In the Islamic Republic of Iran, homosexuality is a crime punishable by death and as such you’re not likely to see any Pride Parades on the streets Tehran anytime soon but there does exist a loophole in the law – a fatwa that was issued in 1980 by then Ayatollah Khomeini after being so moved by a story he was told by a man who believed himself to be woman trapped in a man’s body - that allows anyone in Iran to elect to undergo gender assignment surgery.
While it isn’t official government policy that would force homosexuals to undergo this procedure the pressure to do so is intense: as was already stated, homosexuality in Iran is punishable by death so anyone who is homosexual and is caught being homosexual in Iran is given a choice:
Trans or die.
This is Soheil, no last name given and he is a 21 year old homosexual man from Iran who is now living in Turkey having fled to escape his fate from both the authorities and his own family thanks to friends who managed to smuggle him out of the country.
After having come out to a psychologist in Iran it was recommended that Soheil undergo gender reassignment surgery and after the psychologist made this recommendation his own family immediately pressured him to follow through with it.
In Soheil’s words:
My father came to visit me in Tehran with two relatives. They'd had a meeting to decide what to do about me... They told me: 'You need to either have your gender changed or we will kill you and will not let you live in this family.'
Soheil was being held by family members in Bandar Abbas, keeping him under constant surveillance until the day before his scheduled surgery he was able to escape with the help of friends who immediately whisked him off to the airport and put him on a plane to Istanbul.
Soheil would like to come back to Iran someday but the situation between him, his family and the authorities makes that impossible. It’s very likely Soheil will never set foot in the land of his birth ever again.
Doctors both medical and psychiatric in Iran cannot and do not know the difference between “sexual orientation” and “gender identification”: for these doctors, it’s all the same. As an example, Iman (again, no last name) was confused about his sexuality and was declared by a doctor to be “98% female”.
"The doctor told me that with the surgery he could change the 2% male features in me to female features, but he could not change the 98% female features to be male," says Iman.
How one determines that someone can be 98% female or 2% male is a question that can’t be answered from any known medical standards of practice.
Prior to gender reassignment surgery Iman felt compelled to start a regimen of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and, for a while, it seemed to work - his body hair thinned and he grew breasts.
”It made me feel good. It made me feel more attractive to the kinds of partners I used to have.”
After undergoing gender reassignment surgery, Iman (now Marie) came away feeling, in her own words, “physically damaged”.
”Before the surgery, people used to say ‘He’s so girly, he’s so feminine’ but after the operation whenever I wanted to feel, or behave, like a woman people would say ‘She looks like a man, she’s manly’”.
Life has completely ground to a standstill for Marie. A brief marriage to a man fell apart (one imagines that he realized he wasn’t married to a woman after all) and any hopes that Marie would live as a woman have completely disintegrated. Marie often wonders if, in a free society, would she have even made the choice to undergo gender reassignment or to remain a homosexual man.
While the religious customs of Iran seem alien to us in the West the idea to “trans away the gay” seems to be catching on in the United States and Canada as the clash between sexual orientation and conservative religious values is playing out.
On February 14, 2021 a series of protests were held outside children’s hospitals in six cities that house transgender clinics in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Hartford, and Ontario, Canada and chief among the concerns of the protestors that gender non-conforming or gay and lesbian children were being prescribed puberty blockers, the first stage of gender reassignment surgery as it’s easier to do to arrest the natural biological changes brought on by puberty.
While the protestors lay the blame of “transing” children who do not conform to gender stereotypes or are, in fact, gay and lesbian at the feet of Big Pharma (the collective term for the pharmaceutical industry) I proffer an alternative theory:
It is the parents who, for reasons mostly moral and religious they will not admit to, are directly responsible and Big Pharma (along with the transgender clinics that are popping up all over the United States) are all too happy to take their money.
It’s supply and demand and it’s obvious there’s a huge demand.
It’s necessary to point out that gender dysphoria - the feeling that someone gets that they were born in the “wrong body” and are not the sex they perceive themselves to be - is a thing and typically it manifests itself in young children from ages 2-4 and for some this feeling persists into and beyond puberty that the only relief they will ever get from it is to undergo gender reassignment surgery and one certainly hopes that this condition is diagnosed by competent, careful, sober and serious professionals both medical and psychological.
Gender dysphoria, however, is also exceedingly rare affecting less that one tenth of 1% of the population, most of whom are male and over 70 percent of them, if left alone and not given any medical intervention, will outgrow their dysphoria - some of them even grow into adulthood and come out as gay.
As for those who don’t outgrow it, they go on to be what we now describe as transgender and that they don’t believe they’re actually female, they just feel more comfortable presenting as female - and that’s okay, but the problem as of late this past decade is that the moment these kids start engaging in gender non-conforming behavior (that is they’re not quite what we think of as “boy” or “girl” behaviors and norms) there are but parents who immediately label them as being transgender with gender dysphoria.
For some of these parents, the moment their son or daughter exhibits behaviors that can be construed as homosexual these parents often find themselves in an untenable situation.
An overwhelming 92% of the American population vehemently opposes conversion therapy, a pseudo-psychological treatment that can “cure” anyone of homosexuality. 18 states, including the District of Columbia, have outright banned it. Given that the American public rightly sees conversion therapy as abusive torture, no parent in their right mind would ever put their own child through it and if it were ever known they had any intention to do this the parents would find themselves having Child Protective Services called on them or arrested and the child placed in foster care.
Gender reassignment, on the other hand, is not only completely legal it is encouraged.
When a child is deemed transgender, all manner of support is given. Teachers encourage these children to introduce themselves with their new pronouns. Doctors and therapists practice a technique known as affirmative care - that they don’t try to figure out why a child has gender dysphoria but rather it’s their duty to affirm it and help the child with medical transition.
Today there exists entire armies of doctors and therapists, many in pediatrics, who think it’s their job to administer “social justice” and are quite open about it and the fact they celebrate the increase of medically transitioning children.
It is a politicizing corruption of medicine and science symptomatic of our new, “woke” American society.