According an article, titled "When Sexual Development Goes Awry", by
Suzanne Miller, published in the September 2000 issue of the "World and
I", various medical conditions give rise to sexual ambiguity.
Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), involving excessive androgen
production by the adrenal cortex, results in mixed genitalia. A person
with the complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) has a vagina,
external female genitalia and functioning, androgen-producing, testes -
but no uterus or fallopian tubes.
People with the rare 5-alpha reductase deficiency syndrome are born
with ambiguous genitalia. They appear at first to be girls. At puberty,
such a person develops testicles and his clitoris swells and becomes a
penis. Hermaphrodites possess both ovaries and testicles (both, in most
cases, rather undeveloped). Sometimes the ovaries and testicles are
combined into a chimera called ovotestis.
Most of these individuals have the chromosomal composition of a woman
together with traces of the Y, male, chromosome. All hermaphrodites
have a sizable penis, though rarely generate sperm. Some hermaphrodites
develop breasts during puberty and menstruate. Very few even get
pregnant and give birth.
Anne Fausto-Sterling, a developmental geneticist, professor of medical
science at Brown University, and author of "Sexing the Body",
postulated, in 1993, a continuum of 5 sexes to supplant the current
dimorphism: males, merms (male pseudohermaphrodites), herms (true
hermaphrodites), ferms (female pseudohermaphrodites), and females.
Intersexuality (hermpahroditism) is a natural human state. We are all
conceived with the potential to develop into either sex. The embryonic
developmental default is female. A series of triggers during the first
weeks of pregnancy places the fetus on the path to maleness.
In rare cases, some women have a male's genetic makeup (XY chromosomes)
and vice versa. But, in the vast majority of cases, one of the sexes is
clearly selected. Relics of the stifled sex remain, though. Women have
the clitoris as a kind of symbolic penis. Men have breasts (mammary
glands) and nipples.
The Encyclopedia Britannica 2003 edition describes the formation of
ovaries and testes thus:
"In the young embryo a pair of gonads develop that are indifferent or
neutral, showing no indication whether they are destined to develop
into testes or ovaries. There are also two different duct systems, one
of which can develop into the female system of oviducts and related
apparatus and the other into the male sperm duct system. As development
of the embryo proceeds, either the male or the female reproductive
tissue differentiates in the originally neutral gonad of the mammal."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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