Jan. 30
IRAN:
The times, and genders, are changing in Iran----Homosexuals face death
penalty, so they have sex legally changed, blessed by clerics
Whispering like conspirators, the 2 cousins hook their thumbs in their
belt loops, skim cocky eyes over the women and swivel, stiff-legged from
their hips, like the men they have become.
Across the room, and a few steps away on the gender spectrum, a man with
shaggy hair wrinkles a pug nose in the mirror and struggles to drape a
silky scarf over his head in the style of Islamic womanhood.
Almost everybody here, in this sterilized waiting room at a clinic in the
clanging heart of Tehran, is in the midst of changing their sex.
An opening
"I was married. I had a wife and children," says Maria Pakgohar, a
curvaceous former truck driver wearing flower barrettes and fake furs. She
claims she's in her 40s but flashes an identification card giving her age
as 62. "The cleric came to my house and said to my wife: 'What do you want
from him? He's a woman, not a man.'"
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, gay male sex still carries the death
penalty and lesbians are lashed, but hundreds of people are having their
gender changed legally, bolstered by the blessings of members of the
ruling Shiite clergy.
"Approval of gender changes doesn't mean approval of homosexuality. We're
against homosexuality," says Mohammed Mahdi Kariminia, a cleric in the
holy city of Qom and one of Iran's foremost proponents of using hormones
and surgery to change sex. "But we have said that if homosexuals want to
change their gender, this way is open to them."
Not always accepted
Not that it's easy. The Islamic republic remains a fundamentally
conservative society, laced by harsh judgments and strict mores. A
blizzard of clerical decrees is unlikely to make a mother eager to see her
son become a woman or enlighten leery co-workers who squirm at their
colleague's voice dropping a few octaves. And the government's response is
fractured, with some officials remaining opposed to sex changes.
"The people our age, they all know and accept us," says Toumik Martin, a
brusque 28-year-old businessman who was born a girl named Anita. "Our
problem is with the parents. They don't know how to differentiate between
transsexuals, gays and lesbians."
When Dr. Bahrom Mir-Djalali began performing sex-change operations 15
years ago, he endured death threats from scandalized parents. One father,
he recalls, showed him a dagger and vowed to slash his throat. But slowly,
he says, society has come around. He measures the shift in the fights with
the families, which he says have become less drastic.
"This is an Islamic country, and very, very old-fashioned," says
Mir-Djalali, a white-haired surgeon who studied sex-change procedures in
Paris. "I try to tell people, 'They don't have horns, they are normal
people.' But it's hard for society to accept.
"At least now we have a discussion about it."
(source: Los Angeles Times)
