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Drastic surgery for Iran’s gay men
Gavin Knight, FirstPost.co.uk
If you are a man who wants to become a woman, then the Islamic Republic of Iran can help." This extraordinary proposal comes from the publicity material for a play about to be premiered at the Edinburgh Festival.
Called Plastic, it is written by the acclaimed Iranian playwright Mehrdad Seyf, who in an interview this week with The First Post helped explain how Iran, land of Ahmadinejad and nuclear stand-offs, has become the world centre for sex change surgery.
The starting point is straightforward if shocking: homosexuality is a crime in Iran, punishable by death. Human Rights Watch has reported that as recently as November 2005 two men in their twenties were publicly hanged for homosexual conduct in the northern town of Gorgan.
But while the government persecutes gay men, it sanctions sex change operations - even subsidising 50 per cent of the cost - on the grounds that the operation will 'cure' them of their homosexuality.
Mehrdad Seyf explains how this came about. "Ayatollah Khomenei actually decreed it in a fatwa 25 years ago," he says.
Khomenei was confronted in his living room by a distraught young man called Fereydoon. Due to hormone replacement therapy, Fereydoon already had breasts. He was covered in blood, after being beaten badly by the Ayatollah's bodyguards.
"He tied his shoes together and put them around his neck," Seyf says, "which is a sign to Muslims that you must be heard. The Ayatollah listened and decreed that anyone who feels trapped inside someone else's body has the right to get rid of this body and transform into the other sex."
