Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes
What makes someone a boy or a girl? Is it external genitalia, chromosomes, DNA, environment, or some combination of these factors? Not even doctors or scientists are entirely clear. What is clear is that sex is not an either/or proposition. In an eye-opening exploration of science and sex, Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes challenges the notion of two distinct opposite sexes. Using a brief history of sex from the ancient Greeks to the anatomists of the Renaissance to the geneticists of the twentieth century, immunologist/pathologist Gerald N. Callahan shows us how our understanding of the sexual development of human beings and our thoughts about human sex are continually evolving. In the process he reveals the path of sexual development is as varied as humans themselves.
Lenore was not the first person Dr. Brown had seen or read about with a condition like this. By the 1960s, intersex was certainly a known human syndrome, and the medical literature, albeit a patchwork of fact and opinion, contained many descriptions of intersex children. It was clear that children didn’t always come in tidy packages. What was far less clear was how best to treat such babies and children. At the time, some physicians thought they could do just about anything with a child’s sex. Give any baby the right clothes, the right toys, the right parents, and the right instructions, and that baby would become a boy or girl. Other physicians who studied intersex weren’t so certain, especially with children as old as Lenore.
