In the Dominican Republic, güevedoces (from Spanish: güevedoce, from Dominican Spanish güevos a los doce "testicles at twelve") are children with a specific intersex variation. Güevedoces are classified as girls when they are born but, around the age of 12, they start developing male genitalia. This is due to a deficiency in the production of 5α-reductase, an enzyme involved in the metabolism of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone. The same phenomenon occurs in Papua New Guinea, where it is called kwolu-aatmwol (literally 'a female thing changing into a male thing') by the Sambia people, and in Turkey.
Early research
The first scientific investigations of güevedoces occurred in the 1970s, when Julianne Imperato-McGinley, an endocrinologist from Cornell University, traveled to the village of Las Salinas in the Dominican Republic to investigate reports of apparently female children becoming male children at the onset of puberty. The cause was determined to be 5α-Reductase deficiency, and the results were published in the journal Science in 1974. The...