>> Or is this a lesbian couple making do with a terrible choice, one that was no choice at all?

I think you overlook the significant portion of the story: An Iranian court has ordered an Iranian man to be more tolerant, and the man has evidently had a change of heart.

If this were entirely a sham, I don't think you'd find emotions like that involved, I don't think you'd find a court taking the side of the "lesbians," and I don't think anyone would be willing to set aside the legal right of a father to control his daughter (however barbaric this may seem, we should realise that it's less than a hundred years since most Western fathers had a similar right), but are treating the case as if it involved the competing rights of two males.

This is a *huge* change, and shows that the change of status is considered legitimate in every way. Read the article by the woman who started it all; can't you see the truth in it?

I think that this is the crack in Iranian religious law that will eventually cause the rest to wither away. Once one starts making humane decisions, cases where compassion is involved will come up again.

And we shouldn't forget that Western transsexual and transgendered people have "terrible choices" thrust upon them that barely qualify as choices as well.

One has to follow "standards of care" that force one into a "mental illness" paradigm, whether one feels particularly mentally ill or not. Everyone knows, I think, that many people lie to mental health and other professionals involved in this barbaric practice, "jumping through hoops" in proper order to achieve their desired end. One finds, after all, websites devoted to teaching one the "proper" answers, which speaks volumes about the profound silliness of the whole business. Is one really mentally ill when one is studying the skills involved in malingering? Do schizophrenics study to pass their schizophrenia examinations?

Instead of a free choice, as it should be, and as it was in societies that really accepted transgendered and "two-spirit" people, it becomes a "sickness" to prefer another sex to the one was assigned at birth, as if this were part of some sort of divine order which requires one to have a proper excuse to violate with impunity.

Look at the free will paradigms seen in Triton (Samuel R. Delany) and Steel Beach (John Varley), although both have their own set of problems, the one perhaps meant as a response to the other. Does the current system in any "Western Democracy" look anything like either?

While "our" system is obviously "better," both systems are symptomatic of the same restrictive and judgmental worldview, that there are right ways and wrong ways to behave in matters of gender and sexuality, and you'd better have a damned good reason if you want to escape the straight-jacket.

Cheers,

Puddin'