tern, but lack testosterone receptors. These people are genetic males, but they are sterile, and they look like women, sometimes exceptionally attractive women. There is another condition, a genetic disorder, mostly identified with the Dominican Republic, that causes boys to look like girls, but only until they reach puberty. Then they suddenly start responding to testosterone; their testes descend and they develop male bodies.
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People who have undergone male-to-female sex-change operations often say they have always known deep down in their hearts that they are really women. There appear to be biological reasons for these feelings. Research at the Brain Institution of the Netherlands indicates that some male-to-female transsexuals have a nucleus in the hypothalamus, a regulatory part of the brain, that is more typical of females than males.
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Some people mistakenly identified as transsexual are really genetic females with an enzyme disorder resulting in excessive testosterone, which causes their external genitalia to appear masculine.
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One such case was Gordon Langley Hall, a socially prominent white man in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1968, Hall had an operation, emerged a woman, took the name Dawn Pepita Hall, and married John-Paul Simmons, an African-American man who had been her driver, butler, and companion. At the time, interracial marriage alone was shocking, and combined with a sex-change operation, it was scandalous. Three years later, in 1971, the couple set society further atwitter when Dawn gave birth to a baby. It turned out that all along Hall had been a biological female with ambiguous genitalia, wrongly identified at birth as a male.
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Sexual versatility is the norm in many species. Members of some can readily change from one sex to another. In one species of coral fish, the largest and most dominant female turns into a male if the dominant male dies.
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Even among those without genetic or congenital abnormalities the line between the sexes is blurry. Few men are totally masculine, and few women are totally feminine. Masculinity and femininity lie on an irregular continuum, with some people on either end and some in the middle, but most about at the average for one sex or the other.
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This chapter has emphasized sex differences, especially as they are related to testosterone, but we should put these differences in perspective. Men and women represent distinct groups, different in many ways,
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