Mick Hartley

Ben Appel at the New York Post:

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.

Ring any bells?

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 that stopping a child’s puberty is a compassionate act. We’re told that halting sexual maturation is “lifesaving.” The procedures themselves haven’t changed (breast removal, genital surgeries, chemical castration), but the branding has.

It’s quite the combination with Mamdani: pushing “gender-affirming care”, and cheering on Hamas. “The struggle for Palestinian liberation is at the core of my politics and continues to be”: “We have to make it clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF”.