New Man

The patient was 23 years old and seemed to be a good-looking girl. But the first question Dr. Louis William Mara-ventano was asked in his Yonkers (N.Y.) office was: "What am I, a man or a woman?" "Joan" (the real name was withheld) was a pseudohermaphrodite* whose external genitals resembled both male and female organs. Something had gone wrong (doctors are not sure just how) during fetal development when the time came for the undifferentiated sex organs to become either completely male or completely female. The condition occurs in about one in 1,000 births; accurate figures are hard to come by because of family reticence.

Joan had been brought up and had gone through high school as a girl; she had taken a secretarial course as a girl. But she knew that something was wrong. Menstruation had not started at the usual time. After puberty, hair had begun to grow on her face, and she had to shave every day. She used cosmetics to hide the stubble on her cheeks, and wore falsies to build out her flat chest. She had few dates with men.

Preliminary examination (the distribution of body hair, etc.) indicated that Joan was primarily male, but an operation might show that the doctors and Joan could choose. Said Joan: "I'd rather be a man."

A month ago, at Yonkers Professional Hospital, Dr. Maraventano and his assistants went to work, in an operation lasting three hours. The operation revealed a true testicle in the left side of the groin. In the pelvis, there were an undifferentiated "boggy mass" and suggestions of vestigial Fallopian tubes, but no true uterus and no ovarian tissue. By plastic surgery Dr.

Maraventano freed the obscured clitoris-like penis, closed up the vagina-like introitus, moved the testicle into a scrotal sac formed from the labia majora. Then he made a canal in the freed penis. After the surgery was completed, a series of treatments with testosterone, the male sex hormone, followed.

The operation was successful. There is every reason to believe that "John" (as the doctors called him after the operation) can have normal sex relations. Later tests on the fertility of the sperm will show whether it is possible for him to become a father.

Last week John was back at his home in Yonkers, but he will soon look for a new life as a male secretary in another city. There would still be lots of prob lems. Said the new male: "Really I am only one month old."

* "Pseudo" because, however strangely mixed the genitals may appear, the reproductive glands of only one sex are present. True hermaphrodites, with both ovarian and testicular tissue, are extremely rare; only about 30 authenticated cases appear in medical literature.

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