Just googled up some articles from the Polish press, and they seem to hint at Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, which "[would often] involve excessive or deficient production of sex steroids and can alter development of primary or secondary sex characteristics in some affected infants, children, or adults."
That said, it seems everybody is talking about a paper that's not actually published yet, so there seems to be a lot of speculation and uncertainty and buzz generation around...
edit: As of 2018, the state of knowledge apparently could be summarized as:
"Was “he” born a “she”? Did Pulaski suffer from a hormonal condition resulting in female physical characteristics? Or were the remains from that Georgia plantation simply someone else’s? The answers will be revealed this summer in a Smithsonian Channel documentary."
Do they have a specific reason to suspect Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia? There are multiple causes for intersex, many which could result in ambiguous sex characteristics.
Yes, they did have a reason: "Another unusual feature of the skull was noted by the radiologist and confirmed by the doctors. The area on the base of the skull where the pituitary gland is located was substantially larger than normal." [0]
Its also noted in that article that he was born with some type of anomaly, or 'debility' and that caused him to be baptized in the home, which would be unusual for Catholic families in Poland.
Interestingly, this article on poles.org was written long ago in 2008 and leaked the detail (about this CAH theory) about Gen. Pulaski possibly being a girl. This was supposed to be a secret by the Smithsonian-funded group performing the forensic anthropology analysis and only released now.
This article claims scientists analysed the bones a while back and suspected they belonged to a female, but the DNA evidence was iffy. This was a new study that build on the old hypothesis.
> they seem to hint at Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia
It's certainly possible, I guess. Though to be fair that condition is a whole lot less common than a double X chromosome...
Needless to say, there's an Occam's razor problem here. Why bother with reaching for developmental disorders when the simpler explanation for a female skeleton is that she wasn't a dude?
European officers knew it, too, and had a habit of coming to America and demanding to be commissioned into the upper ranks. Von Steuben initially tried that, was refused, and only came back as a volunteer because rumours of homosexuality had kneecapped his chances of promotion back in Prussia.
Sure, and they also had a big problem in that the initial terms of enlistment were fairly short, as was common with militias, and given the conditions and lack of monetary support from the fledgling government it was difficult to get soldiers to reenlist. I don't think these issues were unique to one side, though. The British basically perfected the art of rounding up drunks and vagrants and turning them into soldiers and sailors.
Anyway, the continental army was a ragged mess for literally the entire war. If it weren't for the staggering incompetence of British generals and the ancient animosities of European powers who saw the colonies as a pawn, the continentals might very well have lost. In the end if there's a tl;dr on the American Revolution it probably reads something like "Thanks for the new country, France!"
>The British basically perfected the art of rounding up drunks and vagrants and turning them into soldiers and sailors.
Britain had the (mostly forgotten) specificity of having a small population. Although it's fairly similar to France now, for a very long time the difference was four or five times. It only broke through the glass sealing and started exploding around the time of the American Revolution. Their foreign policies put extreme demographic pressure onto British society.
They weren't so keen on officers recruited by Silas Deane who didn't speak English and lacked military experience. Lafayette got in partly by offering to serve without pay.
If you like this kinds of stuff, a similar story: Milunka Savic. A Serbian war heroine who was discovered to be female after being wounded in battle. Although not accounted as LGBT, she just wanted to fight...
Reminds me of this Irishwoman who joined the British army in the late 1600s and managed to remain disguised as a man until she was receiving treatment after being wounded -- but only for the second time!:
It's so amazing that it's hard to believe. For example:
"She was so successful at passing herself off as a man that a prostitute claimed she was the father of her child. Rather than give proof that this was impossible, [she] paid child support to the woman."
Nothing. I just said that it looks like her incentive to present herself as a male is to be able to join the army. There is no mentioning of her still portraying a man after she was exposed.
The article says two people got the gender of pictures of babies wrong and then says "his parents could have done the same thing" but that makes no sense. It makes no mention of Pulaski possibly being intersex or having any other condition which would interfere with looking at his genitals to determine sex. It also says Pulaski always considered himself male but has absolutely nothing to back up that claim. People back then were ignorant but not so ignorant as to mistake a vagina and a menstrual cycle for being a "weird man".
The article paints the picture of a person who, rather than being transgender, or intersex, or just not liking the role of women in the 18th century, had mind-bogglingly idiotic parents who raised him the wrong gender as a "whoopsie" and never thought to question it. I find that rather unlikely, especially considering the other women from that time period who assumed male identities to break out of restrictive gender roles.
I'm assuming that Pulaski had external male genitalia, but the skeleton had a "female" pelvis?
The article quotes Prof Merbs saying "The skeleton is about as female as can be." but doesn't seem to say in what respect it was female, which is a weird omission.
The family seemingly avoided infant baptism, in which traditionally a child might be stripped naked, so the likelihood of external genital abnormality seems relatively high.
Lots of chromosomal changes result in amennorhea in females. I'm just surprised there is no speculation as to the exact nature of the persons phenotype, particularly their chromosomal makeup.
Female pseudohermaphrodism might explain having testes but being biologically female; similarly true hermaphrodism (eg due to mosaicism, having 46,XX and 46,XY karyotypes).
But perhaps they were male with partial androgen insensitivity syndrom (PAIS, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_androgen_insensitivity...), I'm not sure how that presents itself skeletally and Wikipedia doesn't appear to have any info on how chromosomal abnormalities effect skeletal development. It doesn't seem too wild to imagine a male with PAIS might have a "female skeleton" as skeleton differentiation develops through puberty, at least one doc I read [oup.com link] indicated - but not explicitly - that AIS would lead to a female skeleton.
> ... had mind-bogglingly idiotic parents who raised him the wrong gender ...
Though uncommon, XX children can have ambiguous genitalia at birth. Today (1) we have some idea on what it is and we can deal with it at various stages of growth in-utero, at birth, during infant development, at adolescence or even later? Faced with a similar situation the past, parents gambled (aided with biases and superstitions). Is that sufficient to call it idiocy, I do not think so.
My son once remarked that the incidence of secret female soldiers pretty much has to be higher than we suspect because, by definition, if they succeeded, everyone thought they were male. If you died on the field of battle during a bad battle, you might be left there or buried in a mass grave. You didn't necessarily get an individual burial.
Re amenorrhea. Being underweight and exercising a lot can cause amenorrhea.*
In Canada, they did an experiment to let women into the infantry on the condition that they meet the same standards as men. Only two women made it through. One quit before being assigned to a unit. The other quit a few weeks after getting assigned. She said she thought it would get easier once she was in a unit. She thought training was intentionally harder than normal routine for the military. But it never got easier.
Unlike male firefighters, female firefighters have to lift weights to be able to do their job. A big guy can do a fireman's carry without being a body builder. This is generally not true for women.
I have serious health issues. As a teen, my periods tended to be 3 to 8 months apart. I was quite skinny when I first began menstruating. My belief is that my irregular periods were largely rooted in how underweight I was. I also was nearly 17 when I began menstruating.
So I strongly suspect that women who successfully passed themselves off as male in very physically demanding jobs probably had their periods suppressed to at least some degree. The very act of trying to physically keep up with the demands of the job may have helped hide their gender by reducing or eliminating their periods.
In times and places where sex outside of marriage was very much frowned upon, it wouldn't necessarily be weird to just be celibate. This would further help hide the person's sex, both by not exposing their body to another and by eliminating the risk of pregnancy.
This also was an era that was not awash in information like we are today. If a baby was born with an oddity, it might be the only time anyone dealing with the child had seen or heard of such a thing. Even physicians had limited information compared to what you can google up in a few minutes these days.
In my youth, I was told at times that I was extremely feminine. One woman who played baseball told me she couldn't imagine me playing a sport because I was so very feminine. (I actually did gymnastics for a time, though not competitively.)
After being homeless for a bit, I began getting addressed as "sir" by people who saw me from the back. I'm tall for a woman and had short hair, but both things had been true before I was homeless and no one mistook me for a man.
I suspect two things made the difference:
1. I stopped wearing a bra. Bra straps are visible through clothing, even from the back, and signal gender.
2. I think my demeanor and body language changed.
So, if you dress in men's clothes and adopt male body language, I think that goes a long way towards convincing others you are male.
Also, I was extremely flat chested until I had my first baby. I gained a cup size with each of my two pregnancies, putting me at an average size. Talking to other women, this seems to be pretty normal.
So it seems if you don't ever have a baby, you may not become very busty. Being flat chested definitely makes it easier to pass for male.
It's a paraphrase of a quote from a well known Polish comedy film Seksmisja. Highly recommended if you know Polish language and some culture/history! Also, you may then find out that numerous quotes from the film have entered the popular language :)
Except in the movie it's only part of the joke. They keep naming famous historical figures this way, until one of the men shouts in frustration: "Yeah, and who else? Curie-Skłodowska?" :)
It's more complex than that because in the movie it's Copernicus, Kopernik była kobietą, and, unlike Pułaski, the surname Kopernik would be the same regardless of gender.
That said, expertentipp's version is the one that captures the spirit and the humour of the joke.
So that got me interested and after some digging: both are ok. Actually, legal documents have to use the original surname, without the traditional change of suffix. Wikipedia also claims it's not incorrect to use either form in casual context, but there's no reference for that.
I think you may be confusing it with more traditional suffixes like "-owa" and "-ówna". Legal documents definitely do use gendered version of the surname.
This claim relies on us being able to reliably sex skeletons. What is the false positive rate? How accurate are we in archaeology where the skeleton has been underground for a long time?
If you have a pelvis or even a sacral bone recognizing typical male from female is trivial.
How many false positive errors can be made? No idea, but if your bones during several years are bathed in a sex hormones cocktails different from what your sex chromosomes are indicating, then on a body plan level you are not what chromosomes are saying.
It is debatable if such mix up is a classification error.
I think in this context, the question is about the soldier. Female family members ARE buried at Arlington, as you point out, but with their male veteran spouse/parent. Female soldiers seems to be a recent thing, as they traditionally were confined to noncombat roles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_adrenal_hyperplasia
That said, it seems everybody is talking about a paper that's not actually published yet, so there seems to be a lot of speculation and uncertainty and buzz generation around...
edit: As of 2018, the state of knowledge apparently could be summarized as:
"Was “he” born a “she”? Did Pulaski suffer from a hormonal condition resulting in female physical characteristics? Or were the remains from that Georgia plantation simply someone else’s? The answers will be revealed this summer in a Smithsonian Channel documentary."
https://today.emich.edu/magazine/article/10654
It seems we're still waiting for the documentary to be aired. And hopefully some paper published.