Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Symptoms
By Mayo Clinic staff
A newborn's genitalia are quite small, and the idea of looking "normal" spans a wide range. Your medical team will likely be the first to recognize the signs of ambiguous genitalia soon after your baby is born. These signs vary from the more obviously apparent to the outwardly invisible.
Characteristics in genetic females
For genetic females, the baby's genitals may take on the following characteristics:
- An enlargement of the clitoris, or what appears to be a small penis
- A concealment of the vagina because the midline groove has closed over
Characteristics in genetic males
For genetic males, the following characteristics may be present:
- Hypospadias — a condition in which the narrow tube that carries urine and semen (urethra) doesn't fully extend to the tip of the penis
- An abnormally small penis with the urethral opening nearer to the scrotum, indicating that the penis stopped growing early in its development
- No recognizable male genitalia in the most severe cases
- The absence of both testicles in what appears to be the scrotum
