Tuesday, 09 February 2010 00:14

HAVANA, Jan 25   (IPS)  - It was as if she had only closed her eyes for a moment. When Wendy Iriepa came round after surgery over a year ago, she tried to get up as if nothing had happened, but a nurse gently pushed her back into bed. ”All done?” she asked, and the nurse replied, ”Yes.”

”I wanted to look at myself, and I managed to feel how I was now. That thing I had had to live with for 33 years of my life was gone for good,” Iriepa, a Cuban transsexual who had the sexual reassignment operation approved by the Public Health Ministry in 2008, told IPS.

”When they finally removed my bandages, I went to the bathroom and I saw my reflection in a huge mirror. It was the happiest moment of my life. The 16 days I spent in hospital were neither an ordeal nor a form of imprisonment for me, but a spiritual liberation that freed my soul,” she said.

As she tells her story, the tears flow again. But since her operation, her tears have been mostly of happiness. Basically she is still the same person, a hard worker and a stubborn rebel, yet she has also changed, and not just physically. Powerlessness and all its consequences are buried in the past along with that burden that was ”always dragging me down.”

Her reflection in the mirror was her constant companion, every day. She would go to the bathroom and see that ”up above I was one thing, and down below another.” In the morning she would bind her genitals in tight underpants that marked and irritated her skin. She would try to regard ”it” as if it were just like an arm, and put cream on it, looking after that skin because, like it or not, ”it was part of me.”

”I felt no pain with the operation, and if I did feel any, it was nothing compared to what I lived with before in society, as I told the surgeon. To me, it was as if my female genitals had always been there, and what I actually had previously was only a mask, something that hid the real shape that was already there,” she said.

Wendy's worlds

The first child, and only son, born to a working class family, she soon discovered she was not what her father wished her to be. At the age of three she played with dolls, and when she started school she cut the shorts of her uniform to make skirts instead, and tied towels around her head to imitate long hair.

At the age of 10 she had her first relationship, with a teacher, one of the few people who gave her affection at a time when she was being criticised and censured by her parents and fellow primary school pupils. One day the head teacher called her and said, ”either you leave school or I'll tell your parents about you.”

”That's when I started hanging out at my cousin's house. She would lend me her dresses and her bathing suits to go to the beach; I would hide my genitals and I lived life as a girl. The problems with my father continued, until I left home when I was 12. When I went back two years later, I already had breasts,” she said.

She had heard her sister say that a contraceptive pill was enlarging the size of her breasts and, without consulting anyone, she started taking two pills a day. It was like a religious rite for her, and it was one of the major turning points of her life. ”I began to dress as a woman; my father would say 'you look like a clown,' but when I looked in the mirror that wasn't what I saw.”

”It was hard work for me to live down this change in my neighbourhood. People would shout and jeer at me, but away from my area, men saw me as a woman, as the person I felt I was and who I had struggled to be all my life. When all the men, everyone from doctors to policemen, made flirtatious remarks to me, I knew that this was the way my life had to be.”

She was 17 when, in 1988, she heard about the first sex change operation performed in Cuba. She went to see the surgeon who had done the operation, and he sent her to see psychologists Mayra Rodríguez and Ofelia Bravo of the National Sex Education Centre (CENESEX). Two years later her status as a transsexual was confirmed.

”Mayra, who has been a true mother to me, made my father understand that I really hadn't chosen to be this way, but that there was a mismatch between my psychological sex and my biological sex; that it wasn't a case, as my father complained, of going against him or wanting to disgrace the men in our family,” she said.

Through CENESEX, she was able to start hormonal treatment to feminise some of her physical attributes, without surgery. The Centre also made the necessary arrangements for her to change the name on her identity document to the name she had chosen. On Jul. 7, 1997, she was officially registered as Wendy.

But it was not all plain sailing. Her life at CENESEX was one thing, but in the world it was quite another. She fell in love, and was disappointed, over and over again. She was systematically abused by one partner, and like many others before her, she felt that prostitution ”was the only means of survival this society gave me.”

Things got so bad that she locked herself into her house and would not go out. ”But time passed, I still had no job and was living a very promiscuous life, until one day I went to see Mayra, in tears, and I told her: I need your help, I need a job. And I started right there, working for the services department at CENESEX.”

Five years later, she is a trusted key worker, handling the files of people who come to the Centre looking for help. She completed sixth grade and plans to finish secondary school and take a secretarial course. Her dream is eventually to attend university and take a psychology degree.

A place in society

Of the courses she has taken at CENESEX, one of the most important, in her view, was on her rights as a citizen: ”it turns out we have the right to wear whatever we like, and yet the police would stop transvestites and fine them for wearing women's clothes. Now we know our rights, we know the law and we can insist on being respected.”

CENESEX, headed by sexologist Mariela Castro (President Raúl Castro's daughter), promotes policies in favour of full acceptance of people's sexual orientation and gender identity, and campaigns against homophobia and transphobia (discrimination against transsexual and transgender people). In Wendy's view the Centre has given transsexuals the tools they need ”to command greater social respect.”

The group of transvestites, transsexual and transgender people who frequent CENESEX have not only received courses on self-image, communication and popular education; many have also become accredited health promotors, and participate in designing the Centre's programmes on sexual diversity.

Some of the more active and educated of these women frequently play a role in awareness-raising activities in different settings, alongside CENESEX experts, sitting on panels about sexual diversity at film festivals, conferences or international meetings on sexuality or AIDS.

”We are open to all who wish to get to know us, and discover that we are not monsters and that we have not broken social norms just because we wanted to, but because this is the way we are, and that we deserve to be respected. We deserve a place in society, and to be looked upon not as strange creatures, but as people of this society, people of these times,” she said.

And in spite of knowing how much still needs to be done before society will accept her as she is, just looking Wendy in the eye or watching her walk through the streets of Havana is enough to know that she is a free and happy woman. In her view, ”happiness is made up of moments in life that you treasure inside yourself, and they determine the direction of your life.”

Tuesday, 09 February 2010 00:14

NEW YORK, Jan 25  (IPS)  - U.S. President Barack Obama's decision to detain 47 of the just-under 200 remaining prisoners at Guantánamo without trial indefinitely is drawing scorn from legal experts and human rights advocates, who charge that the government simply does not have enough evidence to convict the detainees it says cannot be tried but are ”too dangerous to release.”

David Frakt is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps Reserve, associate professor and director of the Criminal Law Practice Center at Western State University College of Law in Fullerton, California.

He is a former lead counsel for the Office of Military Commissions Defence, who successfully represented Mohammed Jawad before the military commissions and won his release in habeas corpus litigation in 2009.

Frakt told IPS, ”The administration's suggestion that they can't try 47 detainees, not because they don't have evidence of criminal wrongdoing, but because a criminal trial would necessarily involve disclosure of classified information, defies common sense.”

He gave three reasons.

”First, both under the Military Commissions Act of 2009 and under the Classified Information Protection Act (CIPA), in use in federal courts, there are elaborate mechanisms in place to protect classified information,” Frakt said.

”Second, given that the remaining detainees at Guantanamo have been held, on average, for over seven years, the likelihood that there is an ongoing need to protect classified sources and methods in such cases is remote.”

”Finally, it is hard to believe that there would be any greater risk of revealing important classified information than in the 9/11 trial, yet the administration is pressing forward with this and several other cases against high-value detainees who were kept in secret CIA ghost prisons and subjected to still classified methods of interrogation,” he noted.

He said that ”The administration has acknowledged the right of all detainees to petition for habeas corpus in federal court. Why does the administration seem to believe classified information could be adequately protected in federal habeas litigation, but not in a criminal trial? It seems far more likely that there is simply inadequate admissible non-coerced evidence of criminality,” Frakt said.

Other legal scholars have weighed in with similar views. For example, Brian J. Foley, visiting associate professor at the Boston University School of Law, told IPS, ”Many of the executive's claims about danger and terrorism have been shown to be incorrect over the years.”

”Last week's incident where an plane bound from New York to Kentucky was diverted for an emergency landing in Philadelphia because passengers freaked out when they saw a Jewish teenager engaging in an Orthodox prayer ritual, and the recent hours-long shutdown of Kennedy airport because a man from earthquake-ravaged Haiti mistakenly opened an emergency door in a terminal, show that our officials are over-reacting and cowardly,” he said.

”The executive's claim that these people are 'too difficult to prosecute' really means that the executive knows that the only evidence it has is weak or was obtained by coercion and is therefore very likely false,” Foley said.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), always a major player in the Guantanamo detention issue, called the Obama policy ”un-American.”

Jonathan Hafetz, a senior ACLU lawyer, told IPS, ”By committing to hold suspected criminals indefinitely without charge, the Obama has embraced one of the most lawless and un-American policies of the Bush administration, one that turns the most fundamental principles of the Constitution on their head.”

”The notion that the government can simply hold those it believes ”dangerous”, without putting them on trial, will ultimately serve neither our liberty nor our security,” he said.

And Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defence Committee, asked, ”How is this any better than Guantanamo itself and the spur such approaches give to al Qaeda?”

He told IPS, ”No legal system worthy of the name can possibly imprison people indefinitely on the shameful argument that they are, in the absence of evidence and a fair trial, 'too dangerous to release'.”

He called the move a ”significant calcification of the lawless Bush approach of holding (often tortured) detainees indefinitely - effectively, perhaps for life - until the conclusion of some endless 'war on terror',” but said it is ”actually undermining vital cooperation from European and Muslim allies, support for the rule of law itself and our country's national standing and historical legacy.”

In a statement, Amnesty International USA, said, ”There's been talk about people who can't be tried but who are too dangerous to release. This is absurd. People must either be charged with a crime and given a fair trial, or be released. End of story. That's the way it works. Either there's evidence against you or there isn't.”

And Virginia Sloan, president of the widely respected Constitution Project, said, ”Even if the Obama administration continues to work to close Guantánamo, by pursuing a policy of indefinite detention without charge, the damaging policies that embody the prison will continue, as will the negative effects to American values, the rule of law, and our nation's reputation abroad.” She urged opposition to the use of military commissions.

The planned closing of the iconic prison facility on the island of Cuba has been, at the same time, one of the Obama administration's signature issues and most serious embarrassments.

On his first day in office, the new president issued an executive order to close the prison by January 2010. That deadline has now been missed, as Congress refuses to accept detainees even for trial in U.S. civilian courts and countries remain reluctant to accept them for resettlement.

For the past year, Justice Department lawyer Matthew G. Olsen has been leading a Task Force of national security and law enforcement officials who have been reviewing the files for each GITMO detainee.

The review included an evaluation of any evidence against each man, how serious the threat would be if the detainee was released, and the government chances of prosecuting each prisoner successfully. The groups were then evaluated under the direction of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

But the process does not provide all the answers. For example, about 30 of the prisoners scheduled to be transferred to other countries are Yemenis. But transfers to Yemen have been halted following the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day. It is believed that this plot was developed by a Yemeni affiliate of al Qaeda.

Holder is also charged with deciding whether those to be prosecuted should face a civilian trial or a military commission. He has announced that five detainees would face a military commission and five others - including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001 - would be tried in civilian court.

It is unclear what criteria the government uses to decide between military commissions and civilian courts.