Courtesy Of Fackeltraeger Verlag / Courtesy of Fackeltraeger Verlag
Christiane Voelling is a 52-year-old intersexual who lives in Dusseldorf, Germany and has fought for greater rights for people like herself whose sexual gender is indeterminate.
By Andy Eckardt , NBC News Producer
MAINZ, Germany Pink? Or blue? For most parents this is the paramount question when it comes to organizing a baby shower or choosing a color for a newborn's room.
But, what happens if the exact gender of the child cannot be determined? It is estimated that in Germany alone approximately 80,000 people are intersexual, so-called hermaphrodites, who have physical features such as chromosomes, hormones, gonads and outer sexual organs which cannot be unambiguously attributed to just one gender.
Christiane Voelling, 52,is an intersexual.
She is a nurse living in Dsseldorf who was born without defining gender characteristics.
Because German law requires that a newborn's personal data including gender specification is registered within a week, Christiane was proclaimed a boy at birth and called Thomas after a midwife supposedly mistook her enlarged clitoris for a penis.
In Voelling's case, it was later diagnosed that her indeterminate external genitalia were the result of a rare genetic disorder of the adrenal gland, the so-called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, or CAH.
"My childhood and teenage development was often agonizing because I did not really know what was wrong with me and where I belonged," Voelling said in a recent interview with NBC News.
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German hermaphrodites push for human rights
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