Johannesburg - South Africa's apartheid-era army performed sex-change operations on gay national servicemen and used hormone drugs, shock therapy and chemical castration to try to "cure" them, a newspaper claimed yesterday.
About 50 sex-change operations, on men and women, were conducted annually between 1971 and 1989, surgeons with the former South African Defence Force told the Mail and Guardian newspaper. In a top-secret project, army psychiatrists and chaplains sought out suspected homosexuals among conscripts, according to an investigation by the newspaper and a report commissioned in part by the national Medical Research Council.