The village where girls turn into boys
Mutation leads to apparent gender switch for 1 in 90 kids in Dominican Republic town
It sounds like the plot of a Twilight Zone episode, an Ursula K. Le Guin story or the Pulitzer Prize winning 2002 novel Middlesex: There’s a place where, when girls hit puberty, they turn into boys. Such a plot would prove rich territory — or a landmine — for anyone interested in how gender and sexuality develop.
“Think of the scientific possibilities!” Slate magazine wrote in 1997. “Finally, we could tease apart nature and nurture and see whether men and women differed because of how they were brought up as children.”
Yet, this place — Salinas, a village in the Dominican Republic — actually exists. And though scientists have been aware of the genetic mutation that causes this curious condition for decades, the little-known story is the subject of a new BBC piece called “The Extraordinary Story of the Guevedoces.” The translation of “guevedoce”: “penis at 12.”
“I never liked to dress as a girl and when they bought me toys for girls I never bothered playing with them,” Johnny told the BBC. “When I saw a group of boys I would stop to play ball with them.”
Johnny, who was born with what appeared to be a vagina but grew male genitalia at puberty, is not alone. As first observed by a Cornell University researcher in the 1970s, one in about 90 children in Salinas are affected by the mutation, which leads to low levels of an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase that typically spurs growth of the penis in utero.
In guevedoces, this growth is delayed until puberty. After their transformation, many of the newly minted boys prove heterosexual.
“So the boys, despite having an XY chromosome, appear female when they are born,” the BBC explained. “At puberty, like other boys, they get a second surge of testosterone. This time the body does respond and they sprout muscles, testes and a penis.”
“When she turned 5, I noticed that whenever she saw one of her male friends, she wanted to fight with him,” said the mother of Carla. Carla was “on the brink of changing into Carlos” at 7, said the BBC.“Her muscles and chest began growing. You could see she was going to be a boy.”
Though the case of the guevedoces, for some researchers, showed that nature is more important than nurture in directing sexuality, U.S. pharmaceutical company Merck took the research to an unexpected place.
Guevedoces generally have small prostates. If 5-alpha reductase could be blocked by a drug, could prostate growth in adult men be inhibited?
Yes, Merck decided. The company developed the drug finasteride, more commonly known as Propecia, now used to treat male pattern baldness and benign prostate growth.
Some men reported the drug had strange effects on their sex drive.
“I’d be with a sexy woman, and there was just no interest at all on my part,” one patient said in 2011. “It was almost like I felt mild repulsion.”
But the guevedoces were not just of interest to Big Pharma. In a 1998 report, the Hastings Center, devoted to ethical issues in medicine, discussed how the very concept of a third sex had changed the vocabulary and mindset of Salinas when it comes to gender.
“The sexually ambiguous child is born not into a world divided up into male and female, but into a world divided into male, female and guevedoce,” the report read.
“I love her however she is,” Carla’s mother told the BBC. “Girl or boy, it makes no difference.”