This is a very well-written article by the Atlantic (said magazine focusing increasingly on gender-related issues of late) which discusses not really transgender issues, but rather issues dealing with gender discrimination. Women are treated like second-class citizens at best under many countries which have either a fundamentalist Islamic culture, or an old tribal culture which has somehow not yet realized that this is no longer the Middle Ages.
This is very similar to a story I reported on last year, about Albanian women who chose to live as men to they could enjoy gender-based socio-economic advantages. While one can only hope that as time passes women will finally gain equality around the world, we must remember that women do not actually have equality even here in this “enlightened” United States. Not only do women here face legal and institutional inequality (such as the way they are treated in the armed forces), but socially and economically American women still have decades to go, or more, before they are paid the same and promoted the same as men are in the workplace. And one wonders whether sexual harassment will actually ever end, or if it will require centuries to do so.