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False claims of having an intersex condition have been observed in print, video, Internet media, and in live presentations. Claims of being intersexed in publicly accessible media were examined and evidence that they were false was considered sufficiently conclusive in 37 cases. Falsity was most often detected due to medical implausibility and/or inconsistency, but sometimes also using information from third-party or published sources. The majority, 26/37, of cases were natal males; 11/37 were natal females. Almost all (34/37) were transgendered, living, or aspiring to live, in their non-natal sex or as socially intergender. The most commonly claimed diagnosis was ovotesticular disorder (“true hermaphroditism”) due to chimerism, an actually uncommon cause of authentic intersexuality. Motivations for pretending to be intersexed were inferred from statements and behaviors and were varied. Some such pretenders appear to be avoiding the external or internalized stigma of an actual transgendered condition. Some appear, similarly to persons with factitious disorder, to be seeking attention and/or the role of a sick, disadvantaged, or victimized person. Some showed evidence of paraphilia, most frequently autogynephilia, and, in several cases, paraphilic diaperism. For some cases, such claims had been accepted as authentic by journalists or social scientists and repeated as true in published material.

In the author's medical record, there is an enigmatic note. It was written as a consultation request from a pediatric endocrinologist to a plastic surgeon while he was hospitalized at age 13 for mastectomy. He does remember the surgeon stopping by and examining him briefly without explaining who he was or why he was there. He had a somewhat longer, but equally uninformative for his visit from a child psychiatrist. He actually has no recollection at all of anything like pressure from his father to change to living as a girl. As he remembers, his father was bothered by his having breasts and was the one who initiated the physician contacts that led to mastectomy. About this same time, he got a clandestine peek at the medical records of a younger cousin, also with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome, and who, like the author, had been raised as a boy.

Bleomycin, a radiomimetic drug currently used in human cancer therapy, is a well known carcinogen. Its toxicity is mostly attributed to its potentiality to induce DNA double strand breaks likely arising from the formation of two vicinal DNA strand breaks, initiated by C4-hydrogen abstraction on the 2-deoxyribose moiety. In this work we demonstrate that such a hydrogen abstraction reaction is able to induce the formation of a clustered DNA lesion, involving a 3' strand break together with a modified sugar residue exhibiting a reactive α,β-unsaturated aldehyde that further reacts with a proximate cytosine base. The lesion thus produced was detected as a mixture of four isomers by HPLC coupled to tandem mass spectrometry subsequent to DNA extraction and enzymatic digestion. The modified nucleosides that constitute new types of cytosine adducts were identified as the likely two pairs of diastereomers of 6-(2-deoxy-β-D-erythro-pentofuranosyl)-2-hydroxy-3(3-hydroxy-2-oxopropyl)-2,6-dihydroimidazo[1,2-c]-pyrimidin-5(3H)-one as inferred from mass spectrometry and NMR analyses of the chemically synthesized nucleosides. We demonstrate that bleomycin, and to a minor extent ionizing radiation, are able to induce significant amounts of the cytosine damage in cellular DNA. In addition, the repair kinetic of the lesion in a human lymphocyte cell line is rather slow, with a half-life of 10 h. The 2'-deoxycytidine adducts thus characterized that represent the first example of complex DNA lesions isolated and identified in cellular DNA upon one radical hit are likely to play an important role in the toxicity of bleomycin.