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Sexuality and gender in Iran
Why Iran is a hub for sex-reassignment surgery
realised quite early on that I was Igay," says Soly, a 25-year-old chef from Tehran. As a young boy, he would strut about the house in his mother's high heels and developed crushes on male cartoon characters. But after he was expelled from school for wearing eye-liner, his parents took him to a psychologist who offered a different explanation. "He told me I was transgender and had to change my sex."
Attitudes towards sexuality can be rigid in Iran. A conservative former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, once declared that the country didn't have any gay people. So it seems an unlikely hub...