Medicine: Girls into Boys

Busily creating 150,000 babies day in, day out throughout the world, Nature occasionally gets befuddled and turns out a creature which is neither girl nor boy. The child may have all a boy's outer characteristics, but internally have a girl's organs. Or a newborn babe may look like a girl and then grow up into a strange state of sexlessness. Such ambiguous children are called hermaphrodites.

Twenty years ago such an anomaly was born on a scrabbly farm near Pittsburgh to a poor Pennsylvania Dutch family named Schreckengost. The...

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