Perspectives: Monk Tales & Eggs at Twelve

This comes to me courtesy of one of my buddies over at LiveJournal:

Thin Sandar, a chicken seller in Myanmar, had always dreamed of being a
man. When she inexplicably grew a penis last month, the 21-year-old
treated it as an awe-inspiring omen -- as have the thousands of stunned
villagers who have traveled to a pagoda to see him.

This made me consider something.

As I wrote to my LJ buddy:

I have heard that in order to become a Buddhist monk or nun, you must not have changed sex more than three times.

Once, I asked a Tibetan monk if what I had heard, were true.

He affirmed that it was.

So I asked, how did they go about gender reassignment back in the Buddha's day?

He said it happened spontaneously. That it just happened.

He personally knew of a case: a monk he had known who suddenly started transforming into a woman.

"What happened to him?" I asked.

He said, in his unassuming Tibetan accent, "Well, she became a nun."

While this doesn't explain the Myanmar case, my new pet theory is that the laws of physics in Tibet function in a manner significantly different from those elsewhere. [This is neatly explainable to anthropologists and other people familiar with the concept of 'world view', but it's downright incredible to the rest of us.]

That is, if something seems improbable, it is probably happening in Tibet, or at least anywhere where there is a
significant Tibetan population, as almost every Tibetan I have ever met has affirmed they either 1) saw or 2) knew someone who saw something very, very improbable elsewhere.

Spontaneous sex change? People flying? Seems it happens in Tibet all the time.

Maybe I should go there, one of these days. Unfortunately, though, Tibetan physics don't seem to have protected them from occupation by foreign powers.

That said, there is a condition that is responsible for some people appearing to spontaneously change physical sex.

People who have 5-alpha reductase deficiency are born with the appearance of girls, but at about the normal age of puberty, their testes descend, the penis begins growing, and they otherwise mature as cosmetically and functionally inconspicuous men.

This is apparently more common in Dominica than elsewhere, where these individuals are called guevedoce - "eggs at twelve".

Addendum:

Guevedoce is referenced as "eggs at twelve" (correction: some say "penis at twelve") at the following links: 1, 2.
It is referenced as "penis at twelve" at all of these places, however.

So it would appear that I owe somebody a cookie.