Comment by akavel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akavel | Hacker News Reader

Just googled up some articles from the Polish press, and they seem to hint at Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, which "[would often] involve excessive or deficient production of sex steroids and can alter development of primary or secondary sex characteristics in some affected infants, children, or adults."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_adrenal_hyperplasia

That said, it seems everybody is talking about a paper that's not actually published yet, so there seems to be a lot of speculation and uncertainty and buzz generation around...

edit: As of 2018, the state of knowledge apparently could be summarized as:

"Was “he” born a “she”? Did Pulaski suffer from a hormonal condition resulting in female physical characteristics? Or were the remains from that Georgia plantation simply someone else’s? The answers will be revealed this summer in a Smithsonian Channel documentary."

https://today.emich.edu/magazine/article/10654

It seems we're still waiting for the documentary to be aired. And hopefully some paper published.

Do they have a specific reason to suspect Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia? There are multiple causes for intersex, many which could result in ambiguous sex characteristics.

Yes, they did have a reason: "Another unusual feature of the skull was noted by the radiologist and confirmed by the doctors. The area on the base of the skull where the pituitary gland is located was substantially larger than normal." [0]

Its also noted in that article that he was born with some type of anomaly, or 'debility' and that caused him to be baptized in the home, which would be unusual for Catholic families in Poland.

Interestingly, this article on poles.org was written long ago in 2008 and leaked the detail (about this CAH theory) about Gen. Pulaski possibly being a girl. This was supposed to be a secret by the Smithsonian-funded group performing the forensic anthropology analysis and only released now.

[0] http://www.poles.org/L_Kaz/E_Kaz.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/06/casimir-pula...

This article claims scientists analysed the bones a while back and suspected they belonged to a female, but the DNA evidence was iffy. This was a new study that build on the old hypothesis.

> they seem to hint at Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia

It's certainly possible, I guess. Though to be fair that condition is a whole lot less common than a double X chromosome...

Needless to say, there's an Occam's razor problem here. Why bother with reaching for developmental disorders when the simpler explanation for a female skeleton is that she wasn't a dude?

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