The New York Times reported last month on the dire situation for gay people in Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death. Many are pressured to undergo brutal reassignment surgeries to live as the opposite sex. Now, instead of effeminate gay men, they’re just run-of-the-mill straight women. Problem solved.

What Iran has effectively built is a medical system that treats homosexuality as a defect to be surgically erased. The goal isn’t self-expression; it’s social conformity. Transition becomes a tool of state-enforced heterosexuality.

As a gay man myself, I think that sounds pretty barbaric.

Though you could say that what’s occurring in the United States is arguably worse.

Here, the process of medically engineering gays into pseudo-straight people starts even earlier. Sissy boys who like Barbies are fed puberty blockers, which prevent their voices from deepening, facial hair from growing and shoulders from broadening. That way, they’ll have an even better chance of “passing” as female.

In Iran, this pressure comes from the state. In America, the pressure is cultural and medical rather than legal, but the result is eerily similar: Gender-nonconforming kids, many of whom would simply grow up to be gay, are rerouted onto a........

© New York Post