Anti-gay Kuwaiti academic claims she’s found a suppository “cure” for homosexuality
Mariam Al-Sohel claims same-sex attraction is caused by anal worms that feed on semen
An anti-gay Kuwaiti academic has claimed she’s invented suppositories that will “cure” homosexuality, which she claims is based on science and “prophetic medicine.”
Dr. Mariam Al-Sohel, who has previously expressed support for conversion therapy, appeared on Scope TV back in March to claim that she had developed a suppository to stop same-sex sexual urges.
“I discovered therapeutic suppositories that curb the sexual urges of boys of the third gender [those that experience same-sex attraction], as well as the fourth gender, which is butch lesbians,” Al-Sohel said. “They have excessive sexual urges.”
Al-Sohel claims that those sexual urges stem from an anal worm that feeds on semen, which a person contracts after they’ve been sexually assaulted. She says her suppositories cure those urges by killing the worm, reports The Jerusalem Post.
“This is science, and there is nothing to be ashamed of,” Al-Sohel said in the interview, a portion of which was posted to Twitter by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
She also claimed that “bitter foods” increase masculinity and implied they can assist in avoiding homosexuality.
Same-sex activity is currently criminalized in Kuwait, and can carry a sentence of up to six years in prison. The country also has a law targeting transgender people that outlaws “imitating the appearance of a member of the opposite sex,” which can carry both a fine and prison time if convicted.
Al-Sohel’s comments have been harshly criticized by LGBTQ advocates in the West.
“The cure for homosexuality is popular among religious fundamentalists. It is quackery and charlatanry,” Volker Beck, a Green Party politician and LGBTQ advocate from Germany, told The Jerusalem Post. “Such therapies and their apologists must be warned. Whether it is Al-Sohel’s suppositories or from Catholic doctors in Germany, it is hocus pocus that reveals much about the mental state of these people.”
British LGBTQ activist Peter Tatchell said the ideas promoted by Al-Sohel take conversion therapy and “quack medicine” to “new heights of absurdity.”
“Anal worms that feed on sperm and make men gay? Foods that make them masculine and straight? This is the most bizarre homophobic nonsense that I have heard in ages,” he said. “On a sinister level, it is another outrageous Islamic-inspired attempt to eradicate same-sex desires. This academic is mirroring failed Nazi attempts to cure homosexuality. The fact that Muslim broadcasters take this junk pseudoscience seriously shows how dogmatic religion is the enemy of knowledge, truth and human rights.”
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