John/Joan in fictional television
I just watched an episode of Law and Order: SVU that borrowed heavily from the case of John/Joan, a case in which a gender identity different from biology was forcibly assigned to one of a pair of twins. Having read about that case fairly recently online, I could see the major "plot twist" for the episode coming a mile away (the sister confessed to
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There are XY females, who are male fetuses who fail to develop testes and do not differentiate as male (I read of a case in a magazine once where this ran fairly commonly in one family; as I recall, the affected persons developed as attractive but infertile women because they were not receptive to androgens, although according to this article on Swyer's syndrome, I don't think this is a common state as the undeveloped testes are incapable of producing either androgens or estrogens).
There are intersexed people, whose genitalia are poorly differentiated at birth, and who in modern times are often assigned a sex at birth, sometimes genetically incorrectly, and a gender identity that may or may not suit them (arguably a better-intentioned approach than displaying them as circus freaks; the idea in doing so rather than allowing them to mature and choose for themselves is largely to preserve these children from confusion and derision as they grow up, but unfortunately the practice causes a lot of problems, as well). They are heavily discussed in the article on John/Joan that I linked in the original post because the practice of assigning them sex at birth was heavily encouraged by the psychologist who treated John/Joan and his brother and touted the case as a successful reassignment of sex to a child who was born clearly a healthy male.
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