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 Schreckengosts named the child Clara and brought her up as a girl. After Clara was 10, she ceased to grow. Her features acquired a slanting cast and she gave no physiological evidence of oncoming womanhood.

Last summer an agent of the Pittsburgh Humane Society found Clara lumbering about the farm. The agent took Clara to Pittsburgh’s Western Pennsylvania Hospital to see if anything could be done about her hermaphroditism.

In other years, to determine Clara’s sex, a surgeon would have been obliged to cut her open and a histologist would have had to study microscopic snips of her internal organs. Now, however, all that was necessary was a test of her blood and urine on virgin rats and spayed mice. If Clara was a true female, her specimens would contain glandular secretions called hormones which would put the rodents into rut. The test was made; Clara was a boy. Thereupon surgeons started a series of major operations to release the latent seeds of manhood. Last week it was announced that the final touches will take place in October after which Clara will assume the name of Clarence.

Nobody seemed more pleased at this strange outcome than Father Schreckengost. Said he: “Many a night I couldn’t sleep thinking about that poor child crying because of the shape she was in. I tell you, it’s a pitiful thing. She’s never had any pleasure out of life.”

Clarence anticipates some difficulties in abandoning Clara’s habits. Said he last week: “I like dresses better than overalls. And I’d rather mind the young ones than plant corn.”

At Lens, near Lille, France another case of metamorphosed hermaphroditism came to light last week. The affair began last Christmas when the parish priest noticed that Alice Henriette Acces, 16, member of the girls’ choir, had imperceptibly changed from hoyden to boor. Henriette had a thin mustache. Her voice was mannish. And, were she dressed in boy’s clothes, she would be indistinguishable from the bantlings of the mine where her father worked.

The case of Henriette reached the ears and hands of Dr. Robert Minne, orthogonadist. Last week Orthogonadist Minne was able to announce: “Today Henriette Acces has become physiologically a male.” And with satisfaction he promised: “It is entirely possible, and even probable, that Henri can become a father.”