Is She a He-She?
Posted on Saturday, July 17, 2010 at 5:53pm
“Are you sure that Toffee is…well, all girl?” Rich said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, offended, stroking Toffee’s satiny coat. The goat kid was curled up in my lap in the big armchair, her blue-grey eyes closed in languid satisfaction.
“Weelll,” he said, “it’s just that she doesn’t have any horn buds.”
I knew that, but I thought it was a good thing. After all, for each goat kid that had horn buds, they had to go to the vet for a de-horning operation that felt vaguely medieval - the blood! the screaming! the red hot iron! It was pretty horrible.
“The gene for a polled goat (one born without horns) is often linked with the one for hermaphrodites,” he pressed on. He showed me the book.
There was a diagram of genetic patterns there, female goats and male goats drawn with horns and without, breeding and producing progeny that either had horns or didn’t. I studied it for a minute, but couldn’t make any sense out of it.
“What are you saying?” I said, starting to get alarmed.
He read out loud. “The hermaphrodite looks like a doe externally, but it actually has male organs internally. Not all have obvious external abnormalities. Carefully examine the vulva of newborn kids. A growth about the sizer of a pea at the bottom of the vagina is abnormal. Unusual behavior in a normal appearing doe kid is cause for suspicion. Intersex goats are often overly aggressive or unusually withdrawn. Hermaphrodites should be destroyed.”
“No!” I said, clutching Toffee. There has just been too much killing, dying and culling recently.
“It’s up to you,” Rich said, shrugging.
We looked at Toffee’s - well, female bits. Or he-she bits. Whatever.
There did, indeed, seem to be a pea-sized growth there. Crap.
“But I’m attached to her now!” I said.
“You can keep her as a pet,” Rich said. “I don’t mind.”
But strangely, the thought that Toffee might be a he-she did start to affect the way that I felt about her over the next day or so. Whereas before I had simply seen her as a nanny kid, now I started to watch her behavior with critical eyes. Was she unusually aggressive? She was certainly athletic and lively, leaping around and racing much more than I remember Eira doing. But then, this could all be guess work - we didn’t even know if she was really a hermaphrodite.
And if she was, we could still keep her. After all, our goats aren’t a money-making endeavor anyway - they are more of an expensive hobby. We don’t have to cull for financial purposes. Buddug is too old to kid now - going bald, even - but we keep her because she’s retired, and we love her.
But, pressed on a logical, cold corner of my brain, you only have room for a certain number of goats in the herd. Over the next twelve years, Toffee will occupy a space in the stalls, eat the food, take the place of another goat, one who could be fertile and have kids every year. She will never produce kids to be sold, or to improve the flock. A dead end.
How sentimental am I?
Can I bottle feed a goat kid for two weeks, only to take it to the vet and have it put down if it’s a hermaphrodite?
Should I?
Is it heartless, cruel to do that? Or is it sentimental and ridiculous to keep a farm animal that is non-productive, that may turn out to be overly aggressive? If she does become a full-grown goat, and then becomes aggressive, might we have to put her down then? How much worse would that be?
And then, of course, my thoughts turned to people. If the way I felt about a goat kid was affected by my thoughts about her gender status, how much worse must that be for parents who have a gender-indeterminate child? Because it happens all the time… Now there’s a sobering thought.
We tend to think that there are only two genders - male and female, and that everyone fits neatly into one category or the other.
But in fact, there is an entire sliding and confusing continuum of gender, complicated by the factors of genital structure, hormonal make-up and personal gender identification. And interestingly, it is only the issue of gender identification that cannot be changed. A good surgeon can give you new genitals, and injections can provide the hormones. But if you feel like a woman on the inside, (even if you’re shaped like a man on the outside) nothing in the world will shift that feeling. Not electro-shock, or therapy, or drugs. The easiest thing, it seems, is to shift the outside of your body to match the way you feel.
Complicated, for a human.
And also for the owner of a possibly hermaphroditic goat…

