In The Womb Documentary Netflix

[Lorin Mandaloniz]

Pubertyis a difficult time for everyone. Some, however, have bigger issues than zits and embarrassing cracks in their voices. Jonny spent the first few years of his life living as a girl. Then, at the age of 11, he suddenly grew a penis.

Jonny is one of a small group of people in the Dominican Republic known as guevedoces, who appear to be female at birth but grow up to become male. He was recently featured in the BBC Two documentary series Countdown to Life , which explores the way in which our time in the womb impacts our lives. I spoke to the show's presenter, Dr. Michael Mosley, about his experience with the guevedoces and what he learned while making the series.

VICE: Hi, Michael. Where did you get the idea for this series?

Dr. Michael Mosley: The first nine months of life is largely unexplored territory. Until recently, it's been quite difficult to explore but modern technology means we can visualize things much better and have a deeper understanding of what's going on. We thought it would be interesting to dive into that slightly mysterious time and look at what happens, as well as what can go wrong. It's just nine months but the things that happen then will play out for the next 30, 40, 50 years.

How did you first hear about the guevedoces?

I actually came across them when I was at medical school in the 1980s. The guevedoces were first identified by a researcher from Cornell in the 1970s. I remember hearing a talk and thinking, That is amazing! Can it possibly be true? I fancied the idea of making a documentary but never found a reason. For this series I said, "We have to do it." It's such a fascinating story.

Does this phenomenon only occur in the Dominican Republic?

Other groups have been identified around the world. The thing about the people in the Dominican Republic is that they are very accepting, whereas in other groups these people are regarded as abnormal and badly treated. In the Dominican Republic the attitude is very much, "Hey ho, sometimes girls turn into boys. That's the way things go." It's remarkable how tolerant they are.

If you don't get that, you become a girl. What happens in the guevedoces is they lack the enzyme that converts testosterone into dihydrotestosterone, so when they are born they look like girls. They have testicles but they are hidden inside the body and they have what looks like a vagina. When they hit puberty, they get this surge of testosterone and that alone is enough to make them grow a penis and start to look like boys.

How do these children tend to cope with the change?

Quite often they have seen it in a cousin or something. It occurs in a relatively small number of families and in about one in 90 children, so they know it might happen. Quite often you have early signs. The mums say things like, 'She was always a bit tomboy-ish.' Still, they get teased. One of the boys could see why his schoolmates were a bit surprised when he went from being a girl one day to a boy the next. But on the whole there's a lot of acceptance.

In the documentary, you see the families treat the children as girls right up until the point where they start to look like boys, even when they know the change is coming.

Completely. In some cases, they decide to remain girls. They go off and have plastic surgery. They say, "What the hell, I've been a girl this long, I'll keep being a girl." We primarily interviewed people who had decided they were a boy and that's how they wanted to be. But I was aware of an aunt of one of the children we interviewed, who had decided she wanted to stay female.

It used to be that people would think that this was somehow a kind of mistake and you could tell them they were being foolish, but the evidence is very, very clear. When you take a child who is transgender and try to force them to stay as they are, this leads to very high rates of suicide. People are born with different urges. We can't just try to ignore that and pretend we are all the same and live according to a straightforward and obvious gender rule.

I can see why this is a prime example of how what happens in the womb can have dramatic consequences on the rest of our lives.

What you see from all this is that things kick off at various stages in the womb and they will alter your life in different ways. In the case of the guevedoces, it makes a big difference. It's a similar case to Mati's, the transgender child we featured in the show; her life is hugely shaped by something that happened very early on.

You've said that making the series had changed the way you think about gender. How?

I guess I've thought for some time that the hormones in the womb are likely to influence not just how you come out physically but also what happens to your brain. I'm not saying that men and women definitely have different sorts of brains but there's quite a lot of evidence.

I worked on a program with Professor Baron-Cohen at Cambridge and he has this idea about empathizers and systemizers. Systemizers like data and collecting it and empathizers are more in touch with feelings. Broadly speaking, blokes tend to fall into the systemizers group and women into the empathizers. He believes, and there's quite a lot of evidence, that hormone exposure in the womb can influence that. But it's a very controversial area. Gender politics is hugely controversial, for the obvious reason that it's often being used to put down women.

What was the most surprising thing you learned when making this series?

A whole range of things. In the first program, I looked at the effect of diet in the first few hours of conception and what a big difference that can make. I absolutely loved meeting the family with six fingers. I was really pleased to finally make a program about the guevedoces, something that had fascinated me for a long time. I just enjoyed meeting so many unusual and interesting people. I thought before I started it that I knew quite a lot. It turned out to be the opposite.

What do you hope people take away from watching your show?

That there is this wonderful undiscovered period of your life that you can't remember anything about but went on to shape the rest of your existence. I hope a bit of fascination and tolerance.

I am a 3rd year BSN student (up in Canada eh ). I'm working on my NICU specialty while doing my BSN in hopes to gain a preceptorship placement next year. I'm a long time lurker of you NICU nurses and love reading the stories you all post!

Anyway, I came across an awesome miniseries on Netflix the other day. It was a PBS special called "Twice Born". It's a 3 part series where they perform rare surgeries on fetuses while still in the womb. It was fascinating--especially for any aspiring NICU nurses like me. You get a minimal sense of what a NICU environment is like. I believe you can watch it on the PBS website as well if you don't have Netflix.

I've always thought this article was a nice antithesis to the "MIRACLE BABY BORN AT 300 GRAMS FLIES SOLO ROCKET TRIP TO MARS" stories you see in the news far more often than the actual reality of the NICU: 'Nathan was born at 23 weeks. If I'd known then what I do now, I'd have wanted him to die in my arms' Society The Guardian

Hi fellow Canadian! :) Another documentary that I would suggest you watch is called Keeping Canada Alive, and it's free to stream on the CBC website. It was just filmed in May of this year, and it's about the different areas of the Canadian health care system seen through the eyes of different patients/health care providers. It's very good, I've watched three episodes so far. I think that they may feature NICU in future episodes. I think it's a good watch for a new nurse too. It sounds like you have your heart set on NICU, but it gives you a good overview of what it's like working in different areas too.

Call the Midwife. Take place in rural 1950-60's England. It shows how young midwives managed to care for moms and babies (and even older adult population) when technology and medicine still seemed like it was in archaic times. I love it and can't wait for next season. I also recommend getting the book, because it is much better and doesn't focus as much on the drama of each character.

On Wednesday morning, Beyonc released Homecoming, a documentary concert film of her iconic and monumental 2018 Coachella performance on Netflix, and an accompanying live album. Over two hours long, it includes rehearsal footage, intimate scenes from Beyonc's pregnancy with twins Rumi and Sir, and commentary from the singer herself on how her legendary performance came together. Below, here are the six most important things we learned.

"I always dreamed of going to an HBCU," Beyonc says at the beginning of Homecoming. "I wanted a black orchestra, I wanted steppers and vocalists." For the performance, she ended up working with band members, dancers, and vocalists from Southern University, Jackson State University, Alabama A&M University, Grambling State University, Florida A&M University, North Carolina A&T University, Hampton University, and Alabama State University.

"It was important for me that everyone that had never seen themselves represented felt like they were on that stage with us," Beyonc says in the film. "I wanted us to not only be proud of the show, but the process. Proud of the struggle. Thankful for the beauty that comes with a painful history and rejoice in the pain...We were able to create a free safe space where none of us were marginalized."

She adds that she always wanted the performance to feel like Battle of the Bands, the annual marching band exhibition from various HBCU's, which she says she grew up watching and was "the highlight of my year." She mined the pains and triumphs of her 22-year career, and put it all into her two-hour performance.

"I was 218 pounds the day I gave birth," she says. During her pregnancy she had high blood pressure, and developed toxemia/preeclampsia, a symptom of hypertension that can cause swelling in the face, hands and feet. One of the babies' heartbeats paused a few times in the womb, so Beyonc had to get an emergency C-section.

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