Word: sexualize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Though nature endows most people with sexual organs that are distinctly male or female, every so often it errs. On rare occasions, a child is born with ambiguous genitalia. In some cases, babies who look outwardly female also have rudimentary male organs-or have testes within their ovaries (a growth that frequently becomes cancerous). Other infants, at first appearing to be male, have small testes, are sterile, and later develop breasts and grow no facial hair...
Fortunately, this gender confusion can usually be corrected with sex-hormone therapy and delicate surgery. Because the treatment is seldom reversible, a mistake in picking the proper gender can have disastrous consequences in later life. Thus, doctors are often uncertain about which sexual direction to take, especially with patients who are too young to have developed any sexual identity. Now a sophisticated new test is available to help doctors make that crucial decision. In using the technique, devised by Immunologists Stephen Wachtel, Gloria Koo and their colleagues at Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, doctors ignore external sexual...
...sometimes an infant's chromosomal sex will not match its outward appearance. There are, for example, people with a female XX chromosome makeup who display pronounced male sexual development. Wachtel discovered why. Analyzing the blood of these individuals, he found that their chromosomes apparently contained a hidden male factor-a variant of the same signal found in normal males. In the first few weeks after conception, when the embryo is still sexually neutral, the signal causes the development of testes, a source of male hormones. In the case of the XX males, however, the male factor, apparently consisting...
...York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, for example, a two-year-old child with an enlarged clitoris but a seemingly normal XX chromosome pattern was tested for H-Y antigen. The assay turned out positive, and subsequent surgery revealed the reason: she was a hermaphrodite, with dual sexual organs-an ovary on one side and a combination of ovary and testis on the other. The doctors promptly removed the ovotestis, thereby reducing the danger of cancer and ensuring that she would be an unambiguous female...
...News Producer Joe Wershba steered him to Stapleton, who shared Flynt's concern about child abuse. Flynt spent a weekend with Stapleton and her veterinarian husband at their Fayetteville, N.C., home, and the Stapletons visited the Flynts' 23-room mansion in Columbus, where they discussed religion and sexual repression, Stapleton recalls. Flynt abruptly phoned her from San Antonio around midnight Nov. 17. "He was talking 90 miles an hour," she says. "Through the jumbled conversation I knew something real had happened...