Nov 10
13
Many Iranian homosexuals pursue sex change operations
Toronto Star – November 13, 2010
Iran’s solution to ‘gay problem’? State-funded sex change surgery
‘My mother said, “I don’t want to see you anymore.” She said my brother would kill me’
By David Graham
Mahtab Mirghaderi signals to her husband to leave the interview. “He hates hearing about my life in Iran before we met,” she says. “It makes him too sad and too angry.” Saleh Shahsaver takes his cigarettes from the coffee table in the lobby of an Ankara hotel and stands out of earshot as his wife, a small 30-year-old woman with thick blond hair, prominent cheekbones and a delicate figure, shuts her eyes and goes back in time.
Five years ago, when she was living in Tehran, Mirghaderi’s mother gave her $3,000 (U.S.) for a sex-change operation, a medical procedure they were convinced would solve all of their problems. There was one condition: Once her son became a woman, once the surgery was completed, Mirghaderi had to stay away from the family, including her five sisters and two brothers. “My mother said, ‘I don’t want to see you anymore.’ She said my brother would kill me. Now I have no relationship with my family.”
Mirghaderi fled Iran three years ago with her boyfriend, Shahsaver. They married soon after in Turkey. For three years they’ve lived under temporary refugee protection in Ankara. Shahsaver, 28, is handsome and straight. “He didn’t believe me when I told him I used to be a boy. But after that he didn’t mind,” Mirghaderi says.
Shahsaver knows the harrowing details of his wife’s early years in Iran but still finds the details more than he can bear. Mirghaderi’s father died when she was young and she was placed in the custody of an overbearing brother, who beat her for not being boyish enough. The doctor who performed her surgery botched it, she says. “Sex is painful.” Mirghaderi lost her job in a hair salon after her surgery and, destitute, turned briefly to prostitution. She was arrested and sentenced to 30 lashes for immoral behaviour.
Sex changes have been legal in Iran since Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution, passed a religious edict 25 years ago authorizing the operations for “diagnosed transsexuals.” Doctors in Tehran, often called the sex-change capital of the world, perform gender-reassignment surgeries in unprecedented numbers. The Iranian government promotes and even subsidizes the operations, which help people define themselves as a man or a woman.