True hermaphrodites (a very rare condition) are individuals with both male and female chracteristics. Sometimes they have two XX chromosomes (as in a female) and normal female internal reproductive organs but with the external genitals being composed of male and female organs. Such people can thus have both ovaries and testes. Because such babies cannot easily be ‘sexed’ at birth they have been valuable in studying sex difference, because a biologically male infant can be brought up as a female and a female reared as a male. Sometimes the illogicality of the rearing is not apparent until puberty when the biological sex and the gender role clearly do not match up. Research has found that a change of gender role before the age of two and a half years is easily tolerated by the child and no harm is done. After that age there are increasing emotional and psychological disturbances which can last into adult life. So this type of evidence suggests that sexual identity is firmly established in the first three years of life. First signs begin to appear as early as one year old.
In hermaphrodites there seems to be a considerable preference for the gender role that they have been given at birth and by which they have been brought up — even when this goes against the obvious physical sexual identity.
Turner’s Syndrome is a condition that arises when the baby’s cells have only one sex chromosome instead of two. The cells are chromosomally XO (instead of XY or XX). Such children are female but fail to develop or to mature sexually and may be mentally retarded. One study of thirteen such girls showed that although they had no sex hormones they all had ‘typically feminine’ day-dreams, fantasies of marriage, romance and heterosexual eroticism. So in spite of having only one X chromosome they behaved in certain ways like females with two. This and other work seems to suggest that biological sex is much more important than gender allocated sex.
Transsexualism occurs when a person feels that he or she belongs to the opposite sex in spite of perfectly normal physical evidence to the contrary. No one has any certain idea why this occurs and it is nothing to do with either transvestism (dressing up in clothes of the opposite sex) or homosexuality. Parents treating a child as if it belonged to the opposite sex may be important.
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