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Scientists can prove someone's gender by looking at his/her chromosomes, can't they (if you take exceptions, there are people born with 4 arms, or even 2 heads:

Scientists can prove someone's gender by looking at his/her chromosomes, can't they (if you take exceptions, there are people born with 4 arms, or even 2 heads: was a new species created, or it's just very rare exceptions?)..? If you abandon common sense and gender is a construct, race and age should be a construct, or however you want to call it, people should be able to change it.

ArchTypical 8y ago
> Scientists can prove someone's gender by looking at his/her chromosomes, can't they? Only in the vast majority of cases. There are XX, XY, YY, XXY, and even more esoteric versions!
eridius 8y ago
No they can't. Gender is a social construct. But they can't tell that for physiological sex either. Humans have a whole host of secondary sexual characteristics, most of which are more important than genitals in determining how other people categorize them. But even ignoring all of that, chromosomes don't strictly determine what sex characteristics someone ends up with. AIUI a lot of this has to do with the presence or absence of a testosterone wash in-utero (which itself is supposed to be determined by chromosomes, but this doesn't always work). There have been documented cases of women with XY chromosomes who not only exhibit all the usual female sexual characteristics, but even have working ovaries and have carried babies to term. In fact, while I don't have it handy, there was a story not that long ago about a woman with XY chromosomes successfully having a baby, and then they discovered that her mother also had XY chromosomes.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  So the answer is that they in fact can in the _VAST_ majority of cases. An extremely rare exception doesn't negate the rule.
  - eridius 8y ago
    AFAIK nobody's done a study to determine what percentage of the population has chromosomes that don't match with their expressed sexual characteristics (either primary or secondary).
excalibur 8y ago
That's... not what I meant.

ArchTypical 8y ago

> Scientists can prove someone's gender by looking at his/her chromosomes, can't they? Only in the vast majority of cases. There are XX, XY, YY, XXY, and even more esoteric versions!

eridius 8y ago

No they can't. Gender is a social construct. But they can't tell that for physiological sex either. Humans have a whole host of secondary sexual characteristics, most of which are more important than genitals in determining how other people categorize them. But even ignoring all of that, chromosomes don't strictly determine what sex characteristics someone ends up with. AIUI a lot of this has to do with the presence or absence of a testosterone wash in-utero (which itself is supposed to be determined by chromosomes, but this doesn't always work). There have been documented cases of women with XY chromosomes who not only exhibit all the usual female sexual characteristics, but even have working ovaries and have carried babies to term. In fact, while I don't have it handy, there was a story not that long ago about a woman with XY chromosomes successfully having a baby, and then they discovered that her mother also had XY chromosomes.

EpicEng 8y ago
So the answer is that they in fact can in the _VAST_ majority of cases. An extremely rare exception doesn't negate the rule.
- eridius 8y ago
  AFAIK nobody's done a study to determine what percentage of the population has chromosomes that don't match with their expressed sexual characteristics (either primary or secondary).

excalibur 8y ago

That's... not what I meant.