Just when I think nature can’t surprise me any more, some new piece of information is discovered. This time it happens to involve gender science.

Whenever you see an article about gender surgery in a major online venue you can bet that someone will post a comment along the lines of, “changing sex is impossible, your sex is imprinted in your chromosomes, and they are in every cell of your body, nothing can alter that”, right?

Well wrong, because intersex people exist. Some of them have strange chromosome patterns, such as XXY, and some of them have perfectly standard chromosomes, but their bodies don’t match what you would expect from those chromosomes.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School and College of Biological Sciences have discovered a gene that, if removed, causes male cells to become female. And that’s in adult tissue. Specifically the experiments were done on mouse testes. Taking away the Dmrt1 causes the cells in the organs to turn into something that looks like ovary cells. And it doesn’t take too much extrapolation to suggest that an embryo born with XY chromosomes but no Dmrt1 gene will grow up with a female body.

Talking of intersex people, many of you will have seen newspaper stories over the past few weeks about hundreds of parents in India having their girl children surgically altered to “become boys”. The papers loved the story, because it gave them an opportunity to be morally superior to brown people and trans people at the same time. But was it true? Mercedes Allen, one of the best trans activist bloggers around, decided to try to find out. You can read her report here.

For those of you not willing to click though, the short version is that most of these operations appear to have been carried out on intersex children. There are well over a billion people in India, so the existence of a few hundred intersex babies is only to be expected. Similar things happen in North America and Europe too. Doctors and parents all over the world want to “fix” intersex people.

Unfortunately, as Mercedes points out, this is a dangerous practice, because the surgery is often done long before the child is able to express a gender identity, and there is therefore a big risk of creating a transsexual child — that is, someone whose gender identity does not match the gender to which that person is being expected to conform. Annabel, by Kathleen Winter, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, tells the story of such a tragedy. It is on my “to read” pile.