Brain Sex

How many TVs do you think cross dress secretly in constant fear of discovery, as though they were committing some sort of sin?

By Joanne Silver

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In the 1960s and 70s there was a lot of attention given to the effects of social anvironment on gender identity. It was, and still is, claimed by some practitioners that that girls are feminine in their behaviour because that is how they were brought up, and similarly for boys.

A famous case was reported in Time magazine in 1973. An American couple had twin boys. While circumcision was taking place one of the babies was castrated in error. It was decided that he should be brought up as a girl and given an artificial vagina and female hormones.

Feminists

The treatment had a significant measure of success and although subsequent evidence is that the subject has some psychological problems, it does have something to tell us about the post-natal development of gender identification. Many feminists hailed this case as proof that women were forced into their roles by training rather than genetic influences.

This was before the Babilonia case came to light. This family from the Dominican Republic inherited a gene along with 23 related families from an ancestor some 130 years ago. The effect of this gene was to suppress the male genitalia and give the baby the appearance of a girl, including a vagina.

The eldest of the ten children to be born to the Babilonias was Prudencio. Being the eldest and clearly a girl she helped her mother with the housework and child rearing, did not mix with the village boys or indulge in any typical male behaviour.

At the age of twelve the clitoris developed into a penis, the testicles descended into what had been the lips of the vagina, and Prudencio changed into a male. Like his younger sister Matilda he is now a brawny, muscular man. He is sexually potent and lives with his wife in the United States.

Puberty

Technically, what happened was that in the womb, while Prudencio's brain developed normally his body was unable to make the particular hormone that shapes the male genitalia and body shape. So in it's absence, although he was in all other respects male, his body developed as a female until puberty when the surge of testosterone completed the job.

The importance of the Bablionia family for the study of gender identity is that although Prudencio was totally subjected to a female upbringing his male brain was unaffected and he has adjusted to being a man without any problems. His father's evidence was that as soon as he reached puberty he found himself a girlfriend.

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