A new investigative report shows Iran is openly pitching itself as a destination for gender-transition surgeries, packaging cut-rate operations with luxury hotels and guided tours for foreign patients. Americans should be alarmed that Tehran, an adversary that still enforces brutal punishments for homosexuality and gender nonconformity, is advertising “medical tourism” to cash in on a controversial and complex set of procedures.
According to the reporting, Iranian state-backed outlets and tour operators are chasing billions in medical-tourism revenue, with explicit targets in the billions and offers that undercut Western prices by tens of thousands of dollars. That price gap is precisely why vulnerable or adventurous patients abroad are being tempted to fly into a country that routinely violates basic human rights for its own citizens.
This reality exposes a grotesque hypocrisy: the same regime that criminalizes same-sex intimacy—sometimes with lashings or worse—has, for decades, been both forcing surgeries on persecuted Iranians and now marketing those very operations to foreigners. What looks like “progressive tolerance” on the surface is really a cynical, state-sanctioned industry born of repression and a theological ruling from the 1980s.
Medical standards and consent are serious concerns. Human-rights groups and medical reviewers warn that many of these surgeries in Iran have been performed under coercive circumstances, and that follow-up care and safety protocols are often lacking compared with Western standards. No American should assume that a price tag alone makes a foreign operation safe or ethical.
Conservatives ought to call out the left’s double standard: while Western elites cheer on unrestrained gender ideology at home, they ignore how authoritarian regimes exploit and monetize the same trends for profit. There’s nothing compassionate about sending people into the maw of a regime that simultaneously forces surgeries and silences dissent.
Practical steps follow from common sense and patriotism: federal travel warnings should reflect not only security risks but also the ethical and medical dangers of medical tourism in hostile states, and private insurers and regulators should scrutinize the safety of cross-border gender procedures. Americans deserve better than to be funneled into risky surgeries marketed by enemies of freedom.
Above all, this story should remind us that medical decisions must be governed by informed consent, high clinical standards, and the rule of law—not by ideological fashion or bargain-basement prices abroad. Hardworking families and the safety of children demand that we resist the normalization of body-altering procedures pushed through globalized markets that answer to tyrants, not patients.
