Between The Sexes

摘要

In 1993 debbie hartman was sure she was hearing things in her hospital room. She had just undergone a caesarean sec- tion, and the doctors were saying the baby was healthy but they weren't sure whether it was a boy or a girl. "I thought the drugs were making me hallucinate," she recalls. In feet, she was hearing just fine. But nothing about her child's biology―from the chromosomes to the reproductive tissue―conformed to the standard demarcations we have come to expect between the male and female sexes. In the language of developmental biologists, the baby was "intersexual." Careful examination showed that the infant had one testis, what looked like a small penis and no uterus or vagina. Genetic tests did not make things any clearer: some of the child's cells contained the XX chromosome pairing typically seen in girls, others contained the XY pattern seen in boys, and some had but a single X chromosome, commonly seen in girls with a condition called Turner syndrome.