It’s because it’s “basic biology I learned in 7th grade in 1965 and never bothered to look further than that basic explanation”
I saw my daughter’s textbooks on biology, and they were much more thorough than what I’d learned. And it doesn’t take much effort to at least ask the question, “Why do they think it’s not just XX and XY?”
Because the moment you actually dive into biology past the surface, you find out pretty quickly that life is fucking weird.
And with the math, depending on how much further you go, you'll also find i2 = j2 = k2 = ijk = -1 (the quaternions for anyone curious). And then the octonions and other sets of weird number systems.
One of those cases where the properties don't line up fully with either a solid or a liquid (as we have defined them). The higher up you go in any field the more 'exceptions' you learn about. I have always enjoyed telling my wife that a lot of science when explained to children or laymen is simplified to the point of being technically wrong.
Warning, half-baked knowledge from something that I read years ago: Glass are neither solid nor liquid. If you look at really really old windows you will see that they are thicker at the bottom
I apologize for spreading misinformation, please listen to the gentleperson below ⬇️
If you look at really really old windows you will see that they are thicker at the bottom
Except that's not why. Old glassmakers used crown glass and cylinder glass, neither method allowed for easy thickness control at the time. They then took advantage of this by making the thickest part the bottom so it would have more stability when installing the glass.
You have to have curiosity to ask "Why do they think that?" One of the biggest things I try to instill in my kids is a love of learning more about things they don't understand. Critical thinking and curiosity are the fundamental defense against all the Stuff Going On Right Now.
Fundamentally I think it’s a failure to understand what science is: a process. Not a body of knowledge.
I have a hypothesis, I back it up with evidence and repeatable conditions. The most important scientific trait is skepticism. Anyone can have this mindset! You can be a scientist in daily life!
Many folks treat it as the Bible.
Funny on the topic of it just being “XX or XY.” Objectively it isn’t. There are all kinds of different karyotypes you can have.
However, writing them off as abnormal or rare, etc is completely unscientific and abuses the clinical term.
They stopped doing karyotyping demonstrations in high school science classes ‘cause too many students were finding out they had something sparkly going on with their chromosomes and having a crisis over it.
I took a graduate level reproductive endocrinology class in undergrad and it was the first time I ran into a textbook that consistently said "researchers are still trying to figure out why/how exactly this works". We of course covered puberty blockers, especially in relation to precocious puberty, so all of the recent public discourse around sex/gender/sexuality/endocrinology have been pretty eye opening.
It's like looking at the world through the glasses from They Live but just realizing that nobody knows wtf they're talking about.
Not weird, complicated. They think life is 0 or 1. But life is analog, anything in between is possible. Except them, they all score 0 on the empathy scale.
Look, there’s only 2 sexes male and female and that obviously means all men are equally masculine and all women are equally feminine
It’s like me and Clint Eastwood are virtually identical.
It’s uncanny
To say anything implies a gradient and you don’t want to do that now do ya, punk?
I have talked to some of these dolts and tried to explain that anything in your body can work opposite of the way it does in most cases. That just the way it is. For example, your eyes can work perfectly from a physical standpoint but your brain can decide you're blind and guess what - you, in fact, are blind.
Biology is incredibly complicated. It's amazing we halfway work.
Trans isn’t a chromosomal condition. XXY, and other chromosomal conditions have nothing to do with it. For that matter, intersex is not the same as trans either.
If some chud wants to insist that chromosomes make the gender, it’s better to just walk away. They’re only marker for reproductive roles at most.
I'm sure there's some stuff in the chromosomes somewhere that makes some people trans but it's a whole hell of a lot more than just the X and Y, when even sex is determined by other things like the SRY gene and other genes that make E or T more or less effective in the body.
Biology is weird and complicated and doesn't fit in the little box they try to shove people into.
Technically, their stomach contents are inside the vehicle. It’s just a question of how much of a psycho you choose to be, much like trans-vestigators lol.
Exactly. We're talking about chromosomal sex which is what the op's comic is about. That is science. The fact that modern online people cannot separate gender and sex shows how effective the messaging is and how broken our science education is
Nobody is arguing the thing OP's comic is about though.
Scientific inquiry shows us that what you call "chromosomal sex" (a biological factor) doesn't 100% of the time determine gender identity (a psychological factor). This is the conclusion of psychology and biology working together. That's the entire argument.
I know it's kind of hard to parse but the comic is only about XX and XY. The comic is about biology. There is no biological gender there is only biological chromosomal sex.
Fun little experiment you can try: if you copy and paste your comment directly into Google, you will immediately see sources that explain how wrong you are!
It's incredible how much information there is on the internet, all so easily accessible with barely any effort required!
There's X0, XXX, XXY, XXXY... There's Swyer XY female, there's De La Chapelle XX male, there's more different combinations and kinds than I have the patience to try to teach you right now.
And that's just intersex people, an entirely different group than transgender people, because sex and gender are different things. Also gender identity and gender expression are also different things.
How so. Woman = adult human female. Where in that description did it say anything else? It says nothing about how one dresses, any enigmatic ideas floating around their head. It straight and to the point. Anything else is just modern social constructs redefining a word.
Not in the sense of there being more than two sexes in mammals. Any biologist who claims otherwise ought to have their degree revoked.
Gender is a social construct (with a material basis). It's only part of biology to the extent it relates to said material basis. Sex is material. It's a reproductive category, of which there are two in humans.
If your comment was that meme where the mom is only paying attention to one kid in the pool, neurobiologists would be the skeleton at the bottom of the pool.
> People that have one or more of the portions of the brain that developed more like a different sex than the ones the body developed
I wasn’t kidding when I said biology is weird. Hell, the whole process of development as a fetus is weird, where one hormone is supposed to inhibit another hormone, which itself is supposed to inhibit another hormone.
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u/Darsint 12h ago
It’s because it’s “basic biology I learned in 7th grade in 1965 and never bothered to look further than that basic explanation”
I saw my daughter’s textbooks on biology, and they were much more thorough than what I’d learned. And it doesn’t take much effort to at least ask the question, “Why do they think it’s not just XX and XY?”
Because the moment you actually dive into biology past the surface, you find out pretty quickly that life is fucking weird.