Correctable Developmental Anomaly

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“Thank you for coming in at such short notice, Jenny. Please, take a seat.”

“Is there a problem with my baby, doctor?”

The doctor smiled. “Nothing we can’t fix, caught as early as this. It’s certainly not a life-threatening condition. Please, sit down.”

Jenny sat in the chair by the doctor’s desk. Her pregnancy wasn’t much more than a bump at this stage, easily covered, had she chosen to do so.

“Your latest scan revealed a correctable developmental anomaly in the foetus’s brain. We just got the results back today. Now, you expressed a wish not to be informed of your baby’s sex before birth, is that correct?”

“Yes,” Jenny said, and smiled, a little embarrassed. “I’m a little old-fashioned I guess.”

Smile. “Unfortunately it is the sex of your baby that this anomaly concerns. We need to discuss what we’re going to do. Are you okay with that?”

Jenny sighed. In truth it was only a foolish, romantic notion of hers to keep herself in ignorance of such things. She’d already had some fun researching both girls and boys names. Perhaps, she thought, it was a little quantum; like schroedinger’s cat, as long as she didn’t know, it wasn’t resolved. “All right,” she said. “Tell me, what’s going on?”

“Physically, your baby is a normal XY boy. No physical anomalies at all. What the last scan showed, however, is that the brain is developing as female. Now, there’s nothing to be concerned about. This happens from time to time, and we can correct for it completely at this early stage. But we do need you to make an informed decision for your baby.”

“Wh– What are the options?”

“Well, as we are at such an early stage, we can start a course of hormone therapy on the foetus to jump-start, as it were, proper male development of the brain. It would mean a little nanosurgery at the outset, just to insert the dispenser in the right location, then subsequent treatments can just be done on an outpatient’s appointment. Your baby’s brain will develop normally as male, to match his body. We would like to follow-up with a scan once a year, but in ninety-nine percent of cases there’s no need for any further intervention.”

Jenny sighed again. “Okay. What else?”

“We can leave the brain alone and modify the development of the body. Your child is an XY, there’s nothing in the universe can change that now, but, again with hormone treatment and a little nanosurgery, we can direct the foestus’s body to develop as female.

“Uhm, with XY chromosomes? Is that possible?”

“Oh yes. In fact on very rare occasion XY females occur naturally. There’s a good chance that we’d need to follow-up with hormone treatment throughout the child’s life, but in most respects she will be indistinguishable from any other girl.

“Most respects?”

The doctor smiled sympathetically. “She won’t have a uterus, and she won’t be able to have children unaided. Now with ova-cloning and a surrogate or uterus transplant this can be overcome; but you need to be aware now that this is the situation.”

“Wh– What if we don’t do anything?”

The doctor looked at her understandingly. “The child would grow up a girl trapped in a boy’s body, eventually becoming a woman trapped in a man’s body. Can you imagine how awful that would be? A long time ago, before we could detect or treat this in utero, the suffering was immense. It’s estimated that even after treatments in later life existed, the suicide rate among sufferers was as high as thirty percent. And the treatments that did exist — we could try to replicate them of course; with modern medicine we should get fairly reasonable results but…” He sighed. “It would always be inferior to directing development one way or another now and helping nature put things right.”

“All right. Um.” Jenny sighed. “The first one, um, you can make the brain develop as male after all? It’s not too late?”

“It’s not too late, but there’s no time to lose.”

“And, um, he won’t need to know?”

“No, he won’t need to know a thing. There’s minimal follow-up, he’ll be a perfectly normal male.”

“Okay, well, I suppose we should do that then. It seems less…” She ran out of words. “Something.”

“It is much less invasive, yes. Although if we had discovered this only a week later I would have recommended the other option.”

Jenny nodded. It was good. They found a problem, but they could fix it. Easily.

For some reason she felt a little sad. She had no idea why.

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Comments

Others

I'm sure others will be able to put what I am going to try and say in a more articulate manner. I've thought about in the future changing the brain instead of the body for situations like Rachael wrote about and I felt the same as when I read this thought provoking story. It disturbed me but wouldn't less pain be caused by altering the mind? Great story Rachael that's really is TG Sci-Fi!
Hugs
Grover

Nicely Done

An interesting quandary. Certainly makes one wonder in which direction the "average" parent would go; I suspect that a solid majority, like your character here, would opt for the less obtrusive and more "natural" solution if the fetus is XY to start with. (There'd also be the question of preserving the mother's genetic line, depending on where the new girl's transplanted ova eventually came from.)

The story puts a different spin, so to speak, on the concept of "mind control", though I believe that's a thought-experiment that has been examined more thoroughly in a prenatal gay-straight context. (At least there's no need here to consider aborting the fetus and starting over.)

Eric

Cloned

Rachel Greenham's picture

(There'd also be the question of preserving the mother's genetic line, depending on where the new girl's transplanted ova eventually came from.)

Not transplanted from a donor. Cloned from the foetus's own stem cells, appropriately engineered. :-) (Might need a spare X chromosome from the mother, but hey, the science here is utterly speculative. :-) )

2nd X Chromosome

Rachel,

The X chromosome in genetic males (XY) comes from the mother. Obtaining the 2nd X chromosome for the engineered ova should come from the father. His, not the mother's, genetic legacy is in need of preservation.

Using the father's X and the X already in place from the mother in the engineering of the grafted ovaries would have the net effect of replicating a natural genetic daughter.

G/R

Rachel this is Disturbing

... and strikes me very wrong. Nothing with your ability to write - which in this tale is superb. Its the idea of genetic tampering and engineering tg's out of existence that really disturbs me. In a perfect world, the child should determine their sex and the direction the go. Based on many tg's i have talked with, it seems even though the parents have good intentions, they always seem to be wrong when it came to determining what their child should be even when the child said what they were or demonstrated. I would think the child would know much better who and what they are.

Very effective and moral thinking writing Rach. *hugs*

ps. keep this type writing up!

Sephrena Lynn Miller

Something?

Andrea Lena's picture

...which would I prefer if I had my say? Definitely the body...the brain...and the inner component of what many of us call the soul? I'd rather be me with an external transient need. Great story! Thank you!



Dio vi benedica tutti
Con grande amore e di affetto
Andrea Lena

  

To be alive is to be vulnerable. Madeleine L'Engle
Love, Andrea Lena

Yay for BC Volume 1

I saw this listed as going into BC Volume 1, so I decided to come and read it.

It's very well written, but very disturbing and makes me wonder if at some time in "their future" they would find that they are making mistakes by messing with the development of the brain.

Simple and Easy Answers

Simple and cheap answers are just that. Historically, they have been very powerful, causing massive changes in the way that human society deals with its challenges. The introduction of inexpensive petroleum dramatically impacted the way the world moved and lit the nights. Inexpensive ammonium fertilizer profoundly changed the way we fed ourselves. Antibiotics and vaccines changed the way we deal with disease.

However, such simple solutions are also much more complicated than they seem on the surface, and cause very real issues of their own.

Automobiles replaced horses, relieving the very real and imminent danger that cities would become uninhabitable due to the pollution, but introduced pollutants that, while not as damaging on the local level, have a strong global effect. Fertilizer freed farmers from the dangers of poor crop yields and populations from some of the specters of starvation (though not all; distribution of the benefits has been uneven and less than "fair" to all), but at the same time made them less aware of the condition of their soil, and, in the space of that inattention, growingly dependent on ever-increasing amounts of that (petroleum-derived) fertilizer. Over-prescription of medicines seen as "wonder drugs" combined with irresponsible use thereof by the patients has led to the evolution of drug-resistant, highly aggressive diseases that now threaten to overwhelm the medical infrastructure in place or in reasonable development.

The point is that, ultimately, it's not a question of whether or not there will be unintended consequences to such "meddling", but rather how soon will they appear, and how profoundly will they change us.

-Liz

Successor to the LToC

-Liz

Successor to the LToC
Formerly known as "momonoimoto"

Genetic tampering

can result in a modern day Frankenstein.

    Stanman
May Your Light Forever Shine

Nice story

Won't ever happen though. TG issues are caused late in the third trimester when brain but not body development is changed by mistimed floods of hormones. Or so I have Ben led to believe.