LAHORE, Sept 12: While the world was bracing itself for warding off the so-called Y2K challenge (or hoax?) at the turn of the millennium, a fifth year student of the Kinnaird College for Women was trying hard to cope with the biological changes which eventually led her to undergo surgery in the US to get her gender changed.

For Musa Khan, formerly Gul Zarine, “the change proved to be a blessing in disguise as I got married with my best friend in the college after the gender change.”

“Nothing better could have happened to me but to change into a boy and marry a person whom I knew so well and loved so much,” Musa says.

Musa was born to a former judge. He was the youngest of three sisters. He started observing biological changes in her body some time in 2000.

Musa says he apprised his parents of the matter who refused to acknowledge that there could be any such thing. “My parents never wanted to help me get my gender changed and refused to provide me with the money needed for surgery. They just kept telling me that my gender was what I was born with. My parents as well as elder sisters tried to dissuade me from undergoing the surgery.”

The parents forcibly took her (him) to faith healers, (pirs), who insisted that he (she) was under a “magic spell and needed to be exorcised”.

However, Musa says without giving details, he somehow managed to leave for the US where he underwent the procedure of gender change for about two months.

On his return home, his parents “refused to accept him as part of the family”. But his classmate at the KC, Sadia, was “very much pleased to accept her old friend’s marriage proposal”.

“Since our wedding in 2001, we’re living happily,” says Sadia, daughter of a retired IGP. “For me, my husband’s gender change is something like a miracle; it happened because God willed us to live together as man and wife,” Sadia says.

Musa and Sadia almost got into trouble early this summer after sleuths from the Intelligence Bureau (IB) became suspicious of their activities.

A source in the IB, who asked not to be named, told Dawnthat the couple used to leave their Model Town residence early in the evening every day to return in the small hours of the morning. “This created suspicions about them. One of our operatives firmly believed that the couple was working for some foreign intelligence agency.” One night the IB operatives broke into their house to look for evidence to indict the couple.

However, on finding nothing against the two, they left. “What our functionaries learnt after chasing the couple for a few days was that they would go to their friends every night and enjoy themselves at parties thrown by them. We never told the couple that they were ever suspected,” the IB source says. —Zulqernain Tahir