For the biologically sexually ambiguous person, all of these determinations are made that much harder. The history of hermaphroditism is largely the history of the struggles over the 'realities' of sex - the nature of 'true' sex, the proper roles of the sexes, the question of what sex can, should or must mean," (Dreger)
The question as to why some individuals become overtly homosexual and some do not, why some hermaphrodites live as both male and female simultaneously (even though we have limited social and mental constructs for us to do so), why some heterosexual, gender-identified people choose to "cross-dress," are all psychological decisions made at the individual level. For hermaphrodites, "the power of the human sex drive may possibly be largely dependent on physiological factors - such as the quantity and/or quality of sex hormone secretion - the direction of this drive does not seem to be dependent on constitutional elements," (Ellis 19)
The history of hermaphroditism is largely the history of the struggles over the 'realities' of sex - the nature of 'true' sex, the proper roles of the sexes, the question of what sex can, should or must mean," (Dreger). Biologically, hermaphroditism, "is when an animal has both testicular and ovarian tissues," (Gilbert)
For the Indians, hermaphrodites represent the Primal Force, the perfect blending of man and woman into a single being. In China, Iran, Australia and throughout the Middle East, androgyny is symbolically linked to the duality of the soul, the unification of the genders and a representative of mythic time (Haft-Pomrock)
Is the sex of the person to whom you are attracted important or even relevant? "Sexuality [is not] learned in the same contexts, it is not practiced for the same purposes, it is not maintained by the same social forces, and it does not cease to be practiced at the same moments in the life course for the same reasons. The social construction of sexuality (and even if sexuality exists as a separable domain in a culture) and its connections to nonsexual conduct are specific to the cultural and historical circumstances of a particular social order," (Kauth 223)
In North America, this boy would be born into a context where his predispositions and response tendencies would make him more comfortable associating with, imitating, and ultimately identifying with the people labeled girls and women. At the same time, because of his biological sex, his parents, teachers, and peers would expect him to have the predispositions and preferences of the people labeled boys and men," (Looy and Bouma III)
They wanted to see their newborn babies as girls or boys, not as intersex. Even though intersex activists advocate raising children as girls or boys rather than in a third, in-between category, some parents found the label as frightening, off-putting, and freakish as hermaphrodite," (Reis 535)
Venus: The Lusiads This is a different type of tale because it deals with a real occasion that has been historically documented. But the author, Camoes, chooses to add the celestial to this story of danger and exploration by a Portuguese sailor named De Gama (Camoes xxxiv)
He talks of her as caught and whining to the other gods trying to get them to let her out. In the end a soliloquy between Apollo and Hermes reveals that Hermes would go through the same torture three times over to lay with Aphrodite one time (Stewart)
Although it is true that a very small percentage of the people not easily sorted into male or female have been shown to have chromosomal patterns that differ from the common XX and XY varieties, the majority do appear, upon examination of their chromosomes, to have the standard male or female "sex chromosome" pattern. (Dreger, 1998, p
The individual may have one of each or some variation of a conglomerate organ(s). (Gilbert, 2006) The development of abnormalities in sexual assignment is often a complicated set of hormonal and very occasionally chromosomal differences from the "discrete" assignment of gender that occurs during gestation, among this variation is a wide arch of individuals who can be classed not as either male or female but intersexual
Developing a reasonable take on the situation and offering support to the family is essential as the individual nurse may find him or herself embroiled in a vast variety of reactions and possibly even demands associated with the condition. (Johnstone, 1999, p
This can happen when two fecundated gametes merge." (Corazza, 2004, p
" Similar articles were published by Neugebauer in the French medical press, and perhaps British and French practitioners of the time needed to be admonished that "[t]he number of cases in which the surgeon is confronted by pseudohermaphrodism is much larger than is generally supposed. (Dreger, 1998, p
As a result, screening for mutants is made much easier, because there is no need to set up specific crosses in order to generate homozygotes. (Hope, 1999; Kaplan, 2006) Normally, populations of this animal consist almost entirely of diploid self-fertilizing hermaphrodites
Indeed, studying its development in a stepwise fashion seems so straightforward that it has been referred to it as "the reductionist's delight." (Kaplan, 2006) C
Many plants and some animals are naturally hermaphroditic and can self-fertilize and reproduce themselves from a single organism. (Omoto & Lurquin, 2004, p
This result is also true in hermaphrodite species, in which the fifty-fifty allocation of reproductive effort to male and female function reduces the female allocation used to make eggs by half. (Roughgarden, 2004) A single organism that makes both small and large gametes at some point in life is called a hermaphrodite
Kondoleon explained that Aphrodite was a primal goddess of manifold identities: She was seductress and the first woman portrayed naked. Believers prayed to her for success in marriage, war and lust (Bergeron 1)
The fresco depicts the daughters of Zeus, who doubled as Aphrodite's handmaidens. The three slender, nude bodies are set against a background of lush vegetation, and their arms are sensually interlocked (Owen 2)