“Thank you for coming in at such short notice, Jenny. Please, take a seat.”

“Is there a problem with my baby, doctor?”

The doctor smiled. “Nothing we can’t fix, caught as early as this. It’s certainly not a life-threatening condition. Please, sit down.”

Jenny sat in the chair by the doctor’s desk. Her pregnancy wasn’t much more than a bump at this stage, easily covered, had she chosen to do so.

“Your latest scan revealed a correctable developmental anomaly in the foetus’s brain. We just got the results back today. Now, you expressed a wish not to be informed of your baby’s sex before birth, is that correct?”

“Yes,” Jenny said, and smiled, a little embarrassed. “I’m a little old-fashioned I guess.”

Smile. “Unfortunately it is the sex of your baby that this anomaly concerns. We need to discuss what we’re going to do. Are you okay with that?”

Jenny sighed. In truth it was only a foolish, romantic notion of hers to keep herself in ignorance of such things. She’d already had some fun researching both girls and boys names. Perhaps, she thought, it was a little quantum; like schroedinger’s cat, as long as she didn’t know, it wasn’t resolved. “All right,” she said. “Tell me, what’s going on?”

“Physically, your baby is a normal XY boy. No physical anomalies at all. What the last scan showed, however, is that the brain is developing as female. Now, there’s nothing to be concerned about. This happens from time to time, and we can correct for it completely at this early stage. But we do need you to make an informed decision for your baby.”

“Wh– What are the options?”

“Well, as we are at such an early stage, we can start a course of hormone therapy on the foetus to jump-start, as it were, proper male development of the brain. It would mean a little nanosurgery at the outset, just to insert the dispenser in the right location, then subsequent treatments can just be done on an outpatient’s appointment. Your baby’s brain will develop normally as male, to match his body. We would like to follow-up with a scan once a year, but in ninety-nine percent of cases there’s no need for any further intervention.”

Jenny sighed again. “Okay. What else?”

“We can leave the brain alone and modify the development of the body. Your child is an XY, there’s nothing in the universe can change that now, but, again with hormone treatment and a little nanosurgery, we can direct the foestus’s body to develop as female.

“Uhm, with XY chromosomes? Is that possible?”

“Oh yes. In fact on very rare occasion XY females occur naturally. There’s a good chance that we’d need to follow-up with hormone treatment throughout the child’s life, but in most respects she will be indistinguishable from any other girl.

“Most respects?”

The doctor smiled sympathetically. “She won’t have a uterus, and she won’t be able to have children unaided. Now with ova-cloning and a surrogate or uterus transplant this can be overcome; but you need to be aware now that this is the situation.”

“Wh– What if we don’t do anything?”

The doctor looked at her understandingly. “The child would grow up a girl trapped in a boy’s body, eventually becoming a woman trapped in a man’s body. Can you imagine how awful that would be? A long time ago, before we could detect or treat this in utero, the suffering was immense. It’s estimated that even after treatments in later life existed, the suicide rate among sufferers was as high as thirty percent. And the treatments that did exist — we could try to replicate them of course; with modern medicine we should get fairly reasonable results but…” He sighed. “It would always be inferior to directing development one way or another now and helping nature put things right.”

“All right. Um.” Jenny sighed. “The first one, um, you can make the brain develop as male after all? It’s not too late?”

“It’s not too late, but there’s no time to lose.”

“And, um, he won’t need to know?”

“No, he won’t need to know a thing. There’s minimal follow-up, he’ll be a perfectly normal male.”

“Okay, well, I suppose we should do that then. It seems less…” She ran out of words. “Something.”

“It is much less invasive, yes. Although if we had discovered this only a week later I would have recommended the other option.”

Jenny nodded. It was good. They found a problem, but they could fix it. Easily.

For some reason she felt a little sad. She had no idea why.