In This Dominican Republic Village, Genetic Disorder Causes Little Girls To Transition Into Boys At Puberty

La Salinas is a small village in the Dominican Republic that shelters a rare occurrence of girls developing male genitalia after puberty or at the age of 12, whichever comes first. Their voice becomes heavy like men and hair starts growing all over the body. The males who are born looking like girls and only grow penises at puberty are known as Guevedoces, which effectively translates as ‘penis at twelve’. This genetic condition is called pseudo-hermaphrodites. In this, a person born with one gender’s primary sex characteristics develops the other gender’s primary sex features.

According to the report, doctors from Cornell University visited the village to study the anomaly of this village. BBC also spoke to one of the Guevedoces named Johnny who went through his rare occurrence in his life. As per the BBC, a boy named Johnny was raised as a girl since childhood. But with increasing age, his gender changed and he became Johnny.

In a conversation with BBC, Johnny said, “I never liked to dress like a girl. When my parents used to buy toys for girls, I never bothered to play with them. Despite being a girl by birth, whenever I saw boys playing, I used to stop to play ball with them.” When he became a male, he was taunted at school and responded with his fists. People used to call him a devil and other things. It would often turn into fights.

One of the first people to study this unusual condition was Dr Julianne Imperato-McGinley, from Cornell Medical College in New York. As per their report, the Guevedoces don’t have male genitalia in the beginning because they are deficient in an enzyme called 5-alpha-reductase which normally converts testosterone into dihydro-testosterone.

In medical explanation, after eight weeks of conception, the sex hormone kicks in. If you are genetically male, the Y chromosome instructs your gonads to become testicles and sends testosterone to a structure called a tubercle. It is called dihydro-testosterone which helps in the conversion of tubercles in the penis. Guevedoces are expected to lack this. This deficiency seems a genetic condition that is quite common in the Dominican Republic but vanishingly rare elsewhere.