Faith v.s. Love

This summer I went a movie showing during a local documentary film festival. The film was "Tales of the Waria", an 2011 documentary portraying the lives of Indonesian transgender women. What's distinctive about this group in Indonesia was none of them had gone through surgeries to remove their genitals, due to their identities as muslims and their interpretation of that identity, namely, one should return to God as God made him/her.

Interestingly, when I discussed this film with a friend who's taking an Anthropology class on sexuality and gender, she told me about another group of transgender women in Asia that she had studied for her class. This group of transgender women (I believe from Iran) is also muslim, but they address the issue of their identities in a very different perspective. For them homosexuality is a bigger sin than changing their genders. Therefore they undergo surgery to make themselves "heterosexual".

There are times when I thought to myself that I have no greater ambition in life than to love and be loved by family, friends and romantic partners--that being the goal, happiness seems easy to obtain. Little did I realize that for others in world love--something that I naturally thought was entitled to everyone--comes with a price, a bloody battle, a bit of maneuver of their faiths, and a compromise of other things like social approval, which is almost as important for survival in their respective societies.