It's a boy! No, it's a girl! No, it's a ...I don't know...

Peter is a 7-month old boy. No, wait. Peter is a 7-month old 'boy'. Okay, I'll start differently: Peter was born...no wait. It is very hard to tell a story about someone without mention of their sex: either by use of a pronoun or by implication with the use of a name. Maybe in such cases, we should a name that could belong to a little boy or a little girl. I don't know. Okay, here goes...

A little baby was born and it was evident there were problems. The baby suffered from what is called Eagle-Barrett syndrome: a condition where there is complete or partial absence of the abdominal muscles, problems with the urinary system and in males, the testicles do not descend from the abdomen into the scrotum. In this baby's case, it had a single opening called a urogenital sinus -- a single opening for the urethra and vagina. It's complicated. Although the parents believed the baby to be a boy -- it seemed to have a penile structure and scrotal sac structure, genetic testing showed it to be a female. It had a genotype of XX. Imaging studies (ultrasound) showed the presence of what looked like a premature uterus and the scrotal sac was empty.

In the end, the parents made the decision (based on religious and other non-medical reasons) to raise their child as a boy. And so 'he' is. I got to take care of 'him' in the context of kidney failure and a febrile seizure (another story). I learned a lot from him.