"Bukan salah siapa." Mohd Ashraf Hafiz Abd Aziz

Its quite sad to read about the death of Mohd Ashraf Hafiz @ Aleesha Farhana. Could'nt quite imagine the predicament and hardship he and his family have gone thru since the news of his rejected application to have his name and gender changed came out in the Malaysian press.

And whats makes it even more depressing is that you have people posting comment like this with regards to this real life issues:
"1 comments:
Anonymous said...
...u want to talk about them...its easy...u dont like the way msians treat u pls leave msia by going out of msia or die...its easy for everybody"

Sat Aug 13, 01:38:00 PM 2011

Why so much hatred..??

Personally, I felt the Muslims especially the Malay Muslim are very good in avoiding taboo subject like transgender, sex before marriage, abortion etc etc.. Our mentality is to always sweeps the issues under the carpet and let it be there to rot. And when being forced to face these issues, we get very defensive and uncompromising. Instead of initiating more indepth discussion we just, quote "...pls leave msia or die... its easy for everybody". Yes thats what we always wanted... an easy way out for everything. "Aleesha" case may just be the tip of the iceberg,.. should'nt the community try to be more understanding. May be we should be made known the difference between a transsexual as transvestite. Please go and look it up in the dictionary and get better understanding..

And what Dr Hasanah have written in her blog, is precisely what could have been done. See the excerpt:
1. They are first of all humans
2. They have sensitive "heart"; if you normal and religiously correct people think you have feeling, then multiply or square your feeling to feel a bit of what these special people feel.
3. They are abnormal to your definition, and I guess as a psychiatrist, I could understand that those with more covert personality/moral/religious issues would hit harder at these special people
4. They first knew that they feel like the opposite sex when they were still very young, some even at the age of 4 or 3. Thus, I question the learning factor in this status.
5. The transgender people may consist of heterogeneous type of genetic make up or physical expression, so each case should be formulated individually and we should not generalised them as having similar underlying problem. A very female person physically could be having an XY genes. Also Brain-based studies have concentrated on whether sexually dimorphic brain structures in transsexuals are more similar to their preferred sex or to their birth sex. We are still in the unestablished grounds here, and more researches should be carried out.
6. Those who'd cursed Aleesha, could be the one having children with such problem. It is one example of "Bukan salah ibu mengandung", also "Bukan salah ibu-bapa mendidik", in fact this problem is a "Bukan salah siapa." Yang salah, yang suka menghina dan menghukum!

Read the whole article here: (http://selfprescription.blogspot.com/2011/07/mohd-ashraf-hafiz-abdul-aziz-aleesha.html)

Lastly my sympathy to the family of the late Aleesha and hope the media can put a rest to this episode and let them live their normal life again..