r/confidentlyincorrect • u/missingperson2 • Mar 18 '26
Comment Thread Biology expert explaining how intersex is actually just Down's Syndrome
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u/Saragon4005 Mar 18 '26
You can't produce both sure, but you can produce neither just fine. Or produce one yet have sexual characteristics of the other.
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u/Separate-Building-27 Mar 18 '26
It is so confusing because it is same dilemma on 3 different levels:
- Chromosomes
- Gamets
- Body
- Self identification
And variation of them applied.
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u/Saragon4005 Mar 18 '26
They forget just how complex sex is. Like for one humans in the best of cases are only capable of reproducing for something like 50 years. And a lot can go wrong to shorten that time. Furthermore sexual characteristics are used not just for reproduction.
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u/platonicvoyeur Mar 18 '26
Just like in all other aspects of life, they think in black and white. Anything outside their narrow understanding is a threat and should be met with anger and intolerance.
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u/Separate-Building-27 Mar 18 '26
More like there are some types of people who can't except world's complexities.
That something simple on the first look could be very complicated in some cases. Especially when medicine and visibility of some facts improved.
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u/rain5151 Mar 18 '26
People who claim that “science” or “biology” say there’s only 2 genders and 2 sexes, with the two always lining up in certain ways, love to ignore how any scientific or medical body worth their salt recognizes the diversity of gender and sex. They’re capable of looking at the evidence and seeing that people don’t fit into those boxes.
You know, like a scientist.
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u/IlGreven Mar 18 '26
The same people using "science" to confirm their biases also reject "science" when it doesn't; i.e. man is causing the climate to spin out of control or humans are apes.
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u/Baeolophus_bicolor Mar 18 '26
They’re great at excepting them. Everyone gets rights “except” trans people. They’re just not good at accepting them.
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u/MD_______ Mar 19 '26
It's cause people (mostly religious but tbf not all) need to have an answer to the question:- "What is a woman". They started with XX and Xy because they know very little biology and thought that the catch all until those with biology degrees etc used Swyers(for example) to prove you can't use sex chromosomes.
So now the transphobes have switched to the gametes argument because anyone that either at one point or could not produce gametes are anomalies and thus don't count and be viewed as their sex chromosomes because they have to be right and nothing will change their mind
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u/Sulhythal Mar 18 '26
See, that's the big issue. They haven't forgotten, they never learned past a 2 year olds understanding(What was common when THEY were two, not what is possible for a two year old to understand) of sex and dismissed any additional context as wrong
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u/Daniel_H212 Mar 18 '26
Don't forget the SRY gene, and various hormone related oddities that can make your body develop differently from what your your hormone levels want.
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u/CptMisterNibbles Mar 18 '26
Also those being 4 broad categories. You don’t get just two sets: “boy genes” and “girl genes”, genetics does not work this way
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u/Separate-Building-27 Mar 18 '26
I am ordinary man with knowledge of bucket of bread. Thanks for sharing.
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u/ResidentBackground35 Mar 18 '26
I once heard the human body as "a beautiful symphony of bio-chemical miracle that reproduces the most complex machine imaginable on a daily basis and a barely self contained dumpster fire that can't go more than a few minutes without confusing itself and trying to burn everything down"
And you randomly jump from one side to the other at the drop of a hat.
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u/ikinone Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
Self identification
Self identification is a valid concept, but it is not part of intersex (DSD) at all.
The 'trans' concept is becoming increasingly distanced from 'intersex'. Part of the point of 'trans' is that it can be entirely based on self identity, and does not require any DSD driving it.
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u/Xanadoodledoo Mar 19 '26
Richard Dawkins tried to make the gamer argument in his dumb book like it was the only “true” identification of sex, and solved all the “sex is a binomial distribution” arguments. But then he started tying it all to secondary sexual characteristics, which is dumb cause that’s how this whole argument started. And THEN started applying human secondary sexual characteristics to animals (like “male animals are bigger than female animals) which is even stupider cause there are so many animal species where sex-linked tendencies are opposite what they are in humans.
As though it’s gamets that control how big animals get.109
u/missingperson2 Mar 18 '26
Dude is adamant about intersex meaning a person producing both sperm and eggs at once, and about how there's literally nothing else it could mean. No one can convince him otherwise
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u/CptMisterNibbles Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
They are using the wrong term; that would be a “true hermaphrodite” or ovotesticular disorder of sexual development (OTDSD), which has indeed
never beenrarely (? Need to check. I thought simultaneous production hadn’t been observed) but is theoretically possible. People that will misunderstand a technical term and then die on a hill for their 7th grade understanding…→ More replies (3)22
u/DefinitelyNotAliens Mar 19 '26
I'll also go tell my in-laws their daughter doesn't have the very documented disorder she has, but actually just has Downs. Good news! She doesn't have severe developmental and mental delays and inability to walk, feed herself, speak, or function beyond what is effectively a less than a year old child. She actually just has Downs.
There are no other trisomy conditions.
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u/Jimisdegimis89 Mar 18 '26
He’s also just wrong about no one producing both, it’s extremely rare but there’s been a few recorded instances where people produce both naturally. There’s all been cases where people produce one or the other at different points in their life and people that have the ability to produce both if given the right hormones.
Also the horrible use of vocab in this idiots rambling is just offensively bad
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u/aphilsphan Mar 18 '26
I was aware of the rare cases where a single person can produce both. Has such a person impregnated themselves?
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u/EuropeIsMight Mar 18 '26
Why would they? Also maybe they had no womb, just because they make eggs and sperm wouldn’t mean all other parts for getting pregnant are available
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u/chyura Mar 18 '26
He's confusing intersex with hermaphroditism/co-sex, jesus.
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u/zhibr Mar 19 '26
He's not confusing anything, he's making a disingenuous conflation in order to deny the ambiguous nature of sex and gender. He wants to be able to say that trans people are not really trans, so he insists on the one specific criterion that is the most binary, ignoring all other issues.
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u/DefinitelyNotAliens Mar 19 '26
Intersex has replaced the term hermaphrodite.
It describes a broad range of conditions where a person does not present, biologically, fully as one sex, or their genetics and presentation of sex do not align.
Individual conditions causing either a mismatch of presentation and genetics (like total androgen insensitivity or 5-alpha reductase deficiency) or indeterminate genitalia are all collectively intersex.
People called hermaphrodites 50 years ago would be categorized as intersex now.
He just misunderstands that the broad category includes things which would go beyond "weird fanfic where the girl has a dick but also a vagina" porn fantasy.
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Mar 18 '26
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u/TheConsentAcademy Mar 18 '26
Yes there are news articles about dads with kids going into surgery for something unrelated and during the surgery they find a functional uterus and ovaries in his abdomen.
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u/Ok-Preference-1681 Mar 19 '26
The eggs aren't functional in any case I've ever heard where the sperm was also functional as the hormonal environment to create one kills the other as far as I'm aware.
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u/WilcoHistBuff Mar 18 '26
Actually people born with ovotesticular DSD have both ovarian and testicular cells in the same organ and can in fact produce both sperm and eggs. Sperm production tends to be very limited and decline with age. But somewhere between 1-5 people per 100,000 live births have mixed cell types.
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u/AutisticTumourGirl Mar 18 '26
I just kept getting more and more pissed off reading those comments 😂😂 like... Holy fucking way to miss the obvious... Most intersex people have underdeveloped gonads that's don't produce anything. Is it really that difficult to read for 3 minutes? Really?
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u/CptMisterNibbles Mar 18 '26
There is no biological mechanism absolutely preventing this, and in fact true hermaphrodites in other species do happen. We have not observed it humans, but it is theoretically possible.
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u/Saragon4005 Mar 18 '26
It's very rare because of entropy mostly. It has to be a very specific set of errors to produce gamates of both types and not break something in the process.
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u/Jacquesatoutfaire Mar 18 '26
I'm not going to take the time to actually read and process and critique all of that shit, but just to be clear for anyone wondering: 1) Chromosomes in humans typically come in 23 pairs, (22 pairs of autosomal chromosomes, 1 pair of sex chromosomes) 2) A trisomy, or an extra chromosome can happen on any of these pairs, including the sex chromosomes. The majority of these are incompatible with life, and the zygote/embryo/fetus will not reach birth 3) Down Syndrome is specifically a trisomy of pair #21. Other trisomies can and do happen, some are even relatively benign. None of them are Down Syndrome.
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u/FloydATC Mar 18 '26
Adding to this, mosaic DNA is very much a real thing. My daughter has DS and also mosaic DNA; one set of DNA has trisomy while the other does not. Also, before she was born I used to think people with DS were all basically the same, but they each have unique strengths and weaknesses just like everyone else. Genetics are fun and scary.
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u/aphilsphan Mar 18 '26
A person with DS has graduated from college. Another was elected to Spain’s parliament.
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u/Kaioken64 Mar 18 '26
What's the reason that some of them can do that but others are at the point where they will never lead an independent life?
Do the people who it seems to affect more have other issues that go along with the down syndrome?
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u/imnotnotcrying Mar 19 '26
I remember a few years ago I came across this mom on tiktok who I think had multiple kids with DS and so she and her husband did the genetic testing and she found out she herself had mosaic DNA and some of that DNA had DS. She didn’t have any outward signs of it, but I can’t remember if she had any neurological symptoms that made more sense when she found out or not
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u/Juronell Mar 19 '26
I think the general proposed (but as yet impossible to prove) explanation for such mosaic individuals is a very early fraternal twin absorption, which is why the mosaic can be do dramatic.
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u/TabithaMouse Mar 19 '26
I saw a video the other day of a doctor saying the trisomy mutation happens so early in gestation the fetus is between 2-8 CELLS big. If it happens towards the beginning, more cells will have the mutation and the person will have more issues, where as if it happens near the end it's possible to have "dilute DS" where only parts of the body are affected, not the entire body
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u/fireflies315 Mar 19 '26
You’re referring to chimerism, which is when two zygotes fuse into one, which I believe has been well documented and relatively well understood (at least in terms of what happens). So basically two different sets of DNA in one person. Mosaicism is a bit less dramatic, and occurs when there’s either a mutation or nondisjunction event in cells descending from the same parent line. So if you have some cells with one allele, and then a mutation happens during DNA replication, you can get two different lines of cell that are only different in that way in your body. Same idea with chromosomes, you can have one line of cells with the expected amount, but another line without the expected amount. For instance, mosaic Turner’s syndrome means you have some XX or XY and some X (no cells with just Y though since I believe cells can’t survive without an X).
Basically, chimerism is when you have two essentially genetically sibling cell lines, and mosaicism is when you have cells that are the same except for minor differences.
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u/Dramatic_Mixture_877 Mar 18 '26
I had a friend who had Kleinfelter's ... I'd never heard of it, but there you go ... he was outwardly normal, but sterile.
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u/Adorable-Ad9533 Mar 20 '26
Yes, my friend’s son has that. Chromosomes are usually XXY with that. But he’s had further test testing and his chromosomes are actually XXYY.
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u/silvandeus Mar 18 '26
Just tacking on.
At work we have seen some rare 18s, lots of 21s, and surprising number of abnormal sex chrom ploidys, all possible combinations at this point.
There are also some very large copy number events in affected probands: it doesn’t have to be the whole chromosome. It be a massive missing or duplicated chunk of the chromosome that is inherited, some of them spanning hundreds of genes.
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u/IndomitableAnyBeth Mar 19 '26
Um, thank you for leading me to Wikipedia a high school friend of mine's condition because I couldn't remember if it's a trisomy. It's not, but wiki being as it is, I now have at least two questions to ask at my next doctor's appointment. Because what you said led me to Lisch nodules and that eye looks like a lot like mine. And I don't know where, exactly, the inguinal area ends. I'm 40s and there's a chance I have neurofibromatosis and never knew. Weird, but thanks. To you, my friend, and my inability to remember if Noonan Syndrome is chromosomal. Just thought I'd say. Hope I'm not breaking any rules.
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u/A--Creative-Username Mar 19 '26
What I've gleaned from all of this: people have approximately 46 chromosomes
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u/Juronell Mar 19 '26
And most people don't know whether they do or not, because genetic testing is rare.
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u/Ur-Quan_Lord_13 Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
For "relatively benign", I believe all of those are sex chromosome related. The reason sex chromosome count differences are less harmful is because even in XX, in each cell only one X chromosome is active, as otherwise it would be overactive compared to an XY person. And, of course, the Y chromosome isn't super active in the first place. This is why even monosomy X, but also XXY, XYY, XXX, and even higher counts of X and/or Y chromosomes are generally viable and don't have as much of an effect as trisomy 21.
If I recall correctly, there is just one other non-sex-chromosome trisomy that can be viable into early childhood but not much further, and no viable monosomy other than X.
Edit: Trisomy 18, 1% of children survive to age 10 but that's without surgical intervention, increase as high as 68% with intervention and can reach adulthood
Trisomy 13 is 12.9% to age 10 even with aggressive surgical intervention
The other non-sex-chromosome trisomies are only viable with mosaicism, otherwise they don't make it to birth.
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u/vonhoother Mar 18 '26
Strange that a person could get to be an expert on biology and never learn to spell "anomaly.”
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u/missingperson2 Mar 18 '26
My personal faves are the "Biologically it is an ANOMOLY to have OUTER CHARACTERISTICS" and the "PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPERSIONS" but all his comments are absolute goldmines
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u/jumpmanzero Mar 18 '26
My mom used to make anomoly with chicken and mushroom sauce. I wasn't an adult until I tried it the "normal" way with tomatoes and graham crackers.
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u/vonhoother Mar 18 '26
And then there's guacomoly, also tasty. If you make it with duck you get quackomoly.
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u/futuretimetraveller Mar 18 '26
I was diagnosed with PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPERSIONS, but that was 15 years ago. It's called Autism Spectrum Disorder now :)
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u/mooshinformation Mar 18 '26
"a case where both are produced I.E.--a conatant state of perpetual gestation" (what??)
"It's a PHYSICAL anomoly. Not an actuality." The man can neither spell nor define anomaly apparently.
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u/Cambrian__Implosion Mar 19 '26
“Rggs.”
Idk why, but out of all the many horribly spelling errors, that one made me laugh the most
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u/Educational_Wait_211 Mar 18 '26
Also anomalies exist. This person keeps saying it can’t exist because it’s an anomaly. But..some people are born with six fingers on a hand. It’s an anomaly, and it’s real.
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u/_goblinette_ Mar 18 '26
With 8 billion people on the planet there are quite literally millions of ultra rare “anomalies” of one sort or another walking around out there. They don’t deserve to be treated as “less than” because of an odd quirk of genetics.
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u/Amorette93 Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
You rang?
Anomaly here. Only person in the ENTIRE world with my diagnosis set. My form of muscular dystrophy is only in 18 genomes tested, including public databases, in all of history. I'm the first whos got it with other cascading gene changes.
Literally one of a kind anomaly. 8b people and only one with my genome. And there's tons of us like this.
We're so common one of us found this.
Eta: if anyone's curious, I have MFM8. Caused by a splice variant in my 12p12 chromosome, PYROXD1 c.285+1G>A. I had late childhood onset. We think my mitocondrial disease that happened during mitosis is the cause of all of my mutations, I have a large amount of "variants of unknown significance" and 3 major pathogenic mutations. Probably no one curious, but I think it's neato. I mean. It sucks ass. But it's interesting
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u/Educational_Wait_211 Mar 19 '26
Both my wife and I ended up in medical text books as children because of rare conditions. Not in the same league as you, but being unusual sometimes feels very common!
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u/lord_teaspoon Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
Yeah, a one-in-a-million (ie, the 0.0001% mentioned in OP's screenshots) condition could be expected to exist in approximately eight thousand people worldwide. This is an oversimplification, of course, but still a useful idea to get people to realise the size of the numbers. It's like how humans seem to instinctively believe that a 95% probability is guaranteed but D&D players roll ones all the damn time, or how any given lottery entry has like a 1/100,000,000 chance of having the running numbers but its reasonably common for a draw to have at least one winner.
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u/SuccessfulSoftware38 Mar 19 '26
"Humans can be male, female, or in rare cases intersex"
"No, that's TOO TRANS. We must have only male and female because otherwise it's TRANS, EW. The anomalies are rare enough that I DEMAND we collectively pretend they don't exist to maintain the integrity of this binary!"
Seen this a lot.
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u/SilverGnarwhal Mar 19 '26
Also, they claim to be such an expert while being completely wrong about sex chromosomal and hormonal disorders that are super easy to research. It’s not forbidden information to review a medical textbook. For whatever reason, this person is grandstanding about an issue that they are woefully inept at understanding and/or painfully inarticulate in discussing it.
Having the stance that intersex does not exist but then not explaining how they dismiss this entire subset of the population that actually exists is a wild take. Approximately 1.7% of people are intersex which equates to about 140 million people. Thats a lot of people that don’t exist.
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u/Toter_Fisch Mar 19 '26
I am severely dyslexic and I nearly have a master's degree, so the spelling is whatever. What I find even stranger is, that a person could get to be an expert on biology and never learn that Down Syndrome is also called Trisomy 21, telling you exactly of which chromosome there is one too many.
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u/Zastai Mar 19 '26
Can’t spell, is wrong about everything and “you use many words so you must have used AI”
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u/hothraka Mar 18 '26
Funniest part to me is "too many words already prove you're GPT-ing it" lmao. Literally saying that the only way you could type up a long response is to use AI! And this is after an extensive yap session, too. My brother in chrimbo you typed just as much if not more than the obviously chat-GPT responder.
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u/missingperson2 Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
Lmao THANK YOU that reply was to my comment that I didn't even tag him in, and I absolutely did not use any AI, I wrote it all by myself because I've studied it enough to know how to resume it on my own lmao. It wasn't even AI formatted at all, clearly written by a human. But I took that as a compliment, and told him exactly that, it only showed me he can't write more than 2 barely coherent sentences on his own. Dude got so butthurt he harassed me for hours about how I "just wanted the last word but had actually proved him right". Tremendous tiny dick energy.
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u/Separate-Building-27 Mar 18 '26
Lol.
The true expert is even on his side of discussion:
Like dude, don't oversimplify please.
This mad guy: NOPE, I WOULD BE PERSISTENT IN MY DENIAL!
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u/Kristen8305 Mar 18 '26
It's ok to base you politics on science, its NOT ok to base your science on your political beliefs. JFC
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u/--StinkyPinky-- Mar 18 '26
FYI: there is such thing as Intersex.
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u/Cool-Date5719 Mar 18 '26
It’s not that uncommon either, I think almost 1% of humans iirc (which I may not)!
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u/missingperson2 Mar 18 '26
It varies how you classify it, it's usually mentioned between 1.7% of the population (any intersex variation including those that have little influence on physical characteristics, for example only chromosomal or hormonal, with a typically male or female phenotype) or 0.018% (more serious or impactful ambiguity of physical characteristics, like ambiguous genitalia at birth)
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u/TheConsentAcademy Mar 18 '26
It's about as common as red hair is among white people. But that rate is based off who we can easily identify and diagnose. There are plenty of cases of, for examples, men with biological children, going into surgery for something and during the surgery they find a functional uterus and ovaries in his torso. There's a great book on the topic called Sexing The Body
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u/AggravatingBox2421 Mar 18 '26
Plus there are so so many women who go in for fertility treatment only to discover that their bodies aren’t 100% female, and that’s why they’re not getting pregnant. IVF is a medical miracle because it can circumvent this, but I can’t count how many women I’ve seen who don’t even have fallopian tubes
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u/WoWSchockadin Mar 18 '26
People actually believing there is something binary in nature and not just another (albeit bimodal) spectrum. That's not how biology works. Everything is a spectrum.
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u/missingperson2 Mar 18 '26
(I'm a biology student) I've learned the basic concept of sex as being binary because of the "only eggs or sperm" premise, and yeah that's a good basis to get started but then there's so much complexity surrounding the development and evolution of species and individuals that while you can still consider the binary as the foundation or the norm you simply can't ignore that a bunch of variations will occur. Life is mutable, that's how it evolves. At least you need to consider exceptions besides the binary, if not see it as a spectrum - people who reduce such complexity to only 0 or 1 have picked the wrong scientific subject to be stubborn about.
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u/WoWSchockadin Mar 18 '26
That's why it should better be taught as a bimodal spectrum. Yes, most people will fall under one of the two modes but not all.
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u/TassieBorn Mar 18 '26
It's a "lie to children" in the same sense as a lot of things we learn in school: a simplified version of reality. Boys are xy and girls are xx is true most of the time. On the one hand, do you want primary school teachers going into the details of chromasomal/developmental variation; on the other hand, how hard would it be to explicitly say "this is how it works for most people, but nature allows for a wild range of differences and that's ok"?
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u/dracorotor1 Mar 18 '26
Well, my teacher for sure said that very thing when I was growing up, but I know for a fact that several of my classmates who stopped at 12th grade (and stopped listening in 8th) still insist that they know more than the entire medical community when they insist it’s a rigid binary
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u/TassieBorn Mar 18 '26
Yep. Only so much that even the best teacher can be expected to achieve, especially when dis- and mis-information is so widely pushed.
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u/mpieto Mar 18 '26
It's a useful simplification, but just as you later learn in physics that there is such a thing as general relativity and quantum mechanics, there should be at least a disclaimer when you learn about genetics that real world is a bit more complex.
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u/fireflies315 Mar 19 '26
They often like to avoid thinking about us by referring to our existence as a mistake, and that we’re not what nature intended. Buddy, if you spent two minutes studying evolutionary biology you’d realize nature doesn’t intend for anything. Our existence as intersex people is an entirely natural part of the process of evolution, because all it is is just throwing mutations at a wall and seeing what sticks. I’m infertile, so my mutation won’t stick, but my mutation is nature working as intended, and it even has positives for me in some ways, I’m way less likely to get acne or to have bad body odour because of it. Being heterozygous for the gene that causes sickle cell anemia is protective against malaria, even if it’s an incredibly painful condition if you’re homozygous. Mutation is the most natural thing there is, it’s why we exist on this planet. It’s supposed to happen.
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u/Forever_Forgotten Mar 19 '26
I feel like schooling in general (and college specifically) has a real issue with teaching complex concepts. You start with a fundamental rule (“when x, y is also true” or “either x or y is true, but not both”). But the longer you go, the more exceptions to the rule you get taught. I really struggled with this in chemistry and genetics.
But it also means that there are a lot of people with only half-remembered high school educations that taught a bunch of half true rules about the world that are now coming up against people with college-level education who think they have a leg to stand on.
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u/Zuwxiv Mar 18 '26
Yup, thank you. But there's something they said that really gets me, besides the spelling:
There is no such thing... These are 0.0001% anaomlies
I think there are 2 sexes. Make and female. And a grey area of overlap for the very rare examples of intersex.
What the fuck is up with this kind of argument? "There are only two, except for the ones that aren't?"
It's like you discover a new species of bird, and they are mostly green or purple. But there's definitely a few that are bright pink. And you tell people, "There are only two colors for this bird: green and purple." And someone is like, wait, what about those ones that are bright pink? "Well, those are less common, so there's no such thing as pink ones."
They act like there's some arbitrary number where, if something is rare enough, we can literally just say it doesn't exist. And after trying to talk to those people - in real life, not just online - that number is always flexible. If they think that the percent of intersex people is 0.0001%, and you show them it's actually between one hundred and seventeen thousand times higher than that, they don't care. (Under the broadest of definitions, about 1.7% of people are intersex; under the strictest, about 0.018%)
It's just this... pathological obsession with things being binary. It's looking at something that we can all see exists and deciding that it simply doesn't count as existing, for no other reason than preferring not to complicate their binary view.
I'd almost understand more if they refused to acknowledge something existed than if they say, "Oh yeah, some of the birds are pink. But the bird is only green or purple."
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u/missingperson2 Mar 18 '26
EXACTLY.
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u/Zuwxiv Mar 18 '26
Also, if I simplify my rant into this:
Some people can look at something that disproves their beliefs, and simply prefer being wrong to changing their mind.
It explains a lot about what we see in the world nowadays.
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Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Zuwxiv Mar 18 '26
Humans are pattern-seekers, so I can get the allure of sticking to a belief that's "mostly right, even if sometimes wrong." But that's okay for like... choosing the right sand to build a sandcastle. It's okay for that to be "mostly right."
When you're talking about other peoples' lives? Enacting laws, voting for politicians, holding fundamental beliefs about how the world works? That's where it just seems absurd.
And when people are getting hurt, it becomes something much worse than "absurd." Vile, malicious, cruel.
It's putting ideology before reality. It's saying that someone's life can just be "an exception" we can ignore, or worse, it's something we can punish. It's honestly... fucking dangerous.
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Mar 18 '26
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u/Zuwxiv Mar 18 '26
They aren’t “debating” the idea in good faith,
Yeah, this seems common with bigots and fascists. (I wish I was using 'fascism' ironically.) They'll throw one or two conveniently memorized stats at you, but they have absolutely zero interest in a real discussion. It's bad faith from top to bottom.
There was a video recently of a guy being interviewed on a street, and he said he supported Trump's war with Iran. Pressed on why, he basically said, "I don't know why. I'm just taking a guess."
He knew that's a lie. The interviewer knew that's a lie. He even immediately tried to punish his friends for disagreeing, which shows that there's no way his moral stance is based on "just a guess." But I'll copy part of my comment about this in another thread:
- So when someone asks them to explain why they support it... Because the sky is blue. I don't know why. I like how many vowels are in it. Taking actual questions seriously is for people who think questions and answers are serious. Refusing to treat someone else seriously - or with any level of respect - is a way of telling people to go fuck themselves. For the bad faith people, the "why" is "Who gives a shit? Because it's better for me. And worse for someone else."
That's literally what I wrote the other day, which is why this struck me:
it’s about disgust and social power... they don’t want to understand it, they want them to go away.
Fucking yes. You nailed it. It's about power - who has it, and who doesn't. They don't care about truth beyond its occasional convenience in taking and holding power. There's nothing about these people - ideologically - that gives a shit about things like "what's true."
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u/TheOwnerOfMakiPlush Mar 21 '26
This is the way transphobe thinks. And people who deny intersex. They can point at person that really do exist and say "it does not exist"
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u/21Pharaoh Mar 20 '26
It feels like so many people have trouble grasping the idea that things can be a spectrum! It’s extremely exhausting when it comes to trying to have any kind of discourse.
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u/Disastrous-Finding47 Mar 18 '26
Ah, the good ol' change the meaning of the word and then say it doesn't exist.
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u/AggravatingBox2421 Mar 18 '26
I’d also like to point out that intersexuality isn’t really all that rare? It occurs with the same chances as people having red hair. And who doesn’t know at least one person in their lives who has red hair?
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u/danimagoo Mar 18 '26
Here’s what I don’t get. Why do they care? Why do they give a shit? Intersex and trans people and our lives do NOT affect their lives at all. These people think the science they learned in the 4th grade is all the science there is. Also, they’ve forgotten a lesson they should have learned in kindergarten: Mind your business.
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u/n3m0sum Mar 19 '26
Some people are deeply invested in a version of "normal" that centres around what they understand. Mostly they think they understand things and people like themselves.
They get creeped out by "not normal", and want to go away, or at least hide.
The same sort of thing is behind racism and homophobia. The current wave of bigotry against trans and intersex. Very much reminds me of the homophobic bigotry of the 1970s and 80s. When gay people got tired of hiding, and acceptance was hard won through a lot of friction and bigotry.
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u/mcduff13 Mar 18 '26
This is something I've seen from people spouting Terf shit. They have to believe that intersex isn't real, not because it's fake, but because the existence of intersex people tests our idea of what biological sex and gender is. If intersex people exist, and can't be assigned a definite gender at birth, maybe the whole concept of gender is fuzzier than they want.
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u/Usagi-Zakura Mar 18 '26
I don't think I've ever seen anyone describe sex as exclusively "producing eggs or sperm".
And "not reproductable by breeding" are they implying that for any condition to be real it needs to be an inherited trait??
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u/Bread_Punk Mar 18 '26
You can stumble across those definitions in certain circles trying to avoid getting behold! a chair'd; a particular idiosynchracy is "theoretically capable of producing the larger gamete".
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u/Razzington Mar 18 '26
While its not said explicitely anywhere in the doofus' doofusery, you can always shut these people down by simply showing them pictures of bald bearded beefy transmale and ask them in which bathroom they want these people to go.
These people do not care about science, they care only about being able to pretend to have intellectual validation of their bigotted positions.
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u/k819799amvrhtcom Mar 19 '26
They will always say that he was born with a dick, no matter how many times you explain it to them.
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u/GravityBright Mar 18 '26
Love those kinds of arguments where both parties technically agree about everything, but one misunderstands the definition of one or more key terms and is unreasonably insistent on them.
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u/AltruisticBob Mar 18 '26
...Furthermore, the ovarian tissues of true hermaphrodites were mainly functional and ovulatory. The testicular tissues were mainly immature. However, spermatogenesis was determined in some cases. In fact, both ovulation and spermatogenesis were detected in some cases. All of these findings show that true hermaphrodites with ovarian and testicular tissues are potentially autofertile...
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u/Bigredscowboy Mar 18 '26
Completely ignoring those producing nether eggs not sperm. And the men I know who are XY, penis, testicles and testosterone are not men because they have no sperm. American conservatives are idiots.
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u/Short_Gain8302 Mar 18 '26
Dude keeps spouting anomaly (or anomoly i guess) like it supports his claim? Anomaly doesnt make it not real it makes it rare, so not only does this person need biology lessons, they also need to revisit their language lessons
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u/Ribbitygirl Mar 18 '26
"Intersex people disprove my world view, therefore I REFUSE to believe they exist, despite evidence."
It's not even just stupidity - it's willful ignorance.
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u/RockyMountainMomof4 Mar 19 '26
As a biochemist who did their internship at the NIH on Leydig Cell Hypoplasia, I can assure you, that until puberty, males don't have any sperm. So, right there, the arguments being laid forth by "Sperm" or "Eggs" person is flawed.
Individuals with the most extreme form of Leydig Hypoplasia have cells that are completely unable to bind testosterone. Meaning, genetically they are XY. Physically they appear XX. Internally they have testes, but those testes never mature because they can't respond to androgens, so, intersexed.
Then there's Turner Syndrome. Women born with a single X and nothing else. Just one X. They may have a small supply of eggs at birth, but those can often disappear by puberty.
So, at least two genetic conditions where there is often no sperm or no eggs. I've given a simplified explanation that I think is pretty clear. Intersexed is absolutely a thing.
Whether someone can have both functional testes & ovaries seems improbable, but that's also way outside my area of expertise...
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u/Juronell Mar 19 '26
At this point they'll talk about "the potential to have produced such gametes if they developed normally," which is obvious nonsense.
I recall in my own deep dive into this subject that there have been a few case studies of mosaic individuals with "ovotestes," or a mixed gamete producing cell that produces both gametes, though usually neither is fully healthy. I believe there was also a case study similar to the famous bifurcated cardinal, where the individual had one teste and one ovary, though they didn't have the striking physical tells of the cardinal.
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u/missingperson2 Mar 19 '26
"A car is a still a car even if it can't leave the garage for some reason" is a metaphor I've heard for "someone with testicles is still male even if they can't produce sperm for some reason".
Yeah but if the reason why the car can't leave the garage is because it has bicycle wheels and pedals that aren't connected to the gas fed mechanisms? Is it a car or a bike?
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u/RockyMountainMomof4 Mar 20 '26
😂😂😂 Do people really use such overly simplistic metaphors? I like your response! If someone is XXY what were they 'supposed' to be is such an inane question.
Or if someone is X0? How in the world would you decide what 'should' have been the other chromosome? They present as female so another X? But it could have just as easily been a Y. So why default to assuming an X?
Science & facts do really complicate some people's needs for emotion-based simplistic answers...
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u/kdnx-wy Mar 19 '26
I like how this chud says “there is no such thing” as mosaic traits and then says it’s a “0.0001% anaomly”. So if it does occur, then it exists, right?
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u/Renuwed Mar 19 '26
Chud logic. If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is around to hear it, it did not produce sound.
He probably got his biology degree from a pop-up ad... you know the ones... "99% of biologists can't answer these 5 questions! (clicks ad) Q1: How do you spell your mothers maiden name? Q2: Can you remember the name of the street you grew up on? Q3: What did you name your pet... etc etc"
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u/kdnx-wy Mar 19 '26
They believe there’s an order and intent to nature. There isn’t; nature is not as clean and clear-cut as fifth-grade biology teaches. There are no true binaries, no unbroken rules. It’s all chemicals bouncing off one another in occasionally-predictable ways. That uncertainty is scary to them, though, so they believe that there is a “true way” things must be and any difference can be disregarded.
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u/Sinocu Mar 18 '26
Damn he said almost everything wrong, the only correct thing here is that it's an anomaly, everything else is just bullshit
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u/shadow31802 Mar 18 '26
Imagine trying to argue about something as complex as genetics while also having zero experience studying said topic
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u/cursetea Mar 18 '26
I'll go track down an old intersex friend and make them tell me if they were lying about their penis or their uterus 🙄
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u/missingperson2 Mar 18 '26
"How come you never told me you produce both EGGS and SPERM????!?!"
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u/cursetea Mar 18 '26
DID YOU KNOW IT'S IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO EXIST??? SOME GUY ON THE INTERNET SAID THAT SUCH AN ANOMOLY IS IMPOSSIBEL
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u/DirtandPipes Mar 19 '26
Aspersion: 1 A) a false or misleading charge meant to harm someone's reputation casting aspersions on her integrity. B) the act of making such a charge 2 A) sprinkling with water especially in religious ceremonies.
What the hell is a “psychological aspersion?”
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u/_notthehippopotamus Mar 19 '26
To begin with, the "expert" has a very limited understanding of what intersex even means. But what bothers me more is a scientist making absolute declarations about something that has "NEVER" happened and never will. Even if there are no documented cases, how can you be so certain? And I'm assuming something earlier in the conversation specified that we are even talking about humans, because there certainly are many examples organisms that produce both eggs and sperm.
I am aware of individuals having both ovarian and testicular tissue, but I was unsure about producing both gametes. Didn't take me long to find out there is actually evidence of that as well.
Ovulation in a cytogenetically proved phenotypically male fertile hermaphrodite
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u/missingperson2 Mar 19 '26
Just to be clear, the title is pure sarcasm, dude's a musician and never claimed to be a biologist. At some point he literally said he was "schooling" literal biologists while he had no degree because he's simply sure he knows more than them. He's just convinced that the general scientific consensus is bullshit because it doesn't fit the definition he pulled out of his ass, and is incapable of admitting he's wrong.
I should have added quotation marks to the title, I can't edit it or I would!
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u/Exotic_You7797 Mar 19 '26
Hey someone whose actually studying biology here for the record, Down syndrome comes in 3 forms, trisomy 21 which means the 21st chromosome has one extra copy, translocation of chromosome 21 to another chromosome, which is less common but is the only one that can be passed from generation to generation, and mosaic where some cells have the trisomy 21 and some have regular structure, but the important thing is Down syndrome is just of the 21st chromosome, not all trisomy like the guy says, as there are 2 other trisomy’s that are not as common but still well known which are Edward’s syndrome and patau syndrome, both of which are fatal though, but that’s just the smaller gripe the bigger gripe is that in genetics intersex is very much a thing, like so much of a thing on my first exam in genetics we had to memorize the actual way to calculate if someone is biologically intersex ( litteraly just number of X chromosomes divided by autosomal chromosomes) with 1= female .5= male and intersex being in between those two, you can even go further and include meta male meta female, also, the person states that these are physical changes not hormonal or chromosomal alterations, well sex chromosomes are actual chromosomal alterations and affect hormone secretion a lot i.e. klinefelter reduces testes sizes and also reduces testosterone secretion, so yes intersex is recognized in actual biology, and no sex chromosomes abnormalities have nothing to do with Down syndrome, this person doesn’t seem to actually know what intersex means as they think that it not being passed through generations makes it not a real thing but they fail to see that anyone who becomes intersex almost always is infertile meaning it physically can’t be passed, even though by every known aspect of genetics it is a real possibility in humans.
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u/Junie_Wiloh Mar 19 '26
I had a friend who presented male but always felt like they were a female. He decided to get a sex chance and they discovered that he had both, testes and ovaries, and just the dick. No other outward sign that indicated they had internal parts that did not match their outward appearance. They were still gung-ho about getting that change and opted to keep the ovaries since they spent more of their life feeling like a she, she didn't feel like she would know how to act, to be male. Guess this friend doesn't count..
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u/Lexi_Bean21 Mar 19 '26
This man doesent understand the difference between genotype and phenotype, you csh have msle genetics but female bodily characteristics or other way around or you have neither
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u/143019 Mar 19 '26
So many people who have never taken a real biology class who are so confident in their ignorance.
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u/HeligKo Mar 18 '26
Why do so many have opinions on this like it affects them. In my normal days this isn't something I have to deal with. If someone tells me to call them him, her, or them it just doesn't affect me and it's easy to do. Not a lot different than a guy named Brad wanting to be called Mike. If he introduces himself as Mike, I'm gonna call him Mike.
Sure if it is my kid or my partner it becomes more complicated, but that is rarely the case with folks writing these posts or stupid laws. Those conversations happen behind closed doors.
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u/Juronell Mar 19 '26
If the world doesn't fit into the neat boxes we try to cram it into then they feel like they have no control. They don't, but that doesn't justify this nonsense.
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u/Munsbit Mar 18 '26
I once saw a woman whose rat was intersex. She posted about that online and people complained that she was forcing her ideology on her animal. It had both a uterus and hidden balls...
Same happens every single time a pet turns out to be intersex. Like, what's so hard to understand for these kinda people that intersex is not an ideology. In most animals they turn out to have reproductive organs or both gender in a way... So yeah, ideology my ass lol
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u/OkoumoriVT Mar 19 '26
NO WAY, I LITERALLY JUST POSTED THE LINK TO THE VIDEO
DERECHO FROM THEFRIENDLYRATFORECAST, RIGHT?!
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u/k819799amvrhtcom Mar 19 '26
Where did you post it? I don't see anything on your profile?
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u/Juronell Mar 19 '26
Birds and other animals have been observed with bilateral gynandromorphy where the body is literally split down the middle, male and female.
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u/amitym Mar 18 '26
It is a physical anomaly. Not an actuality!!
Everyone clear on that now?
I'm going to remember that the next time I'm losing an argument.
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u/ummmthatsme Mar 19 '26
Yes, just like everything else is black and white, up or down, on or off with no in between. In make believe land.
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u/Knife-yWife-y Mar 19 '26
I just don't get how the idiot completely ignores that existence of external sexual organs. We have internal sexual organs, and we have external sexual organs. If there is a mix of male and female sexual organs in any combination, that's a medical anomaly described as intersex... Isn't it?
Please help me understand if I am wrong.
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u/missingperson2 Mar 19 '26
You're right! That, plus chromosomes and hormone production/sensitivity. These four are all primary sex characteristics, and if one or more is different from a defined norm/binary (eg. ambiguous genitals at birth, ambiguity or underdevelopment of gonads (testicles/ovaries), chromosome variations; and much more) then the person has an intersex condition. Many intersex people don't even produce eggs or sperm at all.
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u/Traroten Mar 19 '26
For those who are interested, Forrest Valkai did a deep-dive into the weirdness of biological sex here:
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u/BiebRed Mar 19 '26
The anti-transgender lobby keeps getting pushed back further into a corner. First they insisted sex was genitals observed at birth. When someone made them acknowledge that genitals can be ambiguous, they insisted sex was just chromosomes. When someone made them acknowledge that chromosomes don't fit into a neat binary, they retreated to gamete production, and that's where they're still trying stand now. Conveniently ignoring the fact, of course, that a lot of people don't produce gametes at all.
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u/Astriaal Mar 19 '26
Ummm there was a news article about a dude (Asian IIRC) years ago who went in for surgery, only for the surgeons to discover the presence of ovaries inside him even though he had testicles and a penis. They asked how he'd like to live his life, and he said male so they removed the ovaries.
Was many years ago now, and it's almost 3am here, so I'm afraid the digging up will have to be done by fellow redditors (sorry), but it popped in my mind. Also, human females are born with all their eggs, they don't "make" them. r/badwomensanatomy there.
Edit: A word
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u/SVINTGATSBY Mar 20 '26
tell us you didn’t pass ninth grade biology without telling us you didn’t pass ninth grade biology.
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u/I-am-Chubbasaurus Mar 20 '26
Someone told me I was technically intersex because I have PCOS, which means I produce more testosterone than average.
I don't know if it's true or not, but I wouldn't mind using it against bigots. I was assigned female at birth, have lived female, feel female, but I still produce too much testosterone.
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u/SirDoofusMcDingbat Mar 21 '26
People are Very Offended that sex is complicated and I frankly have no idea why. It's like they feel their own identities are under attack if other people are allowed to be different than them.
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u/stanitor Mar 18 '26
physical realities aren't actualities and if an "anaomly" happens 0.0001% of the time, then there is no such thing. Yeah, ok, buddy.
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u/k819799amvrhtcom Mar 19 '26
① The number of humans who ever existed is approximately 117 to 120 billion.
② Only one human has also been a god.
⇒ The percentage of humans who have also been gods is approximately 0.0000000008%.
③ Anything that happens 0.0001% of the time or less frequently is not an actuality.
④ 0.0000000008% is less than 0.0001%
⇒ There is no god.
q.e.d.
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u/byronicillness Mar 18 '26
I once saw someone ask online if Down Syndrome was an intersex condition because it’s chromosomal. I guess they had somehow only ever heard of chromosomes in the sex context but I was really baffled.
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u/missingperson2 Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
(bonus: this is what happens when you have the audacity of not accepting the guy's expertise, inform him he can't spell/form correct sentences and that some of his brilliant scientific conclusions are laughable, remind him he's ran out of arguments, and keep replying to other people but not him. This is the argument he presents. Somehow he's convinced he still schooled you)
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u/xinarin Mar 19 '26
Ahhh the time honored tradition of "you have to say the last word, do I can make up anything I want, and now if you reply, I've positioned you to be a loser". Just pond scum level brain activity there
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u/OkoumoriVT Mar 19 '26
Derecho has since passed, but TheFriendlyRatForecast does a great job explaining intersexuality in her pet rat. It's not just humans, this kind of thing happens naturally in animals as well.
And that's WITHOUT getting into snails and clownfish and whatever other critters have the ability to swap anatomical sexes!
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u/AngryMiner5704 Mar 19 '26
My favorite part is how this purported "biology expert" doesn't understand how English works.
Hey buddy, maybe try figuring out how the language works before you pretend to understand how the human body works.
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u/Farkenoathm8-E Mar 19 '26
There was a German Olympian born in 1918, Dora Ratjen. When they were born they first said, “it’s a boy” then “it’s a girl after all”. As a result they were raised as a girl and competed in the women’s high jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In 1938 whilst travelling on a train a conductor called the police due to a “man dressed as a woman on the train”. After questioning Ratjen showed documentation stating they were assigned female at birth, but a doctor’s examination found intersex genitalia. Subsequently they were sent to a sanatorium for further tests and tried until a prosecutor in 1939 stated that no intentional fraud had taken place, as it was claimed there was some type of fraud to compete as a woman for financial gain. Following the trial the records were changed to Ratjen being assigned male and they changed their name to Heinrich and lived the rest of their life as a male after 31 years as a female.
There are other cases but this is to me a very fascinating case.
Also, the term intersex was first coined by German geneticist Richard Goldschmidt in 1917. I’m sure a pioneering geneticist knows more about whether intersex exists than some random on reddit.
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u/diabeticweird0 Mar 19 '26
Oh we've moved the debate to if you produce sperm or eggs, not what genitalia you have
It must be exhausting to make your life all about Trans and intersex denial
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u/k819799amvrhtcom Mar 19 '26
First, it was chromosomes, then, it was the SRY gene, then, it was gametes, and now, it's sperm and eggs.
Or did the gametes come before the SRY gene?
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u/cncaudata Mar 20 '26
This guy is out there testing kids for egg and sperm production before he lets them in the bathroom.
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u/XOXO_cuntgirlll Mar 20 '26
Buddy, I'm having a very hard time believing you're actually this "biology expert" you claim to be since you can't even spell "doctors" or "anomaly" correctly.
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u/Honodle Mar 20 '26
That reads like a rant, rather than anything intelligent. It's also poorly written as to grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
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u/666hmuReddit Mar 20 '26
I have never heard of this concept, therefore it does not exist - that guy probably
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u/Annita79 Mar 20 '26
They typed anomaly in three instances and in all of them it was spelt wrong and not even the same wrong.
Also you can produce eggs of sperms or neither and none of these define if one is intersex or not.
People are tiring, I am not people-ing today.
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u/Total-Tap573 Mar 20 '26
Why is it ALWAYS when people use CAPITALS in their very very CONFIDENT statements I find them less believable?
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u/Soraphis Mar 20 '26
they don't exist
those are 0.0001% anomalies
So... By these numbers 8000 people don't exist.
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u/mrjoffischl Mar 20 '26
a real biologist wouldn't be misspelling things this much when trying to make a point. "rggs," "anomoly," "docotrs," etc
like are we fr
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u/BustaCon Mar 21 '26
Someone knows words. Not what they mean or how to use them remotely correctly, but he got off some real doozies, that's for sure.
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u/Hminney Mar 21 '26
Dna - xy abnormalities (eg xxy, xyy) are about 1/10,000). In other words incredibly common - you probably meet someone every week.
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u/Kailynna Mar 23 '26
My son does not have Down Syndrome, and he has two different types of cells and a whole bunch of extra chromosomes. (Mosaicism 48XXXY/49XXXXY)
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u/hilvon1984 Mar 23 '26
I one sentance he claims there is "no such thing as intersex".
In another he claims it is "0.0001% anomalies".
So they do exist by your own admission. Why do you keep arguing?
Like even that ass pull of a low all estimate gives you 8000 people on earth. That is like a small town worth of people who you claim "don't exist". And I don't have the citations in front of me. But Forres Volkai mentions that point quite often - if you actually take scientifically established incidence of intersex people you end up with a worldwide population of them being about 100 million.
...
Biology is fascinating precisely because it has no way of ensuring that replication happens with precision. And yet it has a wide range of tolerance for errors. Plus enough errors overlapping and cancelling each other out.
In such a system one can kinda expect all outcomes to land within one box.
But seeing two large concentrations of outcomes and expecting to never find outcomes in between those is not how any such self-correcting system would work.
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u/Even_Ganache3329 Mar 23 '26
Down syndrome isn’t caused by any random chromosome duplicating bruhhhhh
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