Tim Cavanaugh investigates the Saudi sex-change story

Over on Hit and Run, Tim Cavanaugh does a bit of research to try to track down the story I referenced here:

The story of the five Saudi women getting F-M sex changes that Jesse Walker noted earlier seems too good to be true. I spent 45 minutes yesterday trying to get my Arabic-reading brother in law to find the original story on the website for the Saudi paper al Watan, but it wasn't there or on any of the other al Watans. I do think there was an original story in al Watan, because this Jordanian paper has slightly more detail than is found in any of the other versions — all of which are clearly reading the same original. But nobody has any names or specifics.

It's weird the way these third-world post office stories — in which everybody passes along an article about how a bunch of Egyptians drown trying to get a chicken out of a well, etc. — have survived into the web age.

For those of you with plenty of web-browsing time, just about every sentence in Tim's post is linked to somewhere else.