438
ALAN
FRIEDMAN
doctor secretly, changed the time of the appointment from afternoon
to morning. When Mother was out, I dressed, trying to make myseU
look as mature and feminine as possible. I chose my most daring
dress, I put on silk stockings and heels, I pinned up my hair,
and
I wore a little hat of Mother's with a blue dotted veil.
At the doctor's I was earnest and decorous, confident of the
effect of my clothes. At first, the doctor himself struck me as a
dapper salesman, a smooth-talking hawker; later, during the examina–
tion, he struck me as a brute. Without the slightest consideration
for the embarrassed feelings of a sixteen-year-old girl in her
rust
pelvic examination, he treated me as he would have treated any other
patient. But when I was ready, reclining on the table with my knees
wide, I realized that there could be no mistake, and the thought
comforted me with the promise of finality. The doctor was saying,
"Nothing to worry about
if
a girl matures late . . . yes, there
is
some underdevelopment here ... arrested uterus ..."
He sat down suddenly and put
his
hand to his he.art.
"Am I all right, doctor?" I said, afraid to move. "Or am I a
boy?" It was more than a question-it was a chorus of conviction.
"Don't move, Miss," he said, short of breath, as if he thought
I were going to fade like a miracle. And in a moment he was back
to
the examination, palpating my abdomen.
Doctors all over the country soon became familiar with the
details of my case, since several studies of my anatomy subsequently
appeared in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
as
weD
as other medical publications in Britain and America. Briefly, the
medical picture was this: not only did I have the female organs
with which I had been born, still in an infantile condition; I
also
had, retracted and sealed in vaginal tissue, the organs of the male
sex, by now fully adolescent and, so to speak, trapped.
As
the
doctor himself put it, moments after he had finished examining
me, "You're nat a boy, Miss," and he was sweating when he said
it
"You're also a boy."
For weeks, specialists examined my "miracle." I was,
they
told me, a true hermaphrodite, a "genetic accident" known not only
to the annals of modern science, but known from the testimonies
of ancient art and literature to have appeared now and again
