Polish general who fought with Washington may have been female
asunow.asu.edu
asunow.asu.edu
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.
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.
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.
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?
Anyway, the continental army was a ragged mess for literally the entire war. If it weren't for the staggering incompetence of British generals and the ancient animosities of European powers who saw the colonies as a pawn, the continentals might very well have lost. In the end if there's a tl;dr on the American Revolution it probably reads something like "Thanks for the new country, France!"
Britain had the (mostly forgotten) specificity of having a small population. Although it's fairly similar to France now, for a very long time the difference was four or five times. It only broke through the glass sealing and started exploding around the time of the American Revolution. Their foreign policies put extreme demographic pressure onto British society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Davies
It's so amazing that it's hard to believe. For example:
"She was so successful at passing herself off as a man that a prostitute claimed she was the father of her child. Rather than give proof that this was impossible, [she] paid child support to the woman."
The article quotes Prof Merbs saying "The skeleton is about as female as can be." but doesn't seem to say in what respect it was female, which is a weird omission.
The family seemingly avoided infant baptism, in which traditionally a child might be stripped naked, so the likelihood of external genital abnormality seems relatively high.
Lots of chromosomal changes result in amennorhea in females. I'm just surprised there is no speculation as to the exact nature of the persons phenotype, particularly their chromosomal makeup.
Female pseudohermaphrodism might explain having testes but being biologically female; similarly true hermaphrodism (eg due to mosaicism, having 46,XX and 46,XY karyotypes).
But perhaps they were male with partial androgen insensitivity syndrom (PAIS, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_androgen_insensitivity...), I'm not sure how that presents itself skeletally and Wikipedia doesn't appear to have any info on how chromosomal abnormalities effect skeletal development. It doesn't seem too wild to imagine a male with PAIS might have a "female skeleton" as skeleton differentiation develops through puberty, at least one doc I read [oup.com link] indicated - but not explicitly - that AIS would lead to a female skeleton.
Some sources:
* https://academic.oup.com/edrv/article/39/5/803/5052770
* https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Partial-androgen-insensi...
Though uncommon, XX children can have ambiguous genitalia at birth. Today (1) we have some idea on what it is and we can deal with it at various stages of growth in-utero, at birth, during infant development, at adolescence or even later? Faced with a similar situation the past, parents gambled (aided with biases and superstitions). Is that sufficient to call it idiocy, I do not think so.
1. https://childrensnational.org/choose-childrens/conditions-an...
I wouldn't be surprised to hear of parents who really wanted a boy, birthed a girl instead, and decided to raise her as a boy.
When a boy was born, the boy was dressed up in "girl's" clothes and treated in every way as a girl.
The woman was mad but not mad enough to have her kid taken away from her.
Re amenorrhea. Being underweight and exercising a lot can cause amenorrhea.*
In Canada, they did an experiment to let women into the infantry on the condition that they meet the same standards as men. Only two women made it through. One quit before being assigned to a unit. The other quit a few weeks after getting assigned. She said she thought it would get easier once she was in a unit. She thought training was intentionally harder than normal routine for the military. But it never got easier.
Unlike male firefighters, female firefighters have to lift weights to be able to do their job. A big guy can do a fireman's carry without being a body builder. This is generally not true for women.
I have serious health issues. As a teen, my periods tended to be 3 to 8 months apart. I was quite skinny when I first began menstruating. My belief is that my irregular periods were largely rooted in how underweight I was. I also was nearly 17 when I began menstruating.
So I strongly suspect that women who successfully passed themselves off as male in very physically demanding jobs probably had their periods suppressed to at least some degree. The very act of trying to physically keep up with the demands of the job may have helped hide their gender by reducing or eliminating their periods.
In times and places where sex outside of marriage was very much frowned upon, it wouldn't necessarily be weird to just be celibate. This would further help hide the person's sex, both by not exposing their body to another and by eliminating the risk of pregnancy.
This also was an era that was not awash in information like we are today. If a baby was born with an oddity, it might be the only time anyone dealing with the child had seen or heard of such a thing. Even physicians had limited information compared to what you can google up in a few minutes these days.
In my youth, I was told at times that I was extremely feminine. One woman who played baseball told me she couldn't imagine me playing a sport because I was so very feminine. (I actually did gymnastics for a time, though not competitively.)
After being homeless for a bit, I began getting addressed as "sir" by people who saw me from the back. I'm tall for a woman and had short hair, but both things had been true before I was homeless and no one mistook me for a man.
I suspect two things made the difference:
1. I stopped wearing a bra. Bra straps are visible through clothing, even from the back, and signal gender.
2. I think my demeanor and body language changed.
So, if you dress in men's clothes and adopt male body language, I think that goes a long way towards convincing others you are male.
Also, I was extremely flat chested until I had my first baby. I gained a cup size with each of my two pregnancies, putting me at an average size. Talking to other women, this seems to be pretty normal.
So it seems if you don't ever have a baby, you may not become very busty. Being flat chested definitely makes it easier to pass for male.
* https://healthfully.com/486066-underweight-and-amenorrhea.ht...
That said, expertentipp's version is the one that captures the spirit and the humour of the joke.
Primary source and more detail.
We wuz, etc
This article describes an apparent long running dispute on the issue: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/female-wwii-pilots-barred-from-...