I just wrote a comment above but I believe OP is mixing XXY with what the comment was about, which is likely Swyer Syndrome: XY individuals with female anatomy and gonadal dysgenesis. While they have a Y chromosome, a defective sex-determining gene leads to a failure to sexually differentiate into male gonadal tissue and leads to subsequent loss of downstream sex hormone production.
If the SRY gene is broken, they’d still physically develop as female, though potentially with some abnormalities, rather than as male. Even leaving gender identity out of it, sex is still more complicated than if exists Y; then male
I think if we’re going to use the construction plan metaphor, it would be more accurate to say that the builders didn’t get the message to alter the plans. Like if there was a house plan that was designed so it could be a duplex or a single family home by adding or removing one wall. Both options actually exist in the plans for the house at all times (yes, XX still has the genetic code for male anatomy), the SRY gene isn’t the plans to build male anatomy, that’s stored elsewhere, the SRY gene is more like a text to the builder saying “go with option B”. Except in this case the text failed to send, so the builder defaulted to option A.
So at the end of the day, the builder doesn’t put the wall in and builds a single family home, not a duplex. The owner may have wanted a duplex, but that isn’t what got built. So is it a duplex or not? I would lean towards saying no, but we’re not talking about houses, we’re talking about people, so it should probably just be their call
I think you’re trying to oversimplify things a bit. Sexual differentiation is an extremely complex process. To be frank, a biological perspective doesn’t really care about “what’s recorded on the government ID”. As you get more and more granular, those kinds of generalizations become less useful.
For a pure science take, such an individual might be described as:
A 14-year-old unmarried girl was referred with complaints of primary amenorrhea and nondevelopment of breast. Her build was normal. Examination of her secondary sexual characteristics revealed no breast development, absent axillary hairs, and sparse pubic hairs. External genitalia was of female type. Karyotype showed genotype of 46, XY. Magnetic resonance imaging revealed hypoplastic uterus with absent fallopian tubes and ovaries. A diagnosis of Swyer syndrome was made. (Swyer Syndrome Case Study)
But that doesn’t really fit on a driver’s license, so…
Anatomically, they look female. They develop a uterus and vagina, but usually don’t develop other secondary sex characteristics (breasts, widened pelvis, etc). The karyotype will show typical male XY chromosomes. Usually I’ve seen them classified as intersex because of this.
The sex of the baby will almost certainly be recorded as female. Keep in mind that while the karyotype might indicate XY, babies generally aren’t karytotyped at birth, as that’s a pointless expense for the overwhelming majority of people. The parents, doctors, and children wouldn’t have any idea about their condition until:
Streak gonads are detected, which involves an MRI or ultrasound
Hormone levels are measured in a blood test
The child fails to undergo puberty as expected
Since only #3 is visible without a specific test, it’s usually the first indicator, and the other two tests are used as confirmations of the syndrome. That’s when supplemental hormone therapy and surgery are discussed as well.
If male and female are assigned purely based on physical anatomy, does it really matter?
No one in that person’s life would consider them male and doctors would treat them based on their sex characteristics - they may have testes but they wouldn’t be external.
I have never been karyotyped and I’m willing to bet most people haven’t either; your sex is assumed based on your outward appearance even when your genitals are not observable.
I really don’t think that having a Y chromosome makes you male when you literally have a vagina, you know? Especially when you could go your whole life without knowing.
I’m gonna throw a common metaphor at you. See my previous post in here for a more thoughtful exposition on my gender experience.
Gender is kind of like shoes. If you have the right kind of shoe, well fitted, on the right feet, you don’t think about your shoes much at all. You know you have a certain type or brand of shoes on, but it’s not an essential element of your daily life. You’re not constantly aware of them. This parallels the common cisgender notion that the self isn’t gendered, that “there is a just a human in your head.” If your shoes are too small, on the wrong feet, or made wrong for your feet, it’s a whole problem all fucking day. It’s uncomfortable and disorienting. It’s distracting and persistent. Over time, it becomes painful, and you use increasing amounts of focus and energy dealing with your footwear incompatibility. This is what being gender incongruent is like. You spend huge amounts of time and energy trying to deal with a profound discomfort and incompatibility that nobody else understands or acknowledges because their shoes are fine.
Because so far I understood that for example the sex can be female, and so can the gender. But what sense does it make to have female gender? There is just a human in your head.
But then again… how important is this belief? And why are people claiming that there are more than two genders? Because of gender refers to sex, then what is going on there?
Their are neurological and therefore psychological differences between people of different genders. These are normally aligned with their physical sex and hormones. When there is a misalignment between gender and sex that’s what trans people are. It’s not belief, it’s brain structure.
There is just a human in your head.
Do you not feel attached to your birth gender at all? Or any other gender? Like if you woke up in a body of the opposite sex would you be okay with that?
Statements like this sometimes make me thing the person I am talking to is either very ignorant or a very confused agender person.
And to everyone’s information: I am for Germany and we do not have two words for sex and gender.
I don’t understand what you English speakers are up to.
I don’t understand what you mean here? I’m sure biological sex and gender identity are considered separate ideas even in languages without a specific word for them. To my mind a lot of transphobia comes from people not understanding there’s a difference between sex and gender.
As for the XXY, I’m OP and that’s my mistake. I misremembered my biology lessons and thought a second X chromosome made someone biological female, rather than the presence of an Y chromosome making someone male. I replied to someone else explaining my mistake.
Identity is the constitution of my character and my values. Feelings and emotions are not part of character, they are reactions to stimuli.
What does that have to do with gender? Just because you think you don’t care about gender, doesn’t mean that society doesn’t, or that gender doesn’t care about you.
Because words have a meaning and you don’t seem to understand the difference between sex and gender so I explained it to you in the simplest way possible. If you want to argue that gender doesn’t exist then I can refer you to tons of videos from people much more knowledgeable than you and me on that subject.
It’s funny that you say “German is a precise language” and you’re mad that in English there’s a word to distinguish between two separate concepts… Are you somehow trying to argue that German is a superior language instead of admitting that maybe it doesn’t cover every possibilities? Wait until you learn about Japanese and Mandarin with their words for abstract concepts!
Why would I identify with such a construct?
You don’t live in society?
If I am a male and I am looking for a mate to make children, then I am not interested in the persons belief, what they believe to be, but their biological properties.
Oh so then you don’t mind if your mate looks like him or do you think it might be relevant to speak about gender now that you’re thinking about forming a family with that person? This part of your text also makes you sound a lot like you believe in eugenics… Trying to pass your genes based on the how good the other people is biologically and nothing else… I’ll leave it at that…
I don’t know where you found your definition of gender study but it’s exactly what it says, women study has been a thing for ages, nothing unusual about broadening that field to encompassate more than just women and it just so happens that some people don’t fit in what is men or women gender expectations.
You’re stuck on the fact that genders vary from place to place… As if everything else is the same no matter where you look in the world? A person raised male but identifying as female might have been two spirit (a gender older than the society you live in by the way) had they been raised in a traditional first Nation family, but that’s not their reality and as such they make their situation make sense in the context they live in.
Just because your language doesn’t have a word for it doesn’t mean people don’t experience it, it just means your language needs to evolve. If the word for depression doesn’t exist in a language then do you think depression doesn’t exist for the people who speak it?
They are talking about things like Androgen Insensitively Syndrome where XY people are born with female anatomy. This is because the chromosome dosen’t determine gentials but rather the hormones that chromesome creates. In the case of Androgen Insensitivity the body dosen’t respond to male hormones so develops female gentials despite having male chromesomes because female is the default. Weiredly enough though the gonads are still male.
I’m pretty sure alot of people use it interchangeably to mean the same thing. But I think over the years, gender has become more of a “social” word and Sex as more of a “biological” word. I say Gender instead of sex when talking about someone’s biology. A bit confusing honestly for non-native English speakers
Gonna add this clarification up here for you: sex is xy or xx etc. Gender is wearing dresses and playing with barbie dolls, vs space ships and army toys.
Its pretty obvious xx has nothing to do with the color pink, and so sometimee xy’s prefer these societal structures, so they adopt them as their own.
Technically if an xy was risen as the female gender, they wouldnt even be transgender - their original structure was pink and shit, and so they never changed it. (There is argument that xx -> pink and xy -> army is aligned on the same “side”, so any deviation would be trans - but realistically theres only historical basis for this, nothing that would even make it to the hypothesis stage, much less official definition)
Okay, this description was really funny, but gender is more complex and inherent and can’t be totally reduced to the social aspects. I say that getting my hormones corrected “fixed me” because, after years of antidepressants and anxiolytics and therapies, turning off testosterone is what finally alleviated a constant, lifelong feeling of something being inherently, unquenchably wrong. This was a feeling I’d had all my life. Treating it psychologically never touched that feeling. Even as my depression and anxiety and truama responses improved, that feeling remained. Even social transition just made it easier to cope with. HRT turned it off. If you or anyone else reading this is familiar with the Dark Tower books, I’ve long made comparisons to Jake’s split timeline. You know implicitly that you should be having a different emergent experience of life, of body, of puberty, but time’s arrow neither slows nor reverses. You’re stuck living in two timelines, and every step towards transition brings them closer to harmony, and at least for me, HRT totally collapsed them into a single life. This is the human experience that has the cultural mapor code of pink vs armies laid over it.
It’s more complex because they’re related, but not always.
Genetic sex is the basis for some epigenetic status, which causes some organs to develop more in this or that way, including structures in the brain, which in turn impact behavior, which tends to cause some social preferences.
But none of those steps is written in stone. While “usually” and “if everything goes as expected” an XY and XX will develop following certain patterns all the way from genetics to social preferences, there are also a lot of cases where either one of the steps didn’t go as expected: maybe it went the opposite way, or only worked partially, or not at all, or whatever else.
It’s basically unpredictable, and the worst thing is to get stuck in a status where part of you says one thing, while another part says something else. HRT is just one way to change the part that’s easiest to change in a particular case to keep things as close to harmonized as possible.
Tbh, this doesn’t feel like a response to my post. All I was getting at is that gender is more complex and inherent than just social structures. There are social, psychological, and physiological aspects to gender. A lot of people reduce it to a social/cultural phenomenon, which inevitably leads someone to question the necessity of medical transition. Many trans people, myself included, will/would permanently struggle with chemical dysphoria our whole lives if we relegate the condition and its treatment to psychology and sociology. That’s all I wanted to say. To me, HRT is that science so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. Spironolactone was a revelation in me, and my first few estrogen injections were all but religious experiences.
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I just wrote a comment above but I believe OP is mixing XXY with what the comment was about, which is likely Swyer Syndrome: XY individuals with female anatomy and gonadal dysgenesis. While they have a Y chromosome, a defective sex-determining gene leads to a failure to sexually differentiate into male gonadal tissue and leads to subsequent loss of downstream sex hormone production.
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If the SRY gene is broken, they’d still physically develop as female, though potentially with some abnormalities, rather than as male. Even leaving gender identity out of it, sex is still more complicated than
if exists Y; then maledeleted by creator
I think if we’re going to use the construction plan metaphor, it would be more accurate to say that the builders didn’t get the message to alter the plans. Like if there was a house plan that was designed so it could be a duplex or a single family home by adding or removing one wall. Both options actually exist in the plans for the house at all times (yes, XX still has the genetic code for male anatomy), the SRY gene isn’t the plans to build male anatomy, that’s stored elsewhere, the SRY gene is more like a text to the builder saying “go with option B”. Except in this case the text failed to send, so the builder defaulted to option A.
So at the end of the day, the builder doesn’t put the wall in and builds a single family home, not a duplex. The owner may have wanted a duplex, but that isn’t what got built. So is it a duplex or not? I would lean towards saying no, but we’re not talking about houses, we’re talking about people, so it should probably just be their call
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I think you’re trying to oversimplify things a bit. Sexual differentiation is an extremely complex process. To be frank, a biological perspective doesn’t really care about “what’s recorded on the government ID”. As you get more and more granular, those kinds of generalizations become less useful.
For a pure science take, such an individual might be described as:
But that doesn’t really fit on a driver’s license, so…
Anatomically, they look female. They develop a uterus and vagina, but usually don’t develop other secondary sex characteristics (breasts, widened pelvis, etc). The karyotype will show typical male XY chromosomes. Usually I’ve seen them classified as intersex because of this.
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I’m in the US.
The sex of the baby will almost certainly be recorded as female. Keep in mind that while the karyotype might indicate XY, babies generally aren’t karytotyped at birth, as that’s a pointless expense for the overwhelming majority of people. The parents, doctors, and children wouldn’t have any idea about their condition until:
Since only #3 is visible without a specific test, it’s usually the first indicator, and the other two tests are used as confirmations of the syndrome. That’s when supplemental hormone therapy and surgery are discussed as well.
If male and female are assigned purely based on physical anatomy, does it really matter?
No one in that person’s life would consider them male and doctors would treat them based on their sex characteristics - they may have testes but they wouldn’t be external.
I have never been karyotyped and I’m willing to bet most people haven’t either; your sex is assumed based on your outward appearance even when your genitals are not observable.
I really don’t think that having a Y chromosome makes you male when you literally have a vagina, you know? Especially when you could go your whole life without knowing.
Gender isn’t sex. Their gender is what’s in their brain, not what’s in their pants. I thought this would be obvious by now but I guess not.
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I’m gonna throw a common metaphor at you. See my previous post in here for a more thoughtful exposition on my gender experience.
Gender is kind of like shoes. If you have the right kind of shoe, well fitted, on the right feet, you don’t think about your shoes much at all. You know you have a certain type or brand of shoes on, but it’s not an essential element of your daily life. You’re not constantly aware of them. This parallels the common cisgender notion that the self isn’t gendered, that “there is a just a human in your head.” If your shoes are too small, on the wrong feet, or made wrong for your feet, it’s a whole problem all fucking day. It’s uncomfortable and disorienting. It’s distracting and persistent. Over time, it becomes painful, and you use increasing amounts of focus and energy dealing with your footwear incompatibility. This is what being gender incongruent is like. You spend huge amounts of time and energy trying to deal with a profound discomfort and incompatibility that nobody else understands or acknowledges because their shoes are fine.
Their are neurological and therefore psychological differences between people of different genders. These are normally aligned with their physical sex and hormones. When there is a misalignment between gender and sex that’s what trans people are. It’s not belief, it’s brain structure.
Do you not feel attached to your birth gender at all? Or any other gender? Like if you woke up in a body of the opposite sex would you be okay with that?
Statements like this sometimes make me thing the person I am talking to is either very ignorant or a very confused agender person.
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You had me up to:
I don’t understand what you mean here? I’m sure biological sex and gender identity are considered separate ideas even in languages without a specific word for them. To my mind a lot of transphobia comes from people not understanding there’s a difference between sex and gender.
As for the XXY, I’m OP and that’s my mistake. I misremembered my biology lessons and thought a second X chromosome made someone biological female, rather than the presence of an Y chromosome making someone male. I replied to someone else explaining my mistake.
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We don’t have a word for schadenfreude in English, but trust me, we still experience it.
What does that have to do with gender? Just because you think you don’t care about gender, doesn’t mean that society doesn’t, or that gender doesn’t care about you.
Sex: Biological and even then sometimes biology screws up
Gender: Social and sometimes people raised as one gender don’t identify as being that gender
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But why the word gender then?Because words have a meaning and you don’t seem to understand the difference between sex and gender so I explained it to you in the simplest way possible. If you want to argue that gender doesn’t exist then I can refer you to tons of videos from people much more knowledgeable than you and me on that subject.
It’s funny that you say “German is a precise language” and you’re mad that in English there’s a word to distinguish between two separate concepts… Are you somehow trying to argue that German is a superior language instead of admitting that maybe it doesn’t cover every possibilities? Wait until you learn about Japanese and Mandarin with their words for abstract concepts!
Why would I identify with such a construct?You don’t live in society?
If I am a male and I am looking for a mate to make children, then I am not interested in the persons belief, what they believe to be, but their biological properties.Oh so then you don’t mind if your mate looks like him or do you think it might be relevant to speak about gender now that you’re thinking about forming a family with that person? This part of your text also makes you sound a lot like you believe in eugenics… Trying to pass your genes based on the how good the other people is biologically and nothing else… I’ll leave it at that…
I don’t know where you found your definition of gender study but it’s exactly what it says, women study has been a thing for ages, nothing unusual about broadening that field to encompassate more than just women and it just so happens that some people don’t fit in what is men or women gender expectations.
You’re stuck on the fact that genders vary from place to place… As if everything else is the same no matter where you look in the world? A person raised male but identifying as female might have been two spirit (a gender older than the society you live in by the way) had they been raised in a traditional first Nation family, but that’s not their reality and as such they make their situation make sense in the context they live in.
Just because your language doesn’t have a word for it doesn’t mean people don’t experience it, it just means your language needs to evolve. If the word for depression doesn’t exist in a language then do you think depression doesn’t exist for the people who speak it?
Totally not me clicking your link entirely because I know there’s gonna be a hot guy behind it >_>
They are talking about things like Androgen Insensitively Syndrome where XY people are born with female anatomy. This is because the chromosome dosen’t determine gentials but rather the hormones that chromesome creates. In the case of Androgen Insensitivity the body dosen’t respond to male hormones so develops female gentials despite having male chromesomes because female is the default. Weiredly enough though the gonads are still male.
Could also be refering to Swayer syndrome.
As an English speaker, trust me you don’t wanna know. Don’t dive into it
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I’m pretty sure alot of people use it interchangeably to mean the same thing. But I think over the years, gender has become more of a “social” word and Sex as more of a “biological” word. I say Gender instead of sex when talking about someone’s biology. A bit confusing honestly for non-native English speakers
This:
Seems at odds with:
I caught that too but I think they just sort of lost track mid thought and switched it without realizing.
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Why? It’s the same thing as race.
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You missed the point. Race is a social construct, as is gender
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Gonna add this clarification up here for you: sex is xy or xx etc. Gender is wearing dresses and playing with barbie dolls, vs space ships and army toys.
Its pretty obvious xx has nothing to do with the color pink, and so sometimee xy’s prefer these societal structures, so they adopt them as their own.
Technically if an xy was risen as the female gender, they wouldnt even be transgender - their original structure was pink and shit, and so they never changed it. (There is argument that xx -> pink and xy -> army is aligned on the same “side”, so any deviation would be trans - but realistically theres only historical basis for this, nothing that would even make it to the hypothesis stage, much less official definition)
Not understandin
Okay, this description was really funny, but gender is more complex and inherent and can’t be totally reduced to the social aspects. I say that getting my hormones corrected “fixed me” because, after years of antidepressants and anxiolytics and therapies, turning off testosterone is what finally alleviated a constant, lifelong feeling of something being inherently, unquenchably wrong. This was a feeling I’d had all my life. Treating it psychologically never touched that feeling. Even as my depression and anxiety and truama responses improved, that feeling remained. Even social transition just made it easier to cope with. HRT turned it off. If you or anyone else reading this is familiar with the Dark Tower books, I’ve long made comparisons to Jake’s split timeline. You know implicitly that you should be having a different emergent experience of life, of body, of puberty, but time’s arrow neither slows nor reverses. You’re stuck living in two timelines, and every step towards transition brings them closer to harmony, and at least for me, HRT totally collapsed them into a single life. This is the human experience that has the cultural mapor code of pink vs armies laid over it.
It’s more complex because they’re related, but not always.
Genetic sex is the basis for some epigenetic status, which causes some organs to develop more in this or that way, including structures in the brain, which in turn impact behavior, which tends to cause some social preferences.
But none of those steps is written in stone. While “usually” and “if everything goes as expected” an XY and XX will develop following certain patterns all the way from genetics to social preferences, there are also a lot of cases where either one of the steps didn’t go as expected: maybe it went the opposite way, or only worked partially, or not at all, or whatever else.
It’s basically unpredictable, and the worst thing is to get stuck in a status where part of you says one thing, while another part says something else. HRT is just one way to change the part that’s easiest to change in a particular case to keep things as close to harmonized as possible.
Tbh, this doesn’t feel like a response to my post. All I was getting at is that gender is more complex and inherent than just social structures. There are social, psychological, and physiological aspects to gender. A lot of people reduce it to a social/cultural phenomenon, which inevitably leads someone to question the necessity of medical transition. Many trans people, myself included, will/would permanently struggle with chemical dysphoria our whole lives if we relegate the condition and its treatment to psychology and sociology. That’s all I wanted to say. To me, HRT is that science so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. Spironolactone was a revelation in me, and my first few estrogen injections were all but religious experiences.
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