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To: CobaltBlue
Them female hormones will drive you crazy!

Wachowski is not the only Hollywood celeb with gender problems. My daughter succeeded in flooring me this evening when she mentioned that in her college bio class, the prof mentioned that actress Jamie Lee Curtis (currently starring in "Freaky Friday") is actually geneticly male, and suffers from a genetic abnormality that made her develop as a female. I HAD to check on it, and found she's standardly listed on multiple college biology sources as being an example of the condition.

I'm sure there are lots of XX females who wished they looked as female as Jamie

101 posted on 06/04/2003 6:15:48 PM PDT by SauronOfMordor (Java/C++/Unix/Web Developer looking for next gig)
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To: SauronOfMordor
Jamie Lee Curtis is very attractive, as androgynous people so often are.

I could argue that real women, like me (and I have the kids to prove it), naturally tend to be broad in the beam, but I don't think it would get me very far. ;^)
103 posted on 06/04/2003 6:32:41 PM PDT by CobaltBlue
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To: SauronOfMordor
Your post reminds me of something a judge in the local juvenile court once relayed to me - not sure I can repeat it exactly right - occasionally cases involving hermaphroditic infants wind up in juvenile court because the parents and health care providers need someone to resolve how the child will be reared, as a male or as a female. This may involve surgery.

Glad I don't have to deal with these problems.
104 posted on 06/04/2003 6:36:41 PM PDT by CobaltBlue
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To: SauronOfMordor
http://www.snopes.com/movies/actors/jamie.htm

This appearently not confirmed. But Curtis herself has declined to comment, which I find interesting.
120 posted on 06/04/2003 7:45:45 PM PDT by MattAMiller (Iraq was liberated in my name, how about yours?)
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To: SauronOfMordor
there is a bit about jamie lee curtis on http://www.snopes.com thre rumor was that at BIRTH she was born with both genitals and had to have corrective surgery. Its a gossip bassed birth defect issue

""""We may never know. No one but Ms. Curtis, her parents, and her doctors has the definitive answer to this one, and none of them is talking. Curtis has repeatedly declined deigning to provide a response to this rumor, and her physicians -- even if they had something to say and wanted to say it -- are bound by doctor-patient confidentiality strictures.

This rumor is often lent credibility by people who have heard it repeated as fact by their university professors (especially those with specialties relating to intersexuality). Neither the hearer nor the teller ever seems to be able to provide a credible explanation of how he knows this piece of information to be true, the chain of transmission always tracing back to the notoriously unreliable "Someone else told me about it." As happens over and over, even the most trusted of sources can sometimes take a widespread rumor at face value, then parrot it as fact.

Okay, so we simply don't know. Why, then, is this rumor so widespread?

Jamie Lee is the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. At the time of Jamie Lee's arrival into this world, her father was a roguishly good-looking leading man, an actor female moviegoers couldn't help but swoon over. Her mother was a beauty and a renowned actress. Their union produced two daughters, Kelly Lee in 1956 and Jamie Lee in 1958.

In their day, Curtis and Leigh were one of Hollywood's up-and-coming couples, two successful, ambitious, famous people who appeared to have it all, with that 'all' including a happy marriage and two fine children. (As is often the case, appearances were deceiving: Curtis and Leigh divorced in 1962 after eleven years of marriage, and there were more difficult times ahead for both of them.) It's thus possible that the current rumor about Jamie Lee stems from an ancient backlash against her parents, long-ago envy expressed as a slander about what the union of two "perfect" people had produced. Just as the fox decries as sour the grapes that hang out of his reach, so might meanspirited folks fed up with hearing about the beautiful people spread a rumor that cuts these stars down to size.

Two facts lend an aura of credence to the rumor that Jamie Lee was born with both male and female bodyparts. The first is her two-way name: According to the rumor, a boyish appellation was bestowed upon her by parents who hadn't yet decided whether to have a boy or a girl "made" of their baby and wanted to be prepared to go either way, but that wasn't the case of it. Janet Leigh explained how she came to choose the name:


At that time, we didn't know ahead of time if it would be a girl or a boy, so when I was pregnant with Kelly, my best friend Jackie Gershwin said, "Why don't you call the baby Kelly, so if it's a girl, it works, and if it's a boy, it works?" And she thought the same thing with Jamie. The babies were named before they were born because Jackie said, "This way, we won't have to worry about it!"
If the names were truly chosen before the children arrived, that puts paid to the notion that 'Jamie Lee' was so christened in response to a medical condition that would only have been discovered after her delivery. (Jamie Lee Curtis was born long before the development of medical technology that could identify dual-gendered fetuses.)

The second fact that supports the rumor is Ms. Curtis' own children: They're adopted. Though couples opt for adoptive children over natural progeny for any number of reasons, it is true the operation necessary to correct dual gendering in a female infant would leave her unable to bear children.
"""""


tell Ms. Curtis' publicist and there would probably be suits if there are really in fact published in books naming her SPECIFICALLY vs just using a female image.
204 posted on 06/11/2003 5:05:15 PM PDT by longtermmemmory
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