About half a month ago, Mohd Ashraf Hafiz Abdul Aziz's application to the Kuala Terrenganu High Court

for an order to change his name and gender was rejected by the Judge, Datuk Mohd Yazid Mustafa. It was on the 30th, a day after being admitted to the intensive care unit of the Sultanah Nur Zahirah Hospital, when he breathed his last together with Aleesha Farhana Abd Aziz, the woman whom he failed to be legalized as, despite having undergone a sex-change operation in Thailand a couple of years ago. Doctors there said he was suffering from unstable angina with cardiogenic shock while some said they believed he died from severe depression due to the court's denial of his application. Sex-change operation, sex reassignment surgery, gender reassignment surgery, genital reconstruction surgery, sex affirmation surgery or sex realignment surgery, mention any of these terms and you will see furrowed brows. Why is this kind of surgical operation that changes a person's genital organs from those of one gender to those of the other repugnant to some even though it is becoming ubiquitous? I think it's nonsense. You're born what you are, it's set in a stone, be it a male or a female. No amount of cutting or adding body parts and hormones will ever change that... You don't feel like another sex. It's just a delusion... These people are clearly mentally disturbed. This is perverting the human base... Our religion does not permit sex changes to avoid any confusion and problems that would crop up later, unless you're a hermaphrodite... People who said the above look askance at transgenders as they consider this as going against the law of nature or more specifically the nature of being a human. You are assigned a role to play since birth and that is whom you shall be. It is your responsibility to make the best out of it. This is comparable to a situation in which you are given a topic to elaborate on. You can never switch to another topic just because you have a predilection for it. There is though, an exception: Newborns with intersex deformities must be assigned to one sex or the other for aesthetic or social purposes.

On the other hand, people who do not see the terms related to such operations as pejoratives have a different perspective. They see transgenders as some of the most persistent and bravest souls they have ever met as they are the ones who have fought with the demons in them and dealt with those in the others to be the best person they know how to be. In spite of the fact that their brains identify them as a gender which their bodies do not match and that they have to live with harassments and assaults due to their different sexual preferences, they are never debilitated in such a way that suicidal thoughts surface. They have instead chosen to get an operation which may potentially give them a reason to live. Not only are they to go through years of therapy and treatment after the operation but they also have to bear the risk of infection, bleeding and a need to return for repairs to boot. It is an irrefutable truth that they are sparing no efforts to justify things in order to survive as their own selves. Things in this world - much as we want them to - do not always turn out as expected or according to plan and are in fact often counterintuitive. What we must at least learn is to have more than a modicum of respect towards people with a smorgasbord of personalities and to put ourselves in their shoes - if it hurts, it probably hurts them too. Apart from that, there is an unassailable virtue amongst the transgender community that keeps them moving - a bedrock belief that the mind is of paramount importance plus the sex-change operation is necessary to provide the mind a more favourable carry case, and that is worthy of a salute.