From the Iranian Journal of Public Health, in their 2022 note “Sex Reassignment Surgery in Iran, Re-Birth or Human Rights Violations against Transgender People?” Bihan Pirnia and Kambiz Pirnia reference a 2005 Guardian article (A fatwa for freedom) in which the following appears: “Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran occupies the unlikely role of global leader for sex change.” The author of the Guardian article, Robert Tait, begins with “Maryam Molkara was a woman trapped in a man’s body,” a case that could only be approximately true in an extreme sexual anomaly case, which this case is not.
Pirnia and Pirnia lament that the Guardian article “did not distinguish between SRS and conversion therapy.” They clarify: “What is common in Iran is SRS [sex reassignment surgery], not conversion therapy or reparative therapies. SRS has a guideline and is designed and approved by the World Professional Association for Transgender People (WPATH). It is a professional organization that has published the health care standards for transsexual, transgender and gender nonconforming people in the latest version (version 7). Psychologically, SRS is in line with the adaptation of physical body to sexual identity and reduces the gap caused by the incompatibility of these two dimensions, allows gender expression and contributes to the mental health of these people.”
Despite the fact that Iran is is the only Muslim-majority country that provides SRS (“the Imam Committee provides interest-free loans to some people eligible for gender reassignment surgery, which is in line with the recommendations of the WHO”), the authors lament that the treatment process in Iran does not comply with international medical and psychiatric standards. “Our suggestion is to change the culture of the society towards Trans genders, to improve the quality of surgeries, to create a culture of dealing with these people, and finally to pass laws that will make life easier for them than before.” At the same time, the authors criticize the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), and the construct of gender dysphoria in which, in the authors’ words, “distress is caused by gender mismatch, which is an inappropriate and harmful diagnostic method.” They stress that “the International Classification of Diseases Code (ICD)–11, the Health Organization has suggested that relevant diagnoses be transferred to a new sexual health-related chapter.”
The reader may be surprised that the Islam state in Iran provides SRS for Irans (as well as people from other countries). However, Pirnia and Pirnia explain why this is the case: “Classical Islamic discourse divides gender as one of two categories, male or female, but has accepted the possibility that in the case of hermaphrodites [intersex conditions] it is difficult and sometimes impossible to determine the body.” So far, except for the suggestion that it is ever impossible to determine one’s sex, the discourse aligns with science. But Islam is a religion and sooner or later it will depart from reason. “Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution, once in 1964 in his book Tahrir al-Wasila and once after the Islamic Revolution in 1982, issued a fatwa on the act of reassignment and confirmation gender only for people whose faces are inconsistent with their gender and considered it legitimate and this issue became one of the emerging issues of Shia Islamic jurisprudence.” There’s the inevitable departure from the planet into the real of the supernatural.
What does it mean to say “faces inconsistent with gender”? It means that a boy who is attracted to other boys or who appears to possess attitudes and habits associated with girls is really a girl trapped in a boy’s body. His gender, the role assigned to people by the Islamic faith, does not match his natural body. In Islam, one’s role in society is determined not by social, material, and physical things, but by the soul. “According to the jurists,” the authors report, “since it is not possible to change the soul, but at the same time medical advances have made it possible to change the body, the act of gender reassignment is permissible.”
So, by the lights of woke progressivism, Shia Islam is a progressive religious faith. Women trapped in male bodies are with the sharp edge of the surgeon’s scalpel able to release their authentic selves. Genital mutilation sets them free to suffer the imposition of Islamic gender stereotypes. This is the core doctrine of queer theory. To make it work, science must be abandoned, or at least in this case excluded, and a religious or religious-like ideology must stand in its place. Is it any wonder that the woke faux-left is so enamored with Islamism?
Meanwhile, the Guardian is reporting today that FGM ban in the Gambia under threat as calls grow to repeal law. “Women’s rights campaigners denounce ‘hugely regressive’ proposals from political and religious leaders to decriminalize [the] practice.” The author, Sarah Johnson, reports “Members of the country’s national assembly have backed a proposal for the 2015 law to be scrapped while the Supreme Islamic Council has issued a fatwa condemning anyone who denounces the practice and calling for the government to reconsider the legislation.”
freedom and reason 