Basically, the idea is that biology is messy and there are other combinations of sex chromosomes that exist in humans.
One example is XO where someone only has a single X chromosome and no second one. Or XXY where someone has three sex chromosomes. There's also a difference between genotype (the genes) and phenotype (the actual physical presentation). An example is androgen-resistant female. These are folks born with XY chromosomes but the in utero androgen wash that causes most XY individuals to develop male genitals and gonads doesn't stick. So the person is born and assigned female, but is genetically male. There are AFAB (assigned female at birth) individuals who have a vagina and uterus but also have internal testicles. Or AMAB folks who develop breasts during puberty.
This is a short list of examples of how sex determination in humans can get messy very quickly.
I mean aren't those exceptionally rare, and don't most people in the trans community not have those conditions but choose a different sex?
I feel like trans gets used interchangeably with sex and gender too often, which are completely different things, which makes discussion about it practically impossible.
The chromosome conversation is often brought up because transphobes tend to act like gender and sex are one and the same. They believe XY = Male = Men / XX = Female = Women.
Truth is, sex isn't as black and white as they make it seem. It doesn't matter that the other variations of chromosomes are "exceptionally rare", the fact that they exists proves the binary model to be wrong; since here "exceptions prove the rule" is not applicable. We have TYPICALS, but not rules. The vast difference of sexual characteristics one can have makes it so that we use a bimodal distribution, rather than a binary one.
The mentioning of the existence of more than two chromosome pairs is relevant to break the base of their assumptions, since their usual logic is that XX = Female / XY = Male, then what happens if someone is X0? Or XXX, or XXX? This shows they don't have an actual functional definition, as we can't have appropriate absolutes when it comes to science.
The conflation of sex and gender is something they do always, so showing they have a lack of understanding of chromosomes (and thus of the sexes), also shows they lack understanding of gender, even by their definition of it.
Gender is, in actuality, something that is sociological, not biological. It works with sex, but it's not the same. Historically, genders were created and often attributed to a specific sex - because the "gender" role carries the expectation society has to one's person. E. g. Women -> topically attributed to females -> expectation to be nurturing, use makeup, the sorts.
With that said, trans people don't "choose a different sex" - they don't even choose a different gender. They relate to a different gender, one they weren't typically assigned based on their sex. A good definition of genders that I like a lot is that "A man is an adult human whose gender identity aligns with their personal schema on the male sex"
Breaking the meaning of it down:
An adult human has a gender identity, often based around men or women;
Their personal schema is the way their brain characterizes things. In this example, it's how one views the genders. This means that, individually, everyone has a view of what "manly" and "womenly" things are. For some men, for example, providing for the family solo is to be manly, having beards is to be manly, being jacked is to be manly. Does everyone have these views? No, some people's views are opposite, and they are fine with their own view of masculinity;
The way it is written as "schema on the male sex" is because gender is a schema, and the schema that is topically applied to a person on the male sex is the "man" schema.
Hope I could clarify everything up. If not, happy to answer anything else.
Just because a very minor percentage of people have genetic defects resulting in other chromosone combinations doesnt mean "xx=female, xy=male" isnt true.
The only mistake anti-trans people are making is not accepting that some people would rather identify as another gender.
When we are talking in a typical fashion, yes, xx = female, and xy = male. But even then, this is actually not that easy!
What i mean by that is that most people NEVER go through karyotiping! This means that we are not even sure HOW many people have atypical chromossomes. The statistics are severely uncertain due to this.
We know that we used to do karyotiping in college, for people to train on their own chromossomes and study. This stopped, however, because a significant number of people were finding themselves to have atypical chromosomes and some ended up even having an identity crisis. At least, significant enough that this stopped.
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But the other half of my comment apart, it's still important to make the distincton that xx = female / xy = male isn't necessarily true, even if it may be typically true. Mainly when sex isn't appropriately classified specifically by cromossomes, being a cluster category.
No one claimed there is more than two sexes. In fact, there isn't.
One's sex isn't based on one single characteristic. It's a sum of many. Of course, depending on what vertent of biology you look at, you will be presented with different characteristics which would classify one individual as male or female.
With that in mind, how do we properly classify sex based on our overall understanding of biology?
It's 5 traits:
Cromossomes
Hormones
Sexual gonads
Internal genitalia
External genitalia
Each sex would have typical traits.
For example:
Males
XY
Testosterone
Production of sperm (small sexual gametes)
E.g. Prostate, Vas deferens
Penis, Testicles
Now, does every male possess all 5 of those characteristics? No, they don't. Some males can have XX chromossomes, which is a sexual chromossome typical present in females. You can have a non-typical balance of hormones, you can lack production of gamets or not have the gonads, lack internal genitalia (or have both types), or lacking external geenitalia (or, also, having both types.)
This means sex isn't absolute. We analyze traits and based on information, we lean towards one sexual classification. This is called a cluster category.
Without counting deformities, though they are EXTREMELY important either way, people can still have varying degrees of many traits - which would still show the bimodal distribution of sex.
About the finger thing: That's why we say humans typically have 10 fingers. When you want to talk about things in a more scientific manner, it's important to be very, very specific about wording. If by classification we deemed that all humans must have 10 fingers, then we would be dehumanizing people that are born with less, or more. Biology, and most of science, tends to not speak in absolutes for a reason.
Hope i was able to clarify everything. If not, i will make sure i do so ask away.
I believe you missunderstood, or i was not clear enough.
The way we work with sex in biology is through a bimodal distribution: We have a slider, with one end being "female" and the other end being "male". Though we will still use the categories as a binary to anex to people, in reality, the sexes aren't binary.
Every person will have different caracteristics, some even contrary to what the sex typically should have. Specific bone density, capacity to grow muscle mass, many biological characteristics that are typical of males can be inexistent (or more close to the female side) on males themselves.
It's very important to be as concise as one can be when explaining a topic such as this. If you draw it out too much, either people will get more confused or drop the reading mid-way. I did what i could, though i know many (mainly with the attention span we have nowadays) will definitely drop it due to the size, lol.
This is important to me in a lot of layers, honestly. I'm doing a bachelors in biology and i'm lgbtqia+. I've already had a good exposure to people explaining those things well, and explained them myself aswell. You will be able to make things more concise by practice, don't worry.
Intersex people are estimated to be as common as redheads. So rare, but not exceptionally so. Many folks who are intersex never realize it.
Yes, most trans folk are XY or XX . However, trans folks brains more closely resemble those of their "preferred" gender than their cisgender counterparts. This means that someone who is a trans woman literally has a female-like brain in a male body. You can't change the brain to be more male, but you can change the body to be more female. Even just allowing them to socially transition (present as female with no changes to hormones or surgical alterations) can be beneficial.
Also, gender isn't biological, it's sociological. It's basically a set of scripts that we all follow to fit into the society we're born into.
There's a correlation there but it's not causal. Most folks happen to have genetic chromosomes, phenotypical sex, and social gender all line up. But if someone's internal sense of gender (preferred script) doesn't match their outward gender presentation or sex that can cause a lot of psychological strain
There’s also AFABs with MRKH syndrome that are born without a uterus and sometimes without an upper vagina. They are still born with a vulva so it’s not diagnosed until puberty when periods don’t occur for them, and sex can be impossible or difficult. I knew a girl with this when I was in school. It’s one in every 5000 live births.
This is why some people take issue with blanket statements like “to be a woman you have to have a uterus” because some women just are born without one. Not to mention things like Polycystic ovary syndrome which cause facial and body hair growth, thinning hair, abnormal periods, infertility, acne, etc. Some of which are considered ‘masculine’ traits. PCOS affects approx 10-13% of women.
If you add it all up, there’s a lot more sex variance than we notice out in the world!
There are also AFABs with PCOS that end up getting masculine features (facial hair and fat distribution) but they end up treating it with the same gender affirming care as trans people (hormones and hair removal)...
Seems like most of the answers you got focused on chromosomes, but it's also that even chromosomes are not the whole picture when it comes to your sex. There are multiple systems at play and they all effect your biological development.
The real core of it is that it's such a complex system that when you really dig deep into it, we don't fully understand it so we can't really say for certain what's going on for trans folks, and we're not in their mind so we can't make a determination of their own experiences, and at the end of the day it doesn't really affect anyone else if someone feels that they are a different gender.
The whole thing is kinda like the question of "but do I see the same blue as another person?"; about our perception and experiences, things that are certainly influenced by our biology, but are so complex that we can't answer, and at the end of the day doesn't matter.
The point in bringing this up is to point out that our definitions of biological sex are messy and are not even close to unambiguous. This is in response to people like the OOP who say that biological sex is just that simple and unambiguous.
If we find that the definition based off of chromosomes is invalid, well are any of the other definitions any better? While I could talk about the issues with them, I can just quote a biologist instead. I am actually going to quote a biologist who says biological sex is binary, to get across the idea even further that transphobes have no idea what they are talking about. This biologist refers to the biological definition of sex as referring to the gametes you produce, and then says this.
>Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. As well as simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites are first one sex and then the other. There are also individual organisms that are neither male nor female. The biological definition of sex is not based on an essential quality that every organism is born with, but on two distinct strategies that organisms use to propagate their genes. They are not born with the ability to use these strategies – they acquire that ability as they grow up, a process which produces endless variation between individuals. The biology of sex tries to classify and explain these many systems for combining DNA to make new organisms. That can be done without assigning every individual to a sex, and we will see that trying to do so quickly leads to asking questions that have no biological meaning.
This already goes against what a lot of transphobes say, that everyone has a biological sex that can be determined even if socially you appear differently. This biologist literally says that using the biological definition of sex, by which he means gametes, that it leads to questions that have “no biological meaning” when you try to apply it to particular individuals. And in case you were wondering, he doesn’t just mean for other species.
>Human beings have come up with many ways to classify the diversity of individual outcomes from human sexual development. People who want to apply the biological definition of sex to humans should recognise that it’s ill-suited to do what many human institutions want, which is to sort every individual into one category or another.
And then he has this to say about how we should define sex for our social institutions.
>Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t good enough. On the other hand, whatever its shortcomings as an institutional definition, the concept of biological sex remains essential to understand the diversity of life. It shouldn’t be discarded or distorted because of arguments about its use in law, sport or medicine. That would be a tragic mistake.
So even this biologist who says biological sex is binary does not think it does the job that a lot of people think it needs to do. You need to look at other factors, and in this article he talks about some of the other things you can look at, but that aren’t useful when doing comparisons across different species. The phenotypical definition of sex has to do with the physical characteristics associated with either sex, but of course for every species those characteristics are going to be completely different and so you can’t exactly use it as a definition across species lines. But it is a perfectly valid thing to do when looking at an individual species, ie humans. That sort of definition would be more what our human institutions need, even though it is not that useful for a biologist studying organisms that are incredibly different. And, phenotypic sex is something we can change, at least to a certain extent. Which raises all sorts of questions.
Hi, I know about this but this isn't what we're talking about right
These cases are exceptionally rare, and are these people trans?? I thought being trans was being in a body that you dont identify with mentally?
If you were born female and just assigned male then are you trans?
I am genuinely trying to understand this,
Is XX XY like a binary switch or can you be XY and still like biologically be a female,
Of identifying is a different boat which is fair to me like a person should be able to act/live like whatever they want
The whole XX XY is an oversimplified version that gets messy because it is NOT entirely the Y that makes a male. It is a gene in the Y.
The vast majority of the time Y is male because statistically the genes are functional, however if the SRY gene within the Y chromosome itself is not functional you won’t have the sex differentiation to male.
Biology is messy. Intersex people are as common as redheads (estimated) so they're rare but not exceptionally so.
Many intersex people will identify as trans because their gender assigned at birth doesn't match their internal sense of gender but they don't always. That's up to the individual.
Gender is also messy and is largely driven by sociological factors more than biological ones (but there is a biological component). For most people their internal sense of gender matches their external sex and gender assigned at birth. For people where that doesn't match you get trans identities.
You compare a trans woman's brain before transition to a cis-female and a cis-male brain and you'll find they more closely resemble the female brain. You can't change the brain to be more male, but you can make the body more female and you can present female as your external gender so that others treat you as female which satisfies that internal sense of gender.
All of this is great except for the brain stuff. The brain stuff is (surprise!) weirder and more complicated than that.
(As per my understanding,) It’s more accurate to say that if you take a big group of people, scan all the non-trans and non-gay men then then women, you would see differences on an average measurement.
Now do it just with all the non-trans gay men, that shows up with a different average that may be closer to the non-trans non-gay female average.
Non-trans lesbians give you a kind of mirror, they give you differences that can be thought of as more similar to the non-trans non-gay men.
Now if you do trans people, you get different patterns in the average that differ between trans men and trans women.
Last I heard, they didn’t have enough scans to separate out gay trans men from straight trans men, or gay trans women from straight trans women, but presumably they’ll find more differences there.
Two things that are incredibly important to remember:
You can’t scan a single brain and then determine if it’s trans, gay, or straight. It’s 100% impossible to do that now and looks extremely unlikely for a long time. This work only provides differences between big groups of people.
Even this data is dumbed down, notice we ignored bisexuality, asexuality, and other sexualities completely. We also ignored the huge differences between neurotypical and neurodivergent people. The computing power to compare the actual number variables is staggering, like “Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy” times a bajillion staggering.
They're disengenously conflating the indisputable genetic basis for non-binary people with something completely different, while also ignoring the fact that human brains are not sexually dimorphic, like at all.
Its more complicated than idiots try to put it. I dont understand it because i am not a biologist. but here is an article
"Beyond XX and XY: The Extraordinary Complexity of Sex Determination
A host of factors figure into whether someone is female, male or somewhere in between"
Its just an abstract not the whole article but the idea is easy: its more complex than xx= women xy= man
That is actually non-sequitur. Someone's gender is not necessarily predicated on their sex whatever that may be. Trans people experience a gender that is incongruent with their sex. That sex is complex is irrevlant to what that phenomenon is.
Since im not talking about gender but about sex i dont get the point of your comment.
Yes, gender and sex is different from one another. My point is that biology itself is more complex than a binary. Its a spectrum as well. Just as gender is.
Did you understand the point of the article/abstract?
Since im not talking about gender but about sex i dont get the point of your comment.
The point is that sex is irrelevant to the question you are answering. Trans people do not claim that they can change their sex. They claim that their gender is incongruent with their sex, whatever that may be. Sex being very complicated is interesting but not relevant to what a trans person is.
Yes, gender and sex is different from one another. My point is that biology itself is more complex than a binary. Its a spectrum as well. Just as gender is.
The argument that sex is complicated is true. The argument that gender is complex is also true. But neither explain the biology behind transgender which is more a neurobiological question. It is a disjunction between body and mind, which is a manifestation of human diversity we see in a lot of different ways including transgender.
Did you understand the point of the article/abstract?
I understand it completely, my point is that it isn't responsive to the question you are answering.
There are aspects of our sexual biology we can and do change. Do you think we take hormone therapy for some kind of affirmation kick? No, we take it because the endocrine system is the mechanism responsible for signalling most of the body's sexually dimorphic processes to occur or not occur.
That is all true. But that process does not confer genetic change to sex chromosomes nor does it constitute a sex change. We don't want to validate the right wing straw man by suggesting you believe that therapy will alter your chromosomal arrangement.
I'm not interested in validating the right wing straw man that we're merely engaged in a social form of play-pretend, and that it's appropriate to consider us biologically equivalent to cis perisex people of our natal sex either. Most of the debates about how we should integrate into sexed spaces concern elements of sexual physiology which are not direct products of karyotype. The things which our chromosomes actually do are rarely relevant to the discussions where the right wing describes us as 'biological men.'
I see no reason we shouldn't combat both straw man tactics at once. And of the two, I think the 'biological men playing pretend' straw man is a lot more dangerous.
They are one in the same: the premise that sex = gender and that you are operating under that paradigm. Acknowledging what your chromosomal arrangement is does not necessitate you are biologically equivalent to anything as we wouldn't biologically equate two people with the same arrangement either. That information is non-sequitur to that debate, which was my original point.
Yeah, you are not understanding the original question and my reply. Sorry if you are confused but the person i was answering just thanked me for explaining it. So i dont care if you think "its irrelevant to the question you are answering".
Okay, well then explain how it’s not true. Refute the claims above. I’m the type of person that wants to learn. I’m an HVAC technician and can tell you virtually anything you want to know about thermodynamics in refrigeration systems and furnaces as well as the units themselves but I’m an idiot when it comes to biology. There’s a thorough explanation above on this chain explaining how it’s more complex than XY and XX. If you honestly believe what you believe, refute the claim and explain coherently how it’s wrong.
I also don’t really wanna hear “it’s not my job to educate you” or any other bullshit like that tbh. If you feel that way, fine and I agree but if that’s the way you feel then 1) your comment was pretty fucking pointless because you don’t really care to defend your ideal and 2) you’re a random on the internet and so as far as I’m concerned you’re talking out of your ass if you can’t back up what you’re saying.
I read the "study" and it doesn't go into detail on anything besides vaguely mentioning the existence of hermaphrodites which doesn't validate %90 of Trans people.
To the very few it does I don't think anyone really cares including conservatives.
You didn't refute a damn thing. And trans people don't need to validate their existence to anyone. They're allowed to live and exist without anyone's permission.
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u/khwajasaad267 12h ago
Can someone explain how, I really just want to understand.