Boys born as girls due to genetic deformity
Catherine, left, and his "guevedoces" cousin Carla, right, who is brought up as a girl / Screen capture from Twitter
About one in 90 boys in Salinas, Dominican Republic, is born as a girl due to a genetic deformity, the British Daily Mail has reported.
Because the condition is common in the village, children with the condition are called Guevedoces, or “penis at 12.”
Many children with the condition keep their female names but say they never felt like girls.
Johnny, 24, who was brought up as a girl named Felicity, said he always felt more like a boy.
“I went to school and I used to wear a skirt,” he said. “I never liked to dress as a girl. When they bought me girls' toys I never bothered playing with them. When I saw a group of boys I would stop to play ball with them.”
Julianne Imperato-McGinley, from Cornell University, discovered the condition in the 1970s.
She said babies usually started developing their sex organs after eight weeks in the womb. For males, the hormone dihydro-testosterone triggers the change.
But some babies do not have the enzyme that starts the hormone surge that creates the sex organs.
The male sex organs only start to grow when the children reach puberty, when there is another surge of testosterone.