Convinced there are only two genders, huh? That’s fucking hilarious, because there are some people who aren’t even one gender for their entire life without stepping foot in a doctor’s office for surgery or hormones. Which prompts the question, if someone naturally has the outward appearance of two different genders in their life, what gender are they?
Today’s Moment of Science… The Güevedoces of the Dominican Republic.
Intersex children, born with a mixed presentation of male and female traits, often have their sex chosen for them at birth surgically. This approach is being widely criticized and abandoned in favor of allowing children to keep their anatomy intact and work out a surgical approach if and when they so choose. When intersex people do opt for gender affirming care, it’s based on how they feel and identify. It’s not based on which set of junk the surgeon can more easily make aesthetically pleasing or which color the parents painted the nursery.
Surgical interventions are still performed regularly on intersex babies. This means that doctors and parents arbitrarily choose to perform what can only be described as gender affirming surgery on a baby, absofuckinglutely without their consent. It’s unclear if this has been outlawed in the states that are going through such lengths to ban care for trans children, but I’m guessing that’s a bubbling wet shart of a nope.
(It must be some sort of oversight that you haven’t heard a goddamn peep about this from Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, or any of their grifting cash whore friends who will perpetually pontificate gender hysteria nonsense for a paycheck.)
AHEM Not all intersex conditions have clear presentations at birth, allowing some of these babies to avoid even a discussion of going under the knife before they’ve had their first diaper explosion. There are some conditions that cause a mismatch between chromosomes, internal sex organs, and external sex organs, and are only detected at puberty.
So, güevedoces.
Caused by an underlying condition called 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-αRD), the word güevedoce more or less translates to “testicles at age twelve.” The group of 5α reductase enzymes are used in the metabolism of several steroids and sex hormones. This particular deficiency means testosterone isn’t converted to dihydrotestosterone, a hormone essential to the development of male genitalia early in embryonic development.
So nine months later, a bouncing baby girl emerges. Absent a chromosome test or any sort of body scan, in most cases, nothing would cause suspicion otherwise for a dozen or so years.
Then, with puberty and the torrential flood of testosterone that follows, guess what pops up?
Oh, not just a penis, but undescended testicles, facial hair, the delightful cracking voice expected of a junior high boy, and an ability to pack on muscle like a dudebro. Testosterone is a helluva drug.
In the village of Las Salinas in the Dominican, 5-αRD is so common that one güevedoce is born per every ninety unaffected male births. The condition is also known to occur in Papua New Guinea, Turkey, and Lebanon. It’s a rare recessive condition caused by a mutation on the SRD5A2 gene. Such a high rate of occurrence in Las Salinas indicates that your chances of making babies with another carrier of the gene are pretty darn high. But… what’s so bad about that?
At least in the Dominican Republic, güevedoces are socialized not like boys or girls but like… güevedoces, a third gender. So parents aren’t at all surprised when their little girl has a sudden aversion to all things feminine, understanding that this is all part of a natural change for some children. Though it’s less common, some people with 5-αRD choose to have surgery to remain female, and it seems like… Dominican society is just fucking rolling with it.
In 1998, a report about Las Salinas from The Hastings Center said that the “sexually ambiguous child is born not into a world divided up into male and female, but into a world divided into male, female, and güevedoces. Different concepts, different facts of nature.”
Though kids can be bullies, the adults are doing this right. In an interview with the BBC, the mother of a young güevedoce named Carla said “When she turned five I noticed that whenever she saw one of her male friends she wanted to fight with him, on the brink of changing into Carlos. Her muscles and chest began growing. You could see she was going to be a boy. I love her however she is. Girl or boy, it makes no difference.”
This has been your Moment of Science, not sure how many genders there are, but quite sure they all deserve loving parents.
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