Facebook, the omnipresent social network has come under fire from trangender groups across the globe for failing to provide members with a way of changing their gender on the site.
"Not every transgender person wants to start completely afresh," said trangender spokesperson, Anne Drodgeny. "Some quite like their friends. Also contrary to common belief, their friends still like them, even after their announcement of becoming the opposite gender."
Facebook supremo, Mark Zuckerberg, has dismissed calls to allow gender to be altered as too complicated.
"There's a lot of steps involved," said Zuckerberg. "It's not as simple as changing an F to an M or an M to F. If we let people change their gender they'd be flip flopping back and forth constantly."
Currently, the transgender have to create a new Facebook profile, and approach all of their friends.
"This can be a problem," said Drodgeny. "Facebook classes somebody as a Spammer if they send too many friend requests. This can make it a long winded and protracted process to transfer friends across to the new account."
Zuckerberg will not be providing people with a tool for transferring friends from one profile to another in case it's misused. However, pressure from transgender group The Beaumont Society has made the Facebook millionaire playboy make at least one concession.
"What we've agreed to do," said Zuckerberg, "is to allow people to move their male profile to appear to be a full time female profile. If this is kept up for two years, then the gender can be changed."
Unbeknownst to Zuckerberg, one of the programmers at Facebook has said that if somebody sends him a Paypal transaction of a dollar, he'll change their gender in a minute.
"It's a doddle," said the programmer, who refused to be named and had a better lawyer than your fearless reporter.
