Held upright by her parents, Emma shows off her church finery. She is a little more than a year old, and the surgery to make her look like a girl has healed.
When Emma McDonald was born on September 15, 1998, doctors whisked her away so quickly her family barely had a chance to look at her. For hours, they waited anxiously for news. Then Emma's grandmother, Anita Jones, overheard a doctor speaking to a group of medical students. Alarmed, she hurried back to her daughter. "Vicki," she said, "that doctor called Emma a hermaphrodite."
Months later, Emma played happily in her mother’s lap. “Hey, punkadoodle,” cooed Vicki McDonald. For 18 years, Vicki, now 43, pursued infertility treatments. Finally, she and her husband Charles turned to adoption, and now they have Emma: a solemn child with a gaze that locks in like a searchlight. She was also neither male nor ...
