Freemartin  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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A freemartin or free-martin (sometimes martin heifer) is an infertile female mammal which has masculinized behavior and non-functioning ovaries. Genetically the animal is chimeric: karyotyping of a sample of cells shows XX/XY chromosomes. [The animal originates as a female (XX), but acquires the male (XY) component in utero by exchange of some cellular material from a male twin, via vascular connections between placentas.] Externally, the animal appears female, but various aspects of female reproductive development are altered due to acquisition of anti-Müllerian hormone from the male twin. Freemartinism is the normal outcome of mixed-sex twins in all cattle species that have been studied, and it also occurs occasionally in other mammals including sheep, goats and pigs.

Fictional use

• In the Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World, a "freemartin" (mentioned in chapters 1, 3, 11 and 17) is a woman who has been deliberately made sterile by exposure to hormones during fetal development; in the book, government policy requires freemartins to form 70% of the female population.
• The Robert A. Heinlein novel Beyond This Horizon lists "the clever and repulsively beautiful pseudo-feminine freemartins" as one of the genetically-engineered specialist types of humans that were created in the "Empire of the Great Khans" (chapter 2).
• In the Robert Heinlein novel Farnham's Freehold, the protagonist, Hugh Farnham, is given a companion (bedwarmer) that is described as a natural freemartin.
• In the crime novel Freemartin, by David Cohler, an FtM transgender man is a murderer.
• In the Avram Davidson story "The House the Blakeneys Built", the cattle are freemartins.
• In the fantasy book series Bazil Broketail by Christopher Rowley, "freemartin" is the name for a breed of sterile female dragons.
• In Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, a lithely built woman doubts her sexuality with misgivings as to whether or not she is a freemartin although she is not a cow.