Iranian Transsexual Revolution

According to the swarthy munchkin, there aren't any homosexuals in Iran. Probably because they've been hanging them.

Apparently, however, there are plenty of transsexuals.

Homosexual relationships are banned in Iran, but the country allows sex change operations and hundreds of men have elected for surgery to change their lives.

"He wants to kill me. He keeps telling me to come home so he can kill me. He had put rat poison in my tea."

For Ali Askar, at age 24, the decision to become a woman came at a heavy cost. His father threatened to kill him if he went ahead with surgery.

Now renamed Negar, she says she would not have had the operation if she did not live in Iran.

"If I didn't have to operate, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't touch God's work."

But as Ali, he felt he had no identity.

He could not work with men because they sexually harassed him and made fun of him. But he could not work with women because he was not officially a woman.

"I am Iranian. I want to live here and this society tells you: you have to be either a man or a woman".

OK, so there's no homosexuality in Iran, yet while he was still Ali, he was sexually harassed by other men?

Hmmm.

Methinks Little Mahmoud is living in denial, no?

Sex changes have been legal in Iran since Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution, passed a fatwa - a religious edict - authorising them for "diagnosed transsexuals" 25 years ago.

Today, Iran carries out more sex change operations than any other nation in the world except for Thailand.

The government even provides up to half the cost for those needing financial assistance and a sex change is recognised on your birth certificate.

I can see Democrats latching on to idea of footing the tab for sex changes, if they haven't already.

"Islam has a cure for people suffering from this problem. If they want to change their gender, the path is open," says Hojatol Islam Muhammad Mehdi Kariminia, the religious cleric responsible for gender reassignment.

He says an operation is no more a sin than "changing wheat to flour to bread".

Yet homosexuality is still punishable by death.

"The discussion is fundamentally separate from a discussion regarding homosexuals. Absolutely not related. Homosexuals are doing something unnatural and against religion," says Kariminia. "It is clearly stated in our Islamic law that such behaviour is not allowed because it disrupts the social order."

Such a tolerant people.