I came to my college campus a bit early so I explored its library and picked up a book titled "Please Select Your Gender" by Patricia Gherovici. Then I flipped to a random page and was mind blown by a passage that described Ayatollah Khomeini's (Iran's supreme leader's) stance on transsexualism. Here it is:
"Is the current conspicuousness of gender modification a sign of freedom in a robust democracy, or is the trivialization of sex change a way to push it as a normalizing and prophylactic cure for gender deviance? A very puzzling situation is presented by Iran, a country in which homosexuality carries the death penalty and where women have very limited rights, but in which the government fully supports sex change operations. In a progressive move more than 40 years ago, the Ayatollah Khomenei wrote in support of transsexuality and ruled that sex change operations were allowed, a position that has been reconfirmed by Iran's current spiritual leader. Khomenei argued that 'if somebody wants to undergo a sex change because he feels trapped in the wrong body, he has the right to get rid of his body and transform into the other sex, and he is also entitled to new identification documents, in order to put an end to his plight.' Since the 1990s, the number of sex change surgeries performed in Iran has surpassed the number performed in Europe (the estimation is that the number of transgender operations performed in Iran is over seven times the number of such operations in Europe.) According to Dr. Mirjalali, Iran's leading sex change surgeon , a European surgeon performs an average of 40 sex reassignment surgeries in a decade; he performed over 300 between 1993 and 2005."
So what explains this awesome phenomenon? Did the Ayatollah have personal ties with a transgender person? Does Iranian history support gender variance but not sexual variance? Who knows. I am mind blown.
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