i am sincerely curious about this. my bro was talking to a teenage girl who was opening up to him, and she said these exact words, “i was born with nothing down there and they had to cut me open to make one”.
question is, how rare is this? what caused this? maybe there was just skin growth over the area, but the rest was normal? i have NEVER heard of this before. just boggles me. any info on this would be cool. thanks.
I dunno, but it does remind me of a hysterical BlackAdder II bit:
Lord Melchett: Ah well, the whisper on the underground grapevine, ma’m, is that Lord Blackadder is spending all his time with a young boy in his service.
Queen Elizabeth I: Oh. Do you think he would spend more time with me if I was a boy?
M: Surely not, madam.
Nursie: You almost were a boy, my little cherrypit.
Q: What?
N: Yeah. Out you popped, out of your mummy’s pumpkin and everybody shouting : “It’s a boy, it’s a boy!” and somebody said “but it hasn’t got a winkle!”, and then I said “A boy without a winkle? God be praised, it is a miracle. A boy without a winkle!” And then Sir Thomas Moore pointed out that a boy without a winkle is a girl. Anyway, I was really disappointed.
M: Oh yes, well you see, he was a very perceptive man, Sir Thomas Moore.
Occassionally thing go awry in the womb and a child is born with too much or too little of something or too many or too few or requiring some surgery. Why should “down there” be immune to these little whimsies? Maybe you’ve never heard of it because discussing “down there” is still surronded by taboos.
Anyhow, she didn’t specify which orifice required surgery. Children of both sexes are from time to time born lacking an asshole. These days, something can be done about it. Prior to the 20th Century, and in some places today with primative medical services, these children simply died shortly after birth.
As far as genitalia – it’s quite possible that skin grew over, or membranes overgrew, or something else went wrong requiring surgery to make an adequate opening. Or perhaps this person was born “intersex”, meaning the genitalia is ambiguous (sometimes the chromosones are, too) and they were “assigned” a gender and surgified to match. The success of such procedures does vary.
What causes this sort of thing? Well, genetic or chomosomal defect, poor nutritution in the mother, exposure to certain chemicals… there are a variety of causes, and quite often no one is really certain “why”. Accidents happen.
I recall some talk show (Montel?) that featured a person who was born without any genitalia. Only a urethrea. There was no internal bits that were covered up. “Toby” had to fight the state DMV (Kansas, I believe) in order to put “O” in the “sex” part of, uh, its’, license to indicate it was not a man or a woman.
Toby looked more like a woman than a man, though although it had no breast development.
Baby girls sometimes get what are called labial adhesions - the labia stick together, often so neatly and completely that it looks like the baby doesn’t have a vagina. That might have been what your brother’s friend had, and the story has become exagerrated in the telling. I’ve never heard of a girl needing surgery to fix the problem, but hey, I’m not a doctor, maybe it happens.
As far as being born without a vagina, I can’t think of any reason why it would be impossible, but it would be a significant deformity to say the least :eek:
Actually, it’s quite rare, but does happen. A female infant is born without a vagina, a normal uretha, clitoris, and anus, and a set of non-viable rudimentary tubes where her fallopian tubes and uterus should be. I’m fuzzy on the details, but the ovaries will function well enough to produce the proper hormones at puberty, if not eggs (which is good because there is no egress for unfertilized eggs).
Today, a vagina can be constructed surgically or, because the tissue there is very soft, even with just pressure. One determined pair of newlyweds created one they were both happy with by repeatedly attempting intercourse; today, the woman is advised to sit on what looks like a bicycle seat with an attached dildo. The woman will never be able to become pregnant or carry a child.
The Blackadder reference may be a sly nod to the theory that Queen Elizabeth I was one of the few women to suffer this fate. It was alleged by one of her doctors that she had no vagina, “only a smaller hole through which to pass water,” and although she could not have coitus in the usual way, she still took her lovers to bed and pleasured them. This could be a partial explanation for why she never did marry.
I read all this years ago in an issue of Cosmopolitan, believe it or not.
<shamefacedly>
I remember that! It was Sally Jesse Raphael and it was '89 or '90. I was in college and my roommate called to me, "DUDE! You have GOT to see this!
So I went. Ow.