Source: Daily Mail
Growing up in a remote community on the west coast of Scotland in the Fifties, there was little opportunity for a boy with an embarrassing problem to discuss it with anyone.
‘You can imagine how people would have reacted,’ says Wilf Stevenson, 64, now Lord Stevenson of Balmacara. ‘It is not a subject easy to raise even now.’
Lord Stevenson, opposition whip and former special adviser to Gordon Brown, was born with hypospadias, a condition where the urethra, which delivers urine and sperm, comes out on the shaft of the penis rather than the tip. It does not necessarily affect urinary or sexual function, but it can make urinating difficult.
As Lord Stevenson explains, with some understatement: ‘Although the condition is as common as hare lip or cleft palate, it simply wasn’t talked about, and isn’t now. I just had to deal with it, and it wasn’t easy.’
He is among the one in 50 people (around 1.2 million Britons) thought to have been born with some kind of disorder of sexual development (DSD) as a result of errors in their genetic code.
Read More: Why are so many children being born with sex defects?
Cartoon by Bob Moran
