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…

        •  jarfil   ( @jarfil@beehaw.org ) 
          7•1 month ago

          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.

    •  AShadyRaven   ( @AShadyRaven@lemmy.zip ) English
      11•1 month ago

      Nothing at all

      This post is talking about people born XXY or X0 (just one x chromosome and nothing else)

      or people born with a mixture of XY and XX chromosomes, such as discordant chimerism

      Genetic sex is not binary, its a bellcurve. This is not a theory or an idea or a matter of debate among biologists.

      The only people on earth who think its only XX and XY are those who are uneducated on the topic

      but now you know better!!

        •  Laurentide   ( @Laurentide@pawb.social ) English
          9•1 month ago

          How big does a minority need to be before it’s “relevant” enough to be acknowledged and its members’ rights respected? People with 4 or 6 fingers exist. People whose chromosomes don’t match their physiology exist. People whose gender identity doesn’t match their genitals exist. It doesn’t matter how many of them there are, because every single one of us is a unique minority of one.

          But you asked for numbers, so I’ll give you some numbers.

          According to this article, around 1.7% of people are intersex, meaning they have physiology that doesn’t fit neatly into the common conceptions of male or female. That’s close to the number of people with red hair, which is estimated to be 2% of the world population. I have never heard anyone suggest that redheads are too small a percentage to matter.

          I think you were asking specifically about chromosomes, though. There’s a table in the linked article that breaks down intersex conditions by cause. The first entry is “Non-XX or non-XY (except Turner’s or Klinefelter’s)”. This refers to people with XY chromosomes whose bodies developed female characteristics (Swyer syndrome) and people with XX chromosomes whose bodies developed male characteristics (de la Chapelle syndrome). It does not include people with X, XXY, or XO chromosomes. (Those are the next two entries in the table.)

          The estimated frequency for this condition is 0.0639 per 100 live births, equivalent to 0.0639% of population. That looks like a really low number, right? Surely not enough to be “relevant”! Except… There are 8.1 billion people on this planet. 0.0639% of 8.1 billion is 5,175,900 people, which is roughly the current population of New Zealand.

          Remember, that is only women with XY chromosomes and men with XX chromosomes. If we include all intersex people that number rises to 140 million, which is nearly the population of Russia.