Medicine: Skin-Deep Sex Test

• Share

When doctors tackle a patient with mixed-up sex, e.g., pseudohermaphroditism (TIME, Dec. 15), they are often faced with a cruel dilemma. The child is likely to be a boy whose masculinity was not evident at birth, so he has been reared as a girl. It is one thing, and fairly simple, to operate and make him what nature originally intended, but the social readjustment from girlhood to boyhood is forbiddingly difficult. The less common cases of girls mistaken for boys are just as tough.

A Canadian believes that he has solved the diagnostic problem in human intersex. All human cells, says Dr. Murray L. Barr of the University of Western Ontario, contain something called sex chromatin. It is easy to spot in females' cells, because there it is made from two husky X chromosomes. It is not seen in male cells, because they draw on only one X chromosome and a measly little Y chromosome.

A tiny specimen of outer skin, taken painlessly, is enough to show the true chromosomal sex of any individual. Dr. Barr told Toronto's Academy of Medicine. If doctors suspect a sex mixup in a baby, this test should be made at once, he urged, so that operations to straighten things out can be performed early. Even more important, the child can be reared from the start as a member of its rightful sex.