Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Corrupting What It Means To Be Trans

Iran is corrupting what it means to be Gender Dysphoric
Why Iran’s Mullahs Bless Sex Reassignment
Iran has the death penalty for homosexuality but subsidizes sex reassignment surgery. BuzzFeed News looks at how Iran became a center of sex reassignment in the Middle East, and why many trans Iranians still find life impossible in the Islamic republic.
BuzzFeed
By J. Lester Feder
Posted on Dec. 26, 2016

DENIZLI, Turkey — Sorena sought out the mullah after committing a sin she feared could not be forgiven.

It was the winter of 2014, and Sorena was just 17 years old. She lived with her family in Shiraz, a city of 1.5 million people in southwest Iran. Sorena had been to consult the mullahs before as they dispensed advice from tables in the city park, mostly about how to reconcile the beliefs of her mother — who belonged to Iran’s minority Sunni sect — with the teachings of Shia Islam, the faith of her father, and Iran’s official religion.

But never had she come to discuss something so personal — or so potentially dangerous.

“My desires are not matched with my body,” she told the mullah. “I think because I’ve fallen in love with someone who’s the same sex as me that I’m committing a sin.”

Sorena’s family had raised her as their youngest son, but she saw herself as a woman when she dreamed. She’d also recently had sex with a man for the first time, and the fear that she had sinned beyond redemption drove her into a panic that lasted weeks.
[…]
“You are transsexual, and you have to go for the surgery,” he pronounced. “It is accepted in our religion.”
I think you imprison or even execute gays and lesbians you give them a strong incentive to say they are transgender instead that they are gay or lesbian.
HBO's VICE Uncovers Gay Iranians Forced to Surgically Change Gender
Hard to believe, but the Iranian government will pay for gender-reassignment surgery to "cure homosexuality."
The Advocate
By Thom Senzee
April 11, 2015

The next installment of HBO's VICE documentary series, which premiered Friday, took on "a terrifying cultural landscape" as it looks at a Muslim country whose government will pay for what it calls "sex-change" surgery as a so-called cure for homosexuality.

The show's producers shared an advanced clip of the segment reported by VICE correspondent Thomas Morton. It's an astonishing tale about how gay men who are not transgender are compelled to have what would normally be gender-affirmative surgery if they were indeed trans. For many if not all of these men, it's a matter of living as someone they are not for the rest of their lives following surgery — or facing execution.

Once a relatively progressive country, Iran became a fundamentalist Islamic state where homosexuality is punishable by death after the fall of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. Public executions of gay men in Iran is a frequent occurrence. In fact, the noosed bodies of young men are sometimes put on trucks and paraded through cities, towns and villages for all to see.
When given a choice between death or a sex change* which would you pick?

*I use the term “sex change” because it is not gender-affirmative surgery, not when you force them to choose between death and having surgery.

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