New law in United Arab Emirates allows gender reassignment surgery
A new Medical Liability Law was enacted to allow gender reassignment surgery, which was previously difficult.
The law states that the surgical procedures “by which a transgender person’s physical appearance and function of their existing sexual characteristics are altered to resemble that of their identified gender” is permitted if it is “part of a treatment for gender dysphoria in transgender people, as advised by a medical commission to be set up for this purpose”.
Before the new law, a fatwa issued by Awqaf – the General Authority for Islamic Affairs and Endowments – said such operations were permitted only for those whose “physical features may be different to their physiological and biological characteristics, such as a person with male features who is in reality female and vice versa”.
The fatwa applied to “people with both sex organs or those with unclear features that don’t indicate a gender”.
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Photo By National_Progress_Party (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons