Like a Virgin by Prasad, Aarathi (recommended reading txt) 📕

as more extensive body hair. Yet, even though a woman with this condition is exposed to the testosterone produced by her testes, the body seems to be insensitive to its effects. As a result, she will likely show off a luxuriant head of hair and never experience male-pattern balding – and further, she’ll never develop hair where you would expect it, in the armpit and pubic area.

Essentially, Berry’s idea was that the only way a woman could have a son without input from a father is if she herself carried a Y chromosome. In fact, a son from a mother who carried a Y chromosome – most likely one that was not fully functional – might develop into a normal male, without issues of abnormal testosterone production or sensitivity, if, say, that chromosome mutated back into a functional state somewhere along the way.

But what made this biologically plausible possibility highly improbable was the fact that a testes-carrying female virgin would have a very hard time getting pregnant in the first place: because people with testicular feminization cannot make eggs and have no womb in which a placenta could form, they are sterile.

In theory, Mary of Nazareth might have been a genetic chimaera, rather like Jane of Boston – except that, to have any chance of fertilizing herself, Mary would need to have been formed from a set of twin embryos, one male and one female, who fused into a single body while maintaining both sets of chromosomes – Y and all. This is an intriguing thought experiment, in Berry’s view, but it is also an unlikely scenario, not least because Mary’s body would have to achieve a truly miraculous balance between male and female hormones and reproductive organs.

It’s important to note, however, that in a purely physical sense this kind of sexual ambiguity is actually not that uncommon. As many as one in a hundred people are born with bodies that differ from the standard male or female package, and one in 1666 people are born with sex chromosomes that are not XX (normal female) or XY (normal male); one in a thousand carry XX chromosomes as well as a Y. Far more rare, and for our purposes, more interesting, are the one in every eighty-three thousand people who are born with ovotestes – gonads that are part ovary and part testes.

Indeed, another suggestion is that having ovotestes could explain how Jesus could have been born to a Virgin Mary. Genetically, Mary would carry two X chromosomes and appear to be a normal female – superficially. She would have had breasts (though she may not have been able to lactate), a uterus, Fallopian tubes, and a vagina. Her clitoris, though, would be enlarged, approximating a small penis – reminiscent of Aristotle’s hyenas. This larger clitoris would have been due to her anomalously high testosterone levels – produced by the incomplete testes inside of her perfect female form.

Ovotestes result when a woman inherits from her father an X chromosome carrying SRY material, which is normally located on the Y chromosome. When cells divide – the process by which any fertilized egg multiplies into the millions of cells that make up a living animal – the cells’ chromosomes copy themselves in order to populate the new cells with genetic information. In this replication process, mistakes can and do happen; genes are exchanged between chromosomes quite regularly, and sometimes they are cut and pasted on to chromosomes where they are not supposed to be. So if a person has two X chromosomes, but one of them has acquired essential male genes from a Y chromosome, this would make her completely male.

For the occasion of a Virgin Mary, we would have to go a step further, and imagine that when Mary was a developing embryo, her abnormal X chromosome in most of her tissues lost its male genes. Most, but not all. If the X chromosomes carrying SRY-containing genes were retained in some of those cells destined to become gonads, this would make Mary a genetic and sexual mosaic; she may even have had a beard. And depending on the balance of her mishmash of hormones, it would ‘simply’ be necessary for her ovotestes to produce both sperm and eggs when she reached puberty, and for these simultaneously to travel down the Fallopian tubes, and for the sperm to fertilize the egg, and for the fertilized egg to implant in the uterus. Voilà: virgin birth.

This may sound far-fetched, but just such a case of hermaphroditism was described in 2000. The child, a one-year-old girl from Mexico, was reported to have ovotestes, and to have all the ingredients that might begin the chain of events necessary for an eventual virgin birth. But given her young age at the time of examination, it was not clear whether she would be able to produce viable sperm and eggs at puberty – a question that might very soon be answered, given her date of birth.

You would be forgiven for thinking that these scientific scenarios are no more plausible than a miracle would be. Indeed, (rather like Monica Jones) misunderstanding, misdemeanour, or even mistranslation may be the real explanation behind the baby Jesus’s birth. The great irony, as we have seen in the previous chapter, is that it may, in fact, be almost more sensible to reproduce without males, because of all the drawbacks of sex for females.

Nature has also shown on several occasions that mistakes in the DNA have allowed many animals that normally reproduce through sex to do without it. Sex is, after all, something that evolved only once, which means that those animals today that have the capacity to reproduce without sex regained this capacity relatively recently, through mutation. Switching between sexual reproduction and self-reproduction should, therefore, bring with it some evolutionary advantages. For example, imagine