What is a hemorphidite?

Answer 1

A hemorphidite is someone born with both male and female sex organs.

The correct spelling is hermaphrodite--a combination of Hermes (a male god) and Aphrodite (a female goddess, in Greek mythology). There are very few true hermaphrodites among people; many more people are "intersexuals", with ambiguous genitalia that may be misinterpreted. (It's not easy for a doctor to say "I don't know" to "Is it a boy or a girl?")

The ideas of intersexuality and ambiguous genitalia are easier to understand if one realizes that male sex organs are modified female sex organs. The "default" for a human embryo is female, XX. If the chromosome pair is instead XY, the changed genes together with the testosterone generated by the gonads create an "unauthorized field modification", as it were: the gonads go down and become testes instead of ovaries; the outer labia seal together to form the scrotum; the inner labia seal and grow to become the penile shaft, and a glans is a clit on steroids. These facts account for two things: the "seam" many men have on the underside of their penis and/or vertically through their scrotum (it really is a seam, where what would normally become the labia fused together), and why men have nipples.

If something interrupts this modification process, or there is some other disruption in fetal growth and development, the result can be ambiguous genitalia. Sometimes the anatomy is such that the infant could "go either way"; in such cases, a simple DNA test will reveal whether the child is XX or XY (or XXY or XYY, each of which carries with it other problems). It is common for such children to be assigned their genetic sex and appropriate plastic surgery to be performed.

Other times the child clearly looks like one sex but turns out, perhaps at puberty, to be the other. The novel "Middlesex" discusses one such class of children, who appear to be female but at puberty become male.

In other cases, the genitalia appear to be either a mishmash or so severely malformed that exactly what is what is not clear. It used to be that such children were routinely turned into sterile females, as the surgery to do so was relatively straightforward. The book "As Nature Made Him" describes the tragic "natural experiment" that revealed why this is a bad idea.

True hermphroditism is present in, for instance, snails, who each carry a full set of both male and female organs and who when mating each fertilize the other's eggs.