Read That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor for Free Online Page A

but teasingly and unusually enticing. The Kirks, who knew her best, were profoundly concerned by her influence on their daughter.
    There is now evidence to indicate there may have been sound medical and psychological reasons for Wallis behaving in this way which were not understood at the time and certainly would never have been discussed. She may have been born with what is currently labelled a Disorder of Sexual Development (DSD) or intersexuality, a term which embraces a wide range of conditions. Some are so subtle that even today doctors delivering babies with ambiguous genitals cannot be immediately certain if they are holding a boy or a girl. Since one baby in 15,000 is born with some degree of DSD – which amounts to approximately 4,000 in the UK and 400,000 globally per annum – the problem can no longer be considered rare. This does not mean that Wallis was a man, in fact the reverse, and she was certainly not a freak. Wallis herself, if she were born with some degree of DSD – and there is no medical proof that this is an accurate assessment of her case – would not have known that anything was wrong, at least for many years, and even then might have been given confused information unless she had cause to undergo an operation. Yet the diagnosis is more than wild conjecture because there is strong circumstantial and psychosexual evidence that Wallis fits into this category. Michael Bloch, Wallis’s biographer, who lived and worked in her house in Paris for years while his subject lay largely comatose, came to believe after discussing her case with doctors that she may have suffered from Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or AIS, which is at the milder end of the spectrum. He reached this view based on extensive personal knowledge.
    Patients with AIS are born genetically male as they have the XY chromosome and produce testosterone. Because the body’s receptors in this case are insensitive to testosterone the individual develops outwardly as a woman, although at puberty therse pubert testosterone buildup may result in strong muscles giving her athletic prowess, long legs or large hands. Such a child to all purposes appears female and only later can it be discovered that their karyotype is XY if a DNA test is carried out, and that of course was not an option during Wallis’s childhood. The first clue for Wallis that something might be different would have been at puberty if she did not have periods. But even this might not have seemed unusual, nor would it have been an easy subject for discussion given the frequent absences of her mother at this time in her life.
    Another possibility is that she was born a pseudo-hermaphrodite, the term itself only coined in 1886, ten years before Wallis was born, indicating how little was known and understood about that condition. At the end of the nineteenth century there would have been very little discussion around such a risqué subject, even in medical circles, least of all with the parents of the newborn baby. A patient with pseudo-hermaphroditism has the internal reproductive organs of one sex while exhibiting the opposite in their external genitalia so a man has female characteristics which may include small breasts and a woman some form of male genitalia that are possibly barely noticeable, as well as usually a shallow vagina, but no uterus, cervix or ovaries (though this is variable). Full hermaphroditism, a term now considered offensive, where individuals carry both types of gonad, is extremely rare. For the Victorians, already confused by the Woman Question, the term used to convey the challenge to traditional notions of a woman’s place, merely trying to grapple with such a concept was deeply disconcerting. ‘So much of what is repulsive attaches to our ideas of the condition of an hermaphrodite that we experience a reluctance even to use the word,’ wrote one doctor, Jonathan Hutchinson, in the year of Wallis’s birth. Hermaphroditism challenged notions of what