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NEW MEDICAL TEST IS KEY TO NATURE'S SEX PUZZLES By Victor Cohn--Minneapolis Tribune Staff writer.

Buffalo, N.Y. A woman who was a man lives in this city- an attractive woman of 33 who turns men's heads by her beauty. She is recognized as a woman because of a new medical test. his test in the last few years has moved medicine past the "Christine Jorgenson" era when a man who wanted to live as a woman was almost automatically stamped as a pure psychological problem or an "oddball".

It has taught medicine that many persons, and many so-called homosexuals may really be men whose heredity intended them to be women, or women who should be men. Unfortunately in their mother's wombs something went wrong with their development--a mistake in embryology or in endocrinology, the action of the hormones. Genetic women develoned outward sexual signs of men and vice versa. The individual often grew up desperately unhappy, yearn- ing always for the life of the opposite sex.

The test that now identifies the true genetic sex is called the "sex chromatin" test, for a dark colored, gene-carrying patch that shows up inside far more female than male cells. The test was discovered by Dr. Murray Barr at the Univ. of Western Ontario. Much work in con- firming it was done by Dr. Warren Nelson now in New York but then at the Univ. of Iowa. The test is being done now at many major centers, reports Dr. irwin Kaise who has used it at the Univ. of Minnesota.

"Its main value," he says, "is in the very young-- infants where we cannot be sure of the real sex."

Amazingly, in something like one in every 1000 births doctors may be faced with some uncertainty over true sex, because of some ambiguous sexual structure. Previously, they made a decision one way or another and sometimes it turned out to be wrong. But the child or young adult was already established on the wrong kind of life before the mistake was realized.

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