Theos-Talk Archives (December 2002 Message tt00711)

Dear Paul,

It is very common for female assigned but male gendered 
hermaphrodites to spend a lifetime trying to be women, or posing as 
women for survival reasons. When a person is raised as a female, they 
are taught social feminity or sex-signaling. If they are very good 
observers, they may learn it well. There was a time in my life when I 
was still (for survival reasons) trying to pass as a normal girl. No 
one then guessed that there was anything unsusual about me gender-
wise. I could have kept-up this act (which is what it was) of being 
a normal female indefinitely, had my body not actually started to 
masculinize. For a while I lived in two worlds, one where I was my 
self... David, and the other where I used dipilatory creams on my 
face and continued to pass as the girl I was raised to be. 

Now it is clear from photos of HPB that she did not experiance the 
kind of phyical masculinization that I did. Late virilizing forms of 
either XX or XY intersex are extremely rare. In these conditions, the 
child and adolesent may appear as a normal female. After a rather 
extreme Iand possibly very late...in the 20s) 'puberty', in which a 
phallus grows and secondary male sex characteristics develope, the 
person can no longer hide their transformation...or 'sex reversal' 
without great difficulty. This is obviously NOT what happened to 
HPB, but being feminine in her youth does not mean anything, as the 
late virilizing forms of intersex do not effect the person's pre-
'pubertal' (masculinizing) femininity. 

There was prabably SOME physical clue to her intersexed condition, or 
why would such a rumor persist ? Many intersex conditions are NOT 
something that could be detected by even experts without chromosomal 
analysis and a gonadal biopsy. This makes it seem that she had some 
gross anatomical sign or symptom of some intersex condition. Did she 
have normal menses ? Did she experiance phallic development ? 
Whatever the case, in her time, she would have been an enigma to both 
herself and others. Also it should me noted that among some 
hermaphrodites, both xx 'female pseudo-hermaphrodites' and 'true 
hermaphrodites' (older terms being phased-out of use at the present) 
sexual relations as a woman, pregnancy and child birth are possible. 

So none of the below is any evidence that HPB was not an 
hermaphrodite. 

- BA G

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, "kpauljohnson <kpauljohnson@y...>" 
<kpauljohnson@y...> wrote:
> For what it's worth,
> 
> Some years ago I was told by a Theosophist that Boris de Zirkoff 
had 
> a certificate "proving" that HPB was a hermaphrodite. I did not 
have 
> the presence of mind to ask the source of this certificate and how 
> this person knew of its existence. (Might have been Rick Nurrie, 
not 
> sure, maybe Michael Revere-- one of the younger Theosophical 
Network 
> folks.) But years later someone at the Pasadena T.S. Headquarters 
> assured me that Boris did indeed have such a certificate. And 
AGAIN 
> I failed to ask its source, whether she had seen it, etc. Then, 
some 
> years after that, someone else told me he had seen the thing-- and 
> not only did I fail for the third time to ask the obvious 
questions, 
> I can't even remember who it was!
> 
> So rumor abounds on this subject. On the other hand, we have the 
> testimonial by Albert Rawson as to HPB's feminine charms in her 
> youth, the Witte memoirs about her having affairs with an unnamed 
> Englishman and Agardi Metrovitch, the mysterious child Yuri, and 
her 
> late marriage to Michael Betanelly to weigh in the balance. She 
> certainly lived as a woman for most of her life, if not all. Plus 
> there is the Oppenheim certificate testifying that she was a female 
> who had not borne children. 
> 
> So who knows,
> 
> KPJ