PART TWO - The Study

In 1972, Dr. Ingebog Ward, a research psychologist at Villanova University published the results of her study on the sexual behavior of rats, years before the hypothalamus was identified as responsible for gender identity within the brain.

She divided a group of pregnant rats into three groups. Suspecting that something special might be happening in the early stages of pregnancy, she subjected the first group to stress during the first ten days of gestation by irritating the mother rats to bright lights, noise and annoying vibrations.

Ten days in a rat's pregnancy corresponds to the first trimester (3 months) of a human pregnancy. The second group was subjected to stress towards the end of their pregnancy, just before birth. The third group was comprised of male offspring from both prenatal stressed mothers and unstressed mothers. These babies were subjected to the same stress producing stimuli.

Dr. Ward then allowed all the males to grow to adulthood without further interference. She then placed each group of males in cages with healthy females to observe if their ability and desire to mate with normal adult females. Here is what happened.

"Abstract: Male rats were exposed to prenatal (i.e. before they were born) or postnatal (after they were born) stress, or both. The prenatally stressed males showed low levels of male copulatory (to engage in sexual intercourse) behavior and high rates of female lordotic (a mating posture of some sexually receptive female mammals (as rats) in which the head and rump are raised and the back is arched downward) responding. Postnatal stress had no effect.

The modifications are attributed to stress-mediated alterations in the ratio of adrenal to gonadal androgens during critical stages of sexual differentiation. Specifically, it appears that stress causes an increase in the weak adrenal androgen, androstendione(female hormone similar to estrogen), from the maternal fetal adrenal cortices, or both, and a concurrent decrease in the potent gonadal androgen, testosterone."

In more laymen’s terms, the abstract essentially points out that when the female rat carrying a male fetus was exposed to stress during the first trimester, she produces more estrogen which decreases the amount of testosterone that the male fetus receives. The result is after birth the male rats display a low desire to procreate with female rats, and a high level of desire to take on sexually submissive/female behavior.

Now over 35 years later while the debate continues between the scientists, the doctors, political groups waiting for ‘conclusive’ evidence based on human trials, when scientific studies using rats are have been valid for identifying most every ‘condition’ known to man, still 1 in ever 2000 male children(based on data from the Intersex Society of North America www.isna.org) are born with a level of the Intersex’ condition with little or no desire to procreate with females.

And the sad part is that the mother’s physiological condition that may have created the disorder, or what is now called the Intersex condition, might have been prevented. If she only knew....