A devout Christian surgeon in South Korea once faced a dilemma - he was approached by a Buddhist monk, born with female organs, but living as a male, who wished to have surgery to create a functioning penis.
The surgeon, Dr Kim Seok-Kwun tells his story:
When he first started doing the surgeries in the 1980s, his pastor objected. Friends and fellow doctors joked that he was going to hell if he didn't stop. He now feels a great sense of achievement for helping people who feel trapped in the wrong body. He believes he's correcting what he calls God's mistakes.
A South Korean Christian leader stated:
Sex change operations "are a blasphemy against God*** and make the world a more miserable place," said the Reverend Hong Jae Chul, president of the Seoul-based Christian Council of Korea. He called Kim's remarks "cursed and deplorable."
How did he change his Christian mindset? It wasn't just Christian prejudice - a strong bias against sexual minorities persists in South Korea, the result of lingering Confucian beliefs that children should never damage the bodies they received from their parents; a large, vocal conservative Christian community; and past military-backed dictatorships that ignored minority voices.
So how did Dr Kim think through his dilemma?
He explains:
"Some people are born without genitals or with cleft lips or with no ears or with their fingers stuck together. Why does God create people like this? Aren't these God's mistakes?" Kim said. "And isn't a mismatched sexual identity a mistake, too?"
From the time of his first sex-change operation, Dr Kim has performed over 300 operations.
Many of Kim's earliest patients were in their 40s and 50s. Sometimes parents showed up just before surgeries, furious and threatening to disown their children. (These days, most) of his sex-change patients are in their early 20s, and sometimes their parents agree to pay for the surgery. Male-to-female procedures cost 11 million to 15 million won ($A11,044 to $A15,057), and the more difficult female-to-male procedures cost 31 million won (SA31,109).
His most famous case is:
Harisu, South Korea's most famous transsexual entertainer, is one of Dr Kim Seok-Kwun's best known patients. Photo: AP
Before her surgery, Harisu, the transsexual entertainer, signed a document acknowledging that she knew she could die during surgery, though Kim said none of his sex-change operations have gone so horribly wrong.
"If I had lived as a man without undergoing a sex change operation, I might be dead already," Harisu said. "I was already a woman except for my genitals. I didn't want to live an awkward life with those genitals ... I'm a woman, so I wanted to live as a woman."
Change is occurring slowly in South Korea, the fight against vicious minded Christians goes on. But a changing mindset in the general population is evident. Popular Boy Bands and Girl Bands play with sexual boundaries and push the edges of public aceptance
*** Isn't the Christian God, supposedly all-powerful, the one who curses the human race by allowing HIS mistakes?
The above information based on this Sydney Morning Herald article: