There’s an ancient Greek medical text On Regimen, attributed to the fifth-century BCE physician Hippocrates (the one doctors remember these days when they take their Hippocratic oath), which says that a baby’s character is decided in the womb by a battle between its mother’s seeds and its father’s seeds. Each of these seeds, Walter Penrose explains, can lean toward the feminine or masculine regardless of which parent it comes from, meaning that mothers can make male-leaning seeds and fathers can produce female-leaning ones. So, for instance, a “masculine” female baby could be the result of the
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