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What was accomplished here occurs in nature, in a condition called sex-hormone discordant chimerism, where replication errors in embryos result in persons who h
by walnutclosefarm 4y ago
What was accomplished here occurs in nature, in a condition called sex-hormone discordant chimerism, where replication errors in embryos result in persons who have a mix of otherwise identical (in terms of genetics) male and female cells in their body. In very rare cases this can result in intersex morphology (https://www.nature.com/articles/s10038-020-0748-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s10038-020-0748-4). Generally in mammals, though, such chimerism doesn't result in dramatic phenotypic variance from normal male/female morphology. This is because mammalian secondary sex characteristics expressed by cells are mostly determined by the hormone bath the cells live in, so if a body has wholly or overwhelmingly one-sex gonads, they will develop as that sex. The situation is quite different in insects in birds, where secondary sex characteristics are largely determined by the sex chromosomes of individual cells. This leads to some dramatic phenotypes, such the bilateral gynandromorph (e.g., https://www.birdnote.org/listen/shows/cardinal-thats-half-male-half-female https://www.birdnote.org/listen/shows/cardinal-thats-half-ma...).
- fallingfrog 4y agoFYI I'm pretty sure you meant to link a different nature article, the one you linked is something about methane emissions from wetlands.
- michaelsbradley 4y agoparent seems to have fixed it: by following the link, I got an article titled A Cardinal That's Half Male, Half Female.
- walnutclosefarm 4y agoThanks for catching that. Fixed.
- pavlov 4y ago
- mbg721 4y agoAlternatively, we can't think sexual practice is in any way a willful choice, or else we're demanding a backward theocracy.
- fallingfrog 4y agoI don't understand your comment. Having a gender is not a sexual practice.
- mbg721 4y agoHaving a sex at birth isn't, but the idea of gender being a separate thing from gender is contentious precisely because it's connected to sexual practice.
- fallingfrog 4y agoAllow me to play Socrates here. How is it connected to sexual practice? In what way?
- mbg721 4y agoBecause there's no particular reason to act differently from your birth sex other than for sexual practice. What else does gender actually mean, if it means anything at all? The fundamental conflict of the current culture-war is "Is sexual attraction a choice or is it innate?" and "It's innate" is the only polite thing to say, but it also creates contradictions.
- fallingfrog 4y ago"there's no particular reason to act differently from your birth sex other than for sexual practice" When a four year old wears a dress and plays with dolls, are they doing it for a sexual practice? I don't think so. Your response seems to imply that if a cis woman puts on a dress and walks down the street to buy a cup of coffee, then it is not sexual, but if a transwoman does exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, then it becomes sexual. Why? Let me pose a possible explanation: Perhaps the difference between these two scenarios is in your mind, not the cis or trans woman's. In which case, the trans woman cannot really do anything about the sexual thoughts in your head, can she? "What else does gender actually mean, if it means anything at all?" This is just restating the question I asked. But: I have a gender, and it's my gender when I'm eating lunch, and when I'm brushing my teeth, and at all times in between, and those are not sexual practices. I put on clothes in the morning, and they are gendered clothes, but they are not revealing or sexual, nor is wearing clothes a sexual practice. So how is it different for a trans person? The greatest aspiration of most, if not all, trans people is to "pass", meaning that they become invisible and nobody know they are trans. In what way is that sexual?
- kibwen 4y agoThe other difference with birds is that males are the homogametic sex, with ZZ chromosomes, whereas females are the heterogametic sex, with ZW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system
- matrix12 4y agoBut they are trigametic and not bigametic.