That's unscientific, against medicine. If you see a penis and a pair of testicles, but for some reason the parents are ultra-liberals who wonder if it's still a girl, just test to see if there's a Y chromosome.
What if they do in fact have a Y chromosome, but their body fails to respond to it? Then they will grow up as if they were females.
Also, due to chimerism (I guess that’s what you are getting at with your last two sentences) even genetic sex-determination is only probabilistic — they try to find several Y chromosomes to identify someone’s sex as male.
> According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.
Nor is it only XXY which is the issue:
> For many years, scientists believed that female development was the default programme, and that male development was actively switched on by the presence of a particular gene on the Y chromosome. In 1990, researchers made headlines when they uncovered the identity of this gene, which they called SRY. Just by itself, this gene can switch the gonad from ovarian to testicular development. For example, XX individuals who carry a fragment of the Y chromosome that contains SRY develop as males. ...
> The gonad is not the only source of diversity in sex. A number of DSDs are caused by changes in the machinery that responds to hormonal signals from the gonads and other glands. Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, or CAIS, for example, arises when a person's cells are deaf to male sex hormones, usually because the receptors that respond to the hormones are not working. People with CAIS have Y chromosomes and internal testes, but their external genitalia are female, and they develop as females at puberty.
Noting "But they are rare—affecting about 1 in 4,500 people." (The "some form of" is for a wide range of issues, like "surgeons reported that they had been operating on a hernia in a man, when they discovered that he had a womb. The man was 70, and had fathered four children.")
Ultra click-baity title. The Y chromosome isn't going anywhere. This smells like a man-hating "toxic masculinity" argument wrapped up in the pseudoscience of one person's opinion.
Not sure why nobody want to admit that these children are male at birth. They have a Y chromosome. One out of all of the many biological triggers due to a Y chromosome happens to not trigger until puberty time. Scientifically, what about this makes the children female beforehand? Did they possess developing female genitalia?
It's natural, in a time where sex changes are a fact of life, that sex-testing become a requirement for more and more occasions.
Wouldn't you want to sex-test for a true XX chromosomic set before you'd marry a wife to have children? Better safe than sorry, and be sure you don't marry a XY like you with whom you cannot have natural children!
And it's not new either: how ironic to name it sex-TESTing, when the term comes from popes' testicules being tested to ensure popes were male!
Completely off topic, but this is a pet peeve of mine:
> > Similarly with the boy or girl question, "no" may be stillborn.
> The sex is set at conception.
Not necessarily - at conception, the cells could be XX, XY, but also XXY (not to mention, they could be X- or -Y). After conception, chymerism could occur, where XX and XY twins become conjoined and a single fetus develops having both XX and XY chromosomes in different parts of the body - the sex will mostly be determined by which DNA is used when forming the gonads. It could also end up developing both kinds of gonads. But even if the fetus develops testicles, there is a chance that it has some kind of testosterone resistance and ends up with a completely female phenotype. Of course, there is also a possibility that no gonads are developed. This is all staying well in the realm of biological sex, and disregarding other hormonal complications that could happen based on what the mother is doing and her health, and disregarding any morphological abnormalities that could cause surface-level confusion between biologically male and female sexual organs.
> for those downvoting, can you tell me how I’m wrong, if that is the case?
Sure. Your claim that X is not female is correct. Your claim that Y is not male is wrong. Y is male. If one or more Y chromosomes are present, a male will develop, and if zero or fewer are present, a female will develop.[1]
Cloning a normal male's single X chromosome would lead to the type of problems familiar from inbreeding, but would be unlikely to lead to nonviability; two different X chromosomes, which all normal women have, are already too many and parts of them must be inactivated so that normal development can proceed.
The Y chromosome is unimportant enough that chromosomal abnormalities generally leave the organism in a viable, if often defective, state. The subject of this experiment is an example, with three (XXY) sex chromosomes. One X chromosome and no Y chromosomes (which would usually be described "XO", not "X") would get you a female with Turner syndrome.
In a handy table:
X alone: female, Turner syndrome
Y alone: male, but nonviable; this will be a miscarriage.
XX: female, normal
XY: male, normal
YY: male, nonviable
XXX: female, triple X syndrome
XXY: male, Klinefelter syndrome
XYY: male, Jacobs syndrome
YYY: male, nonviable
[1] There is an exception related to androgen insensitivity. There you have a genetic male that develops into what is mostly a phenotypic female. Such people have female psychology and female external anatomy, but they do not have a female reproductive system and are therefore sterile.
Genetic males have an X chromosome, so they have everything necessary to make ovaries. The issue is that the Y chromosome has the SRY gene [1], and that single gene is more or less responsible for kicking off the whole process of developing male genitalia in a fetus. That gene can get displaced off of the normal Y-chromosome and onto an X-chromosome resulting in XX Males [2] or XY Females [3]. Both conditions invariably result in sterility, though outwardly they appear mostly normal (XX Males externally look male, XY Females externally look female).
That said, the fact that one gene seems to have so much effect suggests it's plausible that in the future we might be able to do something to make those individuals fertile, or to enable genital reconstruction surgeries for transgender people that enable new fertility.
Note that much of this may be oversimplified, so any experts can feel free to apply some pedantry to the finer details.
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