There are precious few hints of the social revolutionary around Kim Seok-kwan, the 52-year-old doctor who single-handedly brought sex-change surgery to this deeply conservative country.
But there is no gainsaying Kim's audacity in introducing sex-change operations here in 1986. Nor do many South Koreans dispute the impact his surgery has had on a society where, even quite recently, sexual matters were mostly whispered about and few dared live openly as homosexuals.
That all began to change with the emergence of superstar Ha Risu, a slinky, silky-haired singer, actor, comedienne and model, armed with a 35-24-35 figure, who is now a fixture in the Korean entertainment firmament. Ha, whose adopted stage name is a play on the English phrase Hot Issue, lived most of her 28 years, unhappily, as a man, until Kim transformed her into a ravishing transgender beauty three years ago.
Kim is a plastic surgeon whose training was in facial and cranial operations, getting his start in sex-change surgery almost by accident. For years he performed the operations largely in obscurity, with awareness of his skills with a scalpel spreading mostly by word of mouth.
"In 1986, a male transvestite approached me and asked me if I could perform a sex-change operation," Kim said. "At that time, nobody knew anything about this sort of thing in Korea, and I told him I couldn't help him."
A couple of months later, the doctor said, another man approached him asking for a sex change. With that, Kim said he became intrigued enough to start reading up on the subject. Within a short time, Kim called the patient back and said he would operate.
The surgery was a first for South Korea. Not only that, but Kim also rejected the use of skin grafts for vaginal construction, which was the standard at the time.
Although the operation's success exceeded expectations, soon afterward Kim went to the University of California at Davis for a year to study more about sex change surgery. When he returned, he found a long list of candidates desperate for the operation.
For the first few years of performing gender-change surgery, Kim said, his patients were overwhelmingly working class or poor, and few could afford to travel abroad for the operation.
The first glimmers of celebrity came to Kim in 1991, with his first female-to-male surgery, which he also pioneered here. That operation caught the attention of the nation's news media.
The brouhaha eventually died down, but by the time it did, something had changed in Korean society. Taboo had been lifted, and sexual mores were suddenly being discussed much more openly in the media and portrayed with more realism in film.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS