Technically no. They aren’t male or female, they’re undifferentiated. Since we’re neither male nor female at conception, this order means males and females don’t actually exist at all.
At conception the future sex is determined by the chromosomes that the sperm contributes. Once fertilized, there are either X and X or X and Y, which will be XX and XY once meiosis occurs for the first time.
So technically once fertilization occurs(conception), sex has been determined.
No, it isn’t. Every Bio textbook I have that discusses it (more than a dozen), is very clear that sex is determined by gonad function/gamete production. Some XY individuals will never produce sperm. Some will produce ova. Some XX individuals will never produce ova. I would bet there is probably at least one case out there where an XX individual produced sperm through some kind of insanely unlikely nondisjunction. And none of this even begins to touch on the variability within the XXY and XO groups. Even if you want to not consider other species, chromosomes ain’t it.
You don’t define the norm with characteristics of edge cases. The X and Y chromosome groups define biological sex be it male, female, or intersex.
Some people are born with vestigial tails, does that mean that humans may or may not have tails? No, a few hundred people have been born with a vestigial tail in recorded history.
Some people are born with a cleft pallette, does that mean humans can be born with or without a cleft pallette? No, 1 in 1,600 people are born with a cleft pallette.
1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 people are born intersex. The other 1499 to 1999 people are XY or XX and 98.5% of those have a gender identity that conforms with their biological sex.
You are daft if you take an XX that identifies as a woman and say she isn’t female because her ovaries don’t produce an ovum. That woman is a sterile female, not intersex.
If you ever get the chance, I recommend the book
A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities: A Compendium of the Odd, the Bizarre, and the Unexpected by Jan BondesonMutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body by Armand Marie Leroi (2003). Please read the reviews.The book talks at length about medical conditions, including the human tail, the cleft pallet and also covers intersex. It talks about XY female androgen insensitivity, SRY gene transposition/deletions, the güevedoce males from Dominican Republic who are indistinguishable from females until about the age of 12 when their testes drop, and the prevalence of more subtle forms of intersex that go under-diagnosed. It also touches on fetal development and general genetics including the inversion of sexual chromosomes in birds and reptiles.
It’s a great dive into the complexity of biology and particularly sexual development. I suspect you won’t be so sure of what you think is normal after exploring its barrage of edge cases that deeply contemplate the nature of genetic sex that creates these deviations under a basic tenet: Nothing in biology is set and it’s all subject to change.
98.5% of those have a gender identity that conforms with their biological sex.
There are many more people today who have incorporated a hybrid gender precisely because they don’t fit into neat categories. People call them femboys and tomboys because everything about their gender expression is mixed. You can’t tell me with a straight face they’re just pretending. The whole category is called “gender non-conforming”.
E: Sorry, I got the wrong book off my reading list somehow!
You don’t define the norm with characteristics of edge cases
Good thing I didn’t do that.
The X and Y chromosome groups define biological sex
This is the whole point, no, they don’t. Biologists do not define sex in terms of chromosomes because there are multiple different chromosomal systems in use to achieve the function of sex cell differentiation.
Some people are born with vestigial tails, does that mean that humans may or may not have tails? No, a few hundred people have been born with a vestigial tail in recorded history.
Some people are born with a cleft pallette, does that mean humans can be born with or without a cleft pallette? No, 1 in 1,600 people are born with a cleft pallette.
I just…fucking wow. Reread what you wrote here.
Clearly people born with a cleft pallette aren’t human to them. Which is kind of a weird thing to say and believe.
They don’t seem to understand that even if XX/XY differentiation is right 99.99% of the time, there are a fuck ton of humans in the world and even small improbabilities are likely to be represented. We obviously shouldn’t make laws that discriminate against minorities, and these people really exist all over the place.
Republicans want to erase the idea of nonbinary people because their tiny minds can’t handle the scientific nuance.
Trump declares
himselfherself the first female President of the USA? 😳(Edit: Excuse me Mrs. President, I had misgendered you.)
He’s so petty he had to steal that title from both Hilary and Kamala it just took him this long…
*She, her
For trump it’s actually
*Stinky, stinks
What I understand about the “intention of the text” is that:
- XY: male.
- XX: female.
People who’s body or mind don’t match with their genes would then be a male or a female with one or a combination of hormonal, developmental, or psychological issues.
What I understand about the “intention of the text” is that:
That’s probably the intention, but because it was written by somebody with zero academic biological experience that is also trying to cosplay as a professional writing a rigorous definition, it fails to do so.
XY: male. XX: female.
Would you like to hear a crazy secret? We biologists don’t use the words “gender” and “sex” separately because we feel like it, there is a major difference between the too. Want to hear something even crazier? We don’t use “XY = male!” as our definition either.
People who’s body or mind don’t match with their genes
Huh… where else do you think their traits come from? Their soul? Their zodiac sign? Your phenotype is nothing but your genes + regulated expression from the environment.
then be a male or a female with one or a combination of hormonal, developmental, or psychological issues
Are blond people just a male or female with a developmental issue in their hair’s pigmentation? Or for this specific category of human diversity you’re okay with calling them what they are rather than trying to define what wild type genomic expression is the “correct”? I mean, a person with XY chromosomes but a mutated SRY gene would develop entirely as a female, your worldview seems to imply that’s “hormonal and developmental issues!” but then I’d love to hear your views on race - or in fact, I would much rather not hear them, if they follow the same logic as your initial proposition.
While we are here, how about the XY individuals with a working SRY gene that physically develop as male, but have certain neural activation patterns only found in women and that swear they were born in the wrong body from a very young age? Why exactly are we going to discard the biological evidence to their subjective perception, just because it makes you uncomfortable? Because if that’s the case, maybe your subjectivity makes me uncomfortable… should we start listing and denying aspects of your physiology too?
Jesus Christ, chill, my dude. I was just explaining what I understand/interpret from the text and its context, not endorsing anything…
My gosh, I am escaping from Reddit precisely because of this aggressive behavior… This is literally my first day in this platform and I get sarcasm and hostility right away.
I was under the impression that the sperm that fertilizes the egg carries either an X chromosome or Y chromosome and that’s what determines male or female. So that would mean conception is in fact when this gets decided, no? What am I missing here?
Sex isn’t directly determined by chromosomes, it is determined by someone taking a look at the sex organs. This works for most people, but embryonic development is like most things complicated and there are a lot of factors that make it more difficult than “male” and “female”. Examples are people with more than 2 chromosomes or that have absorbed a sibling in the womb. Difference of sex development is estimated to affect 1/100 people.
So when the doc takes a look just before 6 weeks, she must declare “the embryo has ovaries and no testes - female” at every single person. At literal conception: “Idk know, man, it is just 1 cell”.
Sex isn’t directly determined by chromosomes, it is determined by someone taking a look at the sex organs.
I mean that’s how it’s usually observed, but not how it’s determined. Those sex organs get there somehow. The general rule is that if you have a heightened level of androgens and nothing preventing you from responding to them at a certain point in fetal development then you develop male sex organs, if not you develop female sex organs. Barring some other medical disorder, those heightened androgens that masculinize the fetus are triggered by the action of the SRY gene on a Y chromosome.
Difference of sex development is estimated to affect 1/100 people.
If you include absolutely everything, yeah. But someone with Klinefelter’s is in terms of sexual function male (if less fertile), someone with XXX is in the same way female, XX people with CAIS are in the same way female, etc. Cases where there’s ambiguity in sexual function are much more rare.
But really all this is like making the argument that gloves shouldn’t come in pairs with five fingers per glove because rarely people are born with syndactyly, polydactyly, etc. Like the definition Trump uses is stupid and wrong (not least because no one is producing gametes at conception) and it’s at least even odds it makes him non-male since at his age he’s probably shooting blanks, but to pretend that sex in humans doesn’t come in two categories and an assortment of rare conditions in which something went wrong genetically or developmentally is kinda silly.
Will they start by playing every previous Male 30% less?
The wage gap as you’re thinking of it doesn’t exist. Women aren’t paid 30% less than men, all else being equal. The wage gap number comes from comparing the median total earnings of men working full time to the median total earnings of women working full time. That’s it. It doesn’t compare apples to apples, and any time you adjust to be closer to comparing apples to apples the gap shrinks. Just switching from total earnings to hourly wage eliminates a big chunk of it as most jobs are paid time and a half for overtime and a majority of overtime is worked by men. Differences in things like industry, position, tenure, career interruptions, etc all also play into it. To the point that young, childless, urban, college educated women actually earn more than young, childless, urban, college educated men.
It wasnt meant to be that serious.
And no, the gender pay gap does exist, its calculated within each sector and the difference in Part-Time to full-time work is Accounted for: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Gender_pay_gap_statistics
Although its “only” 12% in reality
Since you’d gone with 30%, I was assuming you’d exaggerated the US pay gap rather than the EU one. Until I hit your link I was ready to pull out an old DoL report that did a multivariate analysis and ended up with a remaining unexplained gap small enough that it was within margin of error.
Doing some brief reading on the EU numbers from the link you provided I notice a demonstration of one of the things I was getting at - the EU number is much smaller than the US number because the EU number is hourly rather than total and thus mitigates differences in hours worked (since it is average gross hourly earnings it doesn’t fully account for overtime, as overtime is typically paid at a higher rate) right out of the gate.
Another thing it notes that is worth pointing out is that the gap is smaller for young employees, which the link suggests could be due to career interruptions being longer and more frequent for women. The DoL report I mentioned earlier notes this as well for the US, and noted it as a pretty major factor - basically the longer and more frequent career interruptions for women on average lead to missed opportunities and small but lasting and cumulative damage to future earnings. Probably the biggest and most straightforward move to adjust this in favor of women would of all things be to expand parental leave for fathers in such a way that men are incentivized to make full use of it, which would significantly reduce the gap in number and length of career interruptions.
An article linked off that page suggests about 20% of the EU wage gap (~3% of the ~14% gap from the year the analysis was done) can be explained by factors they consider in their analysis, which is less thorough than the old DoL one as far as confounding factors and which they admit doesn’t include all explanatory factors because the data needed simply isn’t available. It’s also all over the place when looking at individual EU countries as opposed to the EU average, which suggests that differences in culture and law between various EU countries probably plays a much bigger role than anything else.
Which brings me back to the whole “wage gap don’t real” thing - women are not being paid dramatically less than men for doing the same work just because they are women, all else being equal. In no small part because all else isn’t equal, and the more you try to account for that, the smaller the gap becomes (except apparently in Luxembourg and Romania, where it goes radically the other direction).
…that’s not how that works.
Early stages of development are bipotential, which means they could develop either way, they’re not initially female.
Around 6-7 weeks, if carrying a Y chromosome carrying the gene SRY, they develop into testes. If there are two X chromosomes, then ovaries develop.
…So we’re all legally non-binary? NBs rise up!
No, it’s very binary, because it’s either or.
Right, but if you start as bi-potential, then you aren’t one or the other, but are in an a tertiary in between state.
Yes, but you’re not born like that, you are one or the other.
Isnt that kind of the point? The EO specifies at conception, not at birth. Birth has nothing to do with this.
The point is, it’s binary. Non binary would mean there’s a lot of different options. There’s not. Just two.
I know what you’re saying, but how is this any different than non-binary people that are between the binary of male and female…? Male and female are binary, but if at conception you are in an in-between state, that doesn’t get more non-binary lol.
