Forced Surgery

Can you imagine what it must be like to have Sex Reassignment Surgery forced on you? It must be like having Gender Dysphoria in reverse, but that is what is being done to gays and lesbians in Iran.

Iran pressures lesbians, gays to have sex change operations – report
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
26 Jun 2014
Author: Emma Batha

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – When Arshkan, a young Iranian man, told a psychiatrist he was homosexual he was astonished to get a letter telling him to start hormone therapy in preparation for a sex change.

Sara, a student in Tehran, was similarly advised to change sex after confiding to a psychologist that she preferred girls to boys.

Rights campaigners say Iranian doctors routinely pressure lesbians and gays to undergo sex change operations including sterilisation.

You are given a choice, losing your head or have the surgery, what would you choose?

Today, Iran carries out among the highest number of sex changes in the world and is the only country which imposes the death penalty for homosexual behaviour while permitting sex changes, Amin said. 

In addition, many of the doctors performing the operation have no training in the surgical procedures and they botch many of the operations.

In a BBC News 2008 article, they wrote,

"Islam has a cure for people suffering from this problem. If they want to change their gender, the path is open," says Hojatol Islam Muhammad Mehdi Kariminia, the religious cleric responsible for gender reassignment.

He says an operation is no more a sin than "changing wheat to flour to bread".

Yet homosexuality is still punishable by death.

"The discussion is fundamentally separate from a discussion regarding homosexuals. Absolutely not related. Homosexuals are doing something unnatural and against religion," says Kariminia. "It is clearly stated in our Islamic law that such behaviour is not allowed because it disrupts the social order."