him aware about transgender rights.After the Islamic Revolution, she was fired from her job at television, injected with male hormones against her will and detained in a psychiatric institution.