known Saudi surgeon claims that he had performed 450 operations over the past 30 years to change the sex of patients suffering from gender problems. His patients include three women who became men after marriage. Prof. Dr. Yassir Saleh Jamal, head of the sex correction surgical center at King Abdulaziz University Hospital here, said he had refused to perform operations on many persons seeking to change their gender since they did not have any sex problems. He said his refusal was because such operations were against the Islamic code, adding that most of them were women seeking to be converted into men to receive a bigger share of their family inheritance. Dr. Jamal was quoted by Al-Watan daily as saying that three of those who underwent these operations were Saudi women aged between 18 and 21 years. “They suffered from general problems after marriage,” he said. “I examined them and found that they were actually males not females…before they underwent this operation, they said they had trouble sleeping with their husbands and that they had asked for divorce,” he said. “They underwent some tests at the center and we found that they were males…we performed successful sex-correction operations on them and the three are now men who are living their life normally.” Dr. Jamal said girls are “more willing” to accept these surgeries than men, who “normally refuse to return to their real nature as women.” “These operations are mostly rejected by those men or their families…it could take years before they come to the center for the operation…many of them came only when they became adults and had no choice.” Dr. Jamal said all persons who had undergone such operations in the Kingdom had suffered from gender problems, adding that it is strictly prohibited to perform them on healthy and normal persons. “This is against Islamic law because it involves altering God's creation…performing an operation on a normal person means that you are changing a right position into a wrong one,” he said. He said he had performed nearly 450 sex-correction operations during his 30-year career, adding that the operation normally lasts from two to 10 hours. “There are nearly 90 such cases waiting for their turn…usually, it takes some time before the operation is done in the absence of doctors specialized in this field,” he said.
