cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18302836
I’m just picturing that robot from Star Trek (the one thinking about “this sentence is false”) going “huh” and then blowing up…
Quite a lot actually! Chromosomes aren’t a good basis for biological sex.
Credit to @jarfil@beehaw.org for where I first saw this image (and obviously original credit to the original tweeter, @RebeccaRHelm)
So we have 4 independent variable
Chromosomal sex Genetic sex Hormonal sex Cells sex
Put it all into a matrix I would love to see the population distribution across this table.
Surly we can simply define a subset of the combinations. Cos the only other solution is to simply through out the concept of gender divisions but that just ain’t gonna work.
Put it all into a matrix I would love to see the population distribution across this table.
That would be an interesting thing to see.
However, biology is still learning about human sex. IIRC last year there was a cancer study that put in question a large number of biology studies in general… because many only focused on XY cell lines, to save time, reasoning that “if it has an X, and it has a Y, then all variables are covered”. Well, turns out that XX cells don’t use both chromosomes at the same time; instead, the genes from one of the Xs get inhibited via epigenetics… but not always all of them, or in the same way, and not always on the same X. That means some genes that didn’t activate in XY cells, sometimes would in XX cells, causing different mutations and reactions to cancer medication.
