A Chinese couple reportedly raised their only child for 13 years in the belief the child was a girl, until a visit to the local hospital alerted them to the fact that he was really a boy.
Chinese state media reports say the unidentified couple from the central city of Zhengzhou were fooled by their child's underdeveloped sexual organs.
They dressed him in girl's clothes and taught him to go to femalepublic toilets, the Zhengzhou Evening News reported.
They did not realise anything was wrong until they were baffled by a "reaction in the lower half of his body" whenever he watched pretty women on TV, the paper said.
The worried parents took their child to the hospital, where a physical check-up corrected their mistake about the child's sex, the newspaper said.
Doctors concluded that he was suffering from a rare disease causing sexual organs to be somewhat hidden from view, and the boy was subsequently treated in a three-hour-long, successful operation, it said.
