Boy or girl? India's hermaphrodites slowly fit in

NEW DELHI (Reuters Life!) - Born with both male and female genitalia, a life of uncertainty seemed to await Ali and his family, but changing attitudes means hermaphrodites once-scorned in India are finding their place.

"Every mother waits eagerly for the doctor to announce the sex of the newborn. They tell you if it's a boy or a girl," said Zubeda, Ali's mother, requesting their real names not be used.

"When the doctor is silent, you know something is wrong," she said. "Since there is a social stigma attached in India with people with undetermined sex, I was apprehensive".

Even a decade ago, the secrecy surrounding such cases made it impossible for mixed-gender children to choose their identities and find doctors able to start timely treatment, she said.

Perceived as eunuchs, children with ambiguous genitalia would be forcibly taken away from parents by 'hijras' or eunuchs, to be brought up in secluded communities of their own.

Shunned by a society that cringes at variants, they make a living by singing and dancing. They are often poor and ridiculed.

For Ali, originally raised as a girl, two surgeries and a radical lifestyle change have allowed the 12-year old to live as he wants, as a normal boy.

"As soon as he could walk and talk, he knew that he wanted to be a boy, and look how happy he is today," his mother said.

GOING UNDER THE KNIFE

Doctors say more parents, even from poor, remote areas, are bringing their offspring for treatment, resisting social pressures to hand their children over to eunuch communities or mistakenly raise them as the wrong gender.

But despite improved care, only a fraction of the between 500,000 and 1.2 million hijras in India get treatment.

"I don't think we diagnose more than 1 percent of these patients in time, and then offer them good treatment," said Dr Y.K. Sarin of the Maulana Azad Medical College.

"Many of them languish in communities undiagnosed or picked up by the hijra community and taken along with them."

And India's age-old cultural preference for sons mean doctors are flooded with requests to turn mixed-gender children into boys, even if that is not always appropriate.

Some propose creating a special category to help hermaphrodites fit in as they are, as in southern Tamil Nadu state, which recently granted transsexuals and transgendered people a "third gender" status with certain privileges.

"They should be given some disability status or special privileges," Sarin said.

"Their genitalia exclude them from all the rights of the society, otherwise they are absolutely normal."

(Editing by Miral Fahmy, Gillian Murdoch and Ben Tan)