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 medicalized track.
Suppress a boy’s puberty, inject him with estrogen, get him on the operating table, and voilà — you’ve transed the gay away.
We once understood that many gay adults were gender-nonconforming kids. Now we treat that nonconformity as a sign of being “born in the wrong body” rather than a natural part of growing into a gay identity.
And guess who wants to expand access to these regressive practices? Zohran Mamdani, whose mayoral campaign was fueled by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Yes, the same CAIR linked to Iran-backed Hamas.
The irony is almost too on-the-nose: A politician supported by groups tied to regimes that persecute gays is championing policies that disproportionately pathologize gender-nonconforming kids here at home.
During his campaign, Mamdani pledged to invest $65 million in gender clinicians and vowed to turn our city into a national hub for this mad science.
In effect, Mamdani wants New York to mirror the very ideology that erases gay people in places like Iran, except he sells it as “progress.”
What makes the American version of this ideology so insidious is that it wraps itself in the language of liberation. In Iran, the state is at least honest about what it’s doing: It claims being gay is a perversion that must be corrected, and it uses medical interventions to enforce heterosexuality.
Here, the same logic is marketed as “gender-affirming care.” We’re told stopping a child’s puberty is a compassionate act. We’re told halting sexual maturation is “lifesaving.” The procedures themselves haven’t changed (breast removal, genital surgeries, chemical castration), but the branding has.
Euphemisms do a lot of heavy lifting. If you slap a pastel-colored label on the same interventions used in some of the most repressive countries on earth, you can convince otherwise intelligent people they’re progressive.
There is nothing progressive about preventing gay young people from becoming gay adults. And that’s the key point lost in these debates: Most gay adults were unmistakably gender-nonconforming children.
We used to understand this as part of the natural spectrum of human development. Now the culture has pathologized it. A boy who behaves like a boy is just a boy, but a boy who behaves like a girl is told he might actually be a girl. A girl who likes sports and hates dresses is told she might be “born in the wrong body.”
The so-called LGBTQ+ movement — the same movement that once insisted homosexuality was not a disorder — now sits silently while clinicians reinterpret ordinary gay childhoods as clinical symptoms.
And this is what makes Mamdani’s proposal especially galling. He isn’t merely advancing a misguided policy. He’s championing a worldview that mirrors the very regimes whose influence he has politically benefited from.
Iran erases gay people by forcing them into surgeries. Mamdani wants to expand access to the same medical pathway that disproportionately captures gay youth here at home, just with better p.r. and a government subsidy.
The effect is the same: You collapse the space for gay young people to grow into healthy adults.
New York City does not need to become the Western hemisphere’s testing ground for a practice that stripped of its slogans amounts to the soft-power version of what illiberal states have already perfected. The only difference is that here, it’s sold to parents as kindness rather than coercion. But the end result is the same.
Ben Appel is the author of “Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
