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Steve QJ's avatar

Hey Dave! Your question sent me tumbling down a rabbit hole of intersex research yesterday! And I thought you might be interested in this one as it speaks to the complexity of these issues.

I just learned about a condition called Swyer syndrome (https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/swyer-syndrome/). It's extremely rare, affecting something like 1 in 20,000-80,000 births, where a male with XY chromosomes doesn't go through the normal sex differentiation in the womb (we all start out female), and so develops an ambiguous penis or sometimes no penis at all.

They don't go through puberty naturally and require hormones to develop secondary sex characteristics, and are almost always infertile, although there is at least one recorded case of a person with this condition getting pregnant. So I stand corrected, there's at least one case of somebody who was technically male getting pregnant! 😁

Still nothing to do with trans people or new sexes, but fascinating.

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Chris Fox's avatar

In a gay bar one evening I saw a young man with a much older one and the younger was almost certainly a case of androgen insensitivity syndrome. He had the subcutaneous facial fat of a barely overweight woman and everything about his posture and expressions and even to the angle at which he held a cigarette was not just effeminate, but feminine.

And in Norfolk I knew one person with something like both kinds of genitalia; I didn't turn on the light for a better look but he told me he was a "he-she" and that he sometimes worked as a prostitute and that the marks didn't care.

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