Iran Seeks to Become the Global Hub of…Trans Surgery?

This is definitely not an outcome I had imagined but in a twisted way it makes sense. Iran is famously one of the most anti-gay countries in the world. And so it turns out they actually force gay people, under threat of punishment or death, to have transition surgery. There are no gay people in Iran, only people in the wrong bodies.

Now Iran is hoping to sell its expertise in trans surgery to the rest of the world.

For 40 years Iran has performed more gender transition surgeries than many other nations, largely a result of pressuring gay and gender-nonconforming citizens to undergo unwanted operations or risk the death penalty.

Now, faced with an economy crippled by war and sanctions, the Islamic republic is promoting its expertise to a global audience, hoping to attract transgender foreigners with the promise of inexpensive surgeries packaged with luxury hotel stays and sightseeing tours…

In Iran, gay men and lesbians can be punished by public flogging and the death penalty. As a result, the United Nations Human Rights Council found, many gay and lesbian Iranians who are not trans are “pressured into undergoing gender reassignment surgery without their free consent.”

Still, the country’s cut-rate prices are drawing transgender individuals from as far away as Australia, the United States, Britain and Europe, according to medical tour operators and surgeons. Many more patients, they say, come from neighboring countries, like Iraq, where such treatments are strictly forbidden.

There’s long been an argument that trans identity is essentially hostile to gay people. This is based on the claim that many people who seek to transition as kids eventually turn out to be gay.

Research shows that some 80% of children with “gender dysphoria” eventually come to terms with their sex without surgical or pharmaceutical intervention. Multiple studies have found that most kids who are confused or distressed about their sex end up realizing they’re gay—nearly two-thirds in a 2021 study of boys. This makes sense: Gay kids often don’t conform to traditional sex roles. But gender ideology holds that feminine boys and masculine girls may be “born in the wrong body.”

In this light, “gender-affirming care” looks a lot like conversion therapy… Clinicians from the main U.K. transgender service referred to prescribing puberty blockers as “transing the gay away”—a play on the description of old-fashioned conversion-therapy as “praying the gay away.” A clinician who resigned from the U.K. service accused it of “institutional homophobia.” Clinicians at the service had a “dark joke” that “there would be no gay people left at the rate Gids”—the Gender Identity Service—“was going.”

In that light, Iran’s embrace of trans surgery makes a twisted kind of sense. A country that denies the existence of any gay people is open to the idea that some men and women were simply born in the wrong body. And as a practical matter, a struggling theocracy is happy to offer those medical services to the rest of the world for a price.

Desperate for foreign investment, Iran’s theocratic government has set a goal of generating more than $7 billion from medical tourism annually, according to Iranian state news media, about seven times as much as it earned last year. That objective has resulted in the proliferation of medical tourism companies, marketing not just nose jobs and hair transplants, but vaginoplasties, mastectomies and penis constructions through glossy English-language websites…

Amid glossy before-and-after photo illustrations of idealized pectorals and breasts, and copy that promises “budget-friendly” procedures, rapid visa approvals and help achieving “a strong feeling of happiness and relief,” the tour companies are also selling patients on what one calls Iran’s “relatively progressive stance on transgender rights.”

It’s hard to know where all of this will go, but it seems possible that the anti-gay Iranian regime could one day be hailed as a heroic center of support for trans westerners. That’s at least what Iran itself is hoping will happen.

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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