JULY 31 — One of the bravest young women I will never know passed away in conditions of extreme physical distress and unimaginable mental anguish at approximately 5am on July the 30th, 2011. Her name was Aleesha Farhana.

Buoyed by the sanction of State, Religious Authority and Community, she was buried in a grave that will carry the wrong name; a name not hers by choice, because she was one of the few people on the planet that get to choose their own name to reflect the reality of their being. Aleesha had chosen to be a woman: the woman that she knew herself to be.

The difference between her and me is that those same authorities were absurdly happy to accept the name that I had chosen after conversion – and changed through deed poll at my own expense, and yet were sanctimoniously intractable in their rejection of the choices that she had made in life, and that now stand sentinel around the manner of her passing in muted testimonial to a travesty that should never have been allowed to occur and should not be allowed to remain.

The insensitivity of people never ceases to amaze me, and yet all those around her in those final days of her life continue to bleat about her ‘resting in peace’ and ‘going back to God as she had been born’. Isn’t it chilling to realise that their continued denial of the realities of her life are inspired, calculated and advanced as a means to make them feel better, not her? It is as if she has already passed beyond their comprehension into a place where merely wishing that things were different is enough to make them so.

But then, they had an excellent example to follow. In a world over which the Ultimate Being presides with ceaselessly advocated ‘infinite understanding’ and ‘limitless compassion’, a branch of our system of Justice determined that, as she was born with the genitalia of one sex and labeled masculine, she must remain that way: and this, despite the fact that she had chosen to pursue a far harder path in life than most of us are tested with and had her physical body changed (as her mental self-image already had) to become the feminine one she had always craved.

She had long recognised that she was a woman, born into the body of a man, and after a torturous period during which she received little understanding from her fellow human beings and even less support, she undertook gender-corrective surgery. Please don’t misunderstand me, this wasn’t a sex change: Aleesha had already been a female for a very long time – perhaps always. And this is not the kind of surgery that brings instant relief, but a lot of pain that lessens only over time. Heroes have not suffered as much.

And that is what she is to me and why I find myself mourning her passing with tears that prick at the corners of my eyes each waking moment and a heart that is heavy with the guilt that I must share. We failed her: all of us. We stood idly by, often with a lavishly illustrated tabloid in our hands, and licked our avaricious chops, revelling in the salaciousness of it all.

We read of her efforts to change her name, and justified our sanctimony by echoing the dogmatic expressions of a court that is anything but ‘High’. We gossiped in the halls of our holy places and quoted the opinions of legal experts wearing little white skullcaps that advocated the laws of God and man as carved in stone, and we condemned her to live in the lie that we were comfortable with because we all think we know better. Why then do I hear the echo, somewhere in the back of my mind, of an idea being espoused by innumerable scholars and theologians that only God can judge? What has happened to our humanity? We would heal a wound, preserve a life, or put a crippled dog out of its agony, and ‘Yes’, I’ll agree that she was only one of these things. Yet we cannot find it in our hearts to allow someone to make a choice to change their name.

And now, in the tragic aftermath of a life it seems we would rather remember for what it wasn’t, rather than what it was, we tell the world that none of it could have been averted; her suffering could never have been assuaged, and that if ‘he’ had come to us, we would have counseled ‘him’. Even in death we cannot find it in our granite hearts and palsied minds to accord her that simple thing: respect.

What unpardonable arrogance, and whose is the greater sin: hers, or mine?

I have no comprehension of what she must have gone through – none! I just know that I would not have been strong enough to make the choices that she did, and simultaneously know that I will face a failure in all the mechanisms of support; face the acrimony and rejection of the community that I have been born into and lived, and then attempt to advocate my rights in a rabidly conservative society on the highest levels in a simple effort to live life on my terms, as I choose them. No, I am never going to be that strong.

The word that I will forever connect with you, Aleesha, is valour. For me, it is reflective of the highest valour to possess convictions that one can rationalise and justify, and then advocate them in the face of determined resistance from every quarter; every part of the system; every blighted, judgmental one of us.

We should change the gravestone. We should change the law: a system that is meant to change to fairly reflect the social paradigm as it evolves, but which seems condemned to remain mired in the mud of heartless and insensitive dogma. We should all change – abandon heartlessness, absolve ourselves of carelessness and become the kind of being that can fairly be described as ‘human’.

From my granite heart, I have carved a medal. It is one to be awarded for the ‘Highest Valour’ and I offer it to you, Aleesha Farhana. It is too late, perhaps, but I will do what I can… because I must.

* Omar Salahuddin reads The Malaysian Insider

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication. The Malaysian Insider does not endorse the view unless specified.