Iran’s Double Edged Sexuality Sword
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Religion, The WorldIn Iran you can be killed for being a homosexual. However, if you want to get a sex change and then have sex with the gender you’re attracted to, that’s okay.
Jeez…
From The Independent:
I know because I’ve experienced both worlds: as a man in Iran I have more freedom and choice than as a woman,” muses 30 year-old estate agent Milad Kajouhinejad, 30, loosening his tie and unbuttoning his shirt to reveal a hirsute chest. It gives him pleasure, this manly gesture, just as it gives him pleasure to carry an attaché case and sport the full beard of a practising Muslim. Until three years ago, he could do none of these things. “I never used to go to the mosque, either,” he adds. “I did not want to have to wear a chador. Now I can pray in boxer shorts if I feel like it, and I never miss prayers,” he says.Milad gives thanks to Allah five times a day and, while doing so, always offers a special prayer to the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, “without whom,” he says, “every transexual would have had to leave Iran. He was the first to issue a fatwa authorising a man or woman to change their sex.”
More than 15 years after Khomeini’s death, the cleric’s unlikely religious judgement means that Iran now has one of the world’s largest populations of transexuals, and the fatwa itself has become the stuff of legend. “A theology student told me that he delivered his verdict after he was contacted by a couple who no longer experienced any physical pleasure. He advised them to change sex and, once the woman had become a man and the man a woman, then to remarry,” says Mahnaz Javaheri, 42, the mother of Athena, a 20-year-old who, as she puts it, “needed to be freed of her man’s body”. A devout Muslim, Mahnaz says that if the three imams she consulted hadn’t given their permission, she would never have let her son Hadi become Athena, “even if it meant him committing suicide. These three great ayatollahs all said that he should have the operation as soon as possible.”
Hey, if you can’t beat em…
This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2005 and is filed under Religion, The World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 14th, 2005 at 12:54 pm
Thanks for posting this, I had no idea that this particularly twisted hypocrisy of the radical muslims existed.
Frankly if I were a woman in that culture I’d get the sex change almost immediately…what’s to lose? You would change from being a virtual slave to pretty much complete freedom. Of course I doubt the same level of opportunity for sex change is given to women as it is to men, as well as of course women have little ability to earn the cash to cover the surgery.
November 14th, 2005 at 4:23 pm
Yeah, this is pretty ridiculous, but this is the type of logic you get when you have religious extremism. Crazy stuff.