simonillyan:

lyri-yum:

lupinely: when are people going to start acknowledging that sex is as much a social construct as gender is and stop saying there are two sexes OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD SCIENCE IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT??? BIOLOGY ISN’T REAL??? WHEN WAS ANYONE GOING TO TELL ME THIS??? *hyperventilates*

l m a o literally just answered another post along these lines but okay, you wanna go, mate, here’s your basic biology for you

humans carry 23 chromosome pairs. out of those pairs exactly one is sex chromosomes, and while a fair number of people carry XX or XY, there’s a very significant percentage of the population that carries different combinations like XXY or XO or XYY, etc. children are not karyotyped at birth so doctors assign sex entirely by taking stock of secondary/primary characteristics and deciding which seems to “fit more” into the existing social categories, despite the fact that phenotypic variation within those categories is MASSIVE, and all sexual features exist on a spectrum (& thereby so does sex itself)

moreover, there’s only one gene responsible for gametic variation called the SRY gene—it’s carried on the Y chromosome (most of the rest of which is, ironically, mutant & junk DNA; the Y chromosome has relatively few genes that actually get read and expressed, and in fact predominantly made up of the most condensed form DNA can take, constitutive heterochromatin—the DNA is tightly bound to histone proteins and is never unraveled or read)

the other 22 chromosomes, which contain literal fucktons more of the genome, experience vast variation—arising from crossing over in meiosis during reproduction, multiple alleles for single traits, and things like variable gene expression, where a single sequence of DNA can be expressed in dozens (or more) ways

knowing how much genetic variation arises in every single person, and knowing that sex chromosomes carry relatively little information, and knowing that the phenotypes expressed by various genes related to sex vary massively, it’s literally fucking nonsensical to group people into two categories based on a couple of assumed traits. “male” and “female” tell you absolutely nothing about a person, because the biology between those supposed categories is TOO VARIABLE TO CATEGORIZE

tl;dr amazing, science is informed by society because it’s conducted by people, wow!!!!!!!