So picture this:
You, being the sort of unconvential individualist that you are, discover that you’re the wrong gender. And in the process of changing your gender, you find yourself reconsidering your outlook on life, mostly in the form of your religion. So you change your gender and you change your religion and you get married and start a life. It might take a while for your parents to come to terms with it, but eventually they’ll accept you for you. Right?
Not so for Issa Fazli, a Muslim woman turned Christian man.
Issa, whose name means “Jesus” in Arabic, found happiness with a woman in New York, but each set of their influential Muslim Pakistani parents had a major problem with it. So you’d think the couple would have been suspicious when their parents offered to throw them a party back in Pakistan.
But they weren’t. And then their lives started to suck.
Because when Issa and his wife Saadia went back to Pakistan for their Big Fat Pakistani Wedding, they were greeted instead with a maelstrom of hurt.
But their parents weren’t just upset. They were vengeful. Each set of parents used its influence with the government to make life completely miserable for the Issa and Saadia. When the couple tried to leave the country to return to New York, they found that the airports insisted that they needed their parents’ permission to buy plane tickets!
Of course, the couple then made the mistake of registering as Christian federally, completely screwing themselves even further. They then claimed their families were paying off people (including Issa’s own bodyguard) to try to kill them.
Issa and Saadia are now safe back in New York, but this whole thing has probably really fucked them up.
Personally, I am a Jewyjew dating a non-religionized Asian man. Our parents would prefer we date within (in my case) our relgion and (in his case) our race, but it’s been four years and they’re kind of over it.
Of course, neither of us has changed genders.
I don’t know. It seems pretty nuts to me. What do you think? Why isn’t it possible for us all to just shut up and love each other already?
