I have an experiment for you.

True

Just saw this:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2138671-research-on-male-animals-prevents-women-from-getting-best-drugs/?utmcampaign=Echobox&utmmmedium=Social&utmsource=Facebook#linkktime=1498490567

regrouted. Thanks for that. I'm not a geneticist either and studied prokaryotes in the main rather than eukaryotes. Nevertheless, I think I managed to get the gist of MTZ. Seems that in mammals (if the mouse model is typical) zygote transcription shoots up only after 1-2 cell divisions.

I hadn't realised that each one of the pair of chromosome in any given cell is 'switched off' either. I'll have to look up on google to see the mechanism.

As to the main question, maybe the reason as to why the images of human bodies are depicted as males, is maybe a relic of early anatomy students mostly having the corpses of executed men to work with - and the tradition built up - just a thought.

This is a really interesting thread.
Now try typing "naked human" into Google and see how the male-female ratio changes (and how many women are lying down).

They are also always white.

Yeah, Creme, it was just her ankle. Very odd.

Collidascope it's normal protocol to only do a pregnancy check if we are imaging the abdomen or pelvis and then we just get the patient to sign a no risk of pregnancy form . This is for all patients between the ages of 12-55.

The thing is it's the radiographer's registration on the line if something goes wrong, sometimes if there's been a problem before , the radiographer might take a belt and braces approach. Having said that a pregnancy test is a bit ott.

My point about the developing blastocyst is referring the maternal-to-zygotic transition:

"In animals, maternal factors contributed by the egg cytoplasm initially control development, while the zygotic nuclear genome is quiescent. Subsequently, the genome is activated, embryonic gene products are mobilized and maternal factors are cleared:

Lee, Miler T., Ashley R. Bonneau, and Antonio J. Giraldez. “Zygotic Genome Activation during the Maternal-to-Zygotic Transition.” Annual review of cell and developmental biology 30 (2014): 581–613.

Even so, re your paternal X chromosome comment, both XX are not read together otherwise we'd be in a lot of trouble over double the amount of expressed genes (dead). At 32 cells (i think - I'm not a geneticist but accred. biomed sci), X inactivation happens, so there in every cell a different X is turned off. The textbook example to understand it is calico cats, which are only ever female as the different patches of coloured fur are developed from a different X being turned on.

Also massive tangent.

A family member of mine recently had to have an X ray on her leg. She explained several times she couldn't be pregnant but they forced her to take a pregnancy test to prove it, which seemed incredibly patronising to me. It seems like if they're scared of litigation or something, all the need to do is get a signature where the woman says she is happy to have the X ray without proving she's not pregnant...

But medics don't 'trust' women

Isn't there an (acne?) Drug that if women take it they have to be put of birth control - even if the maintain they won't be getting pregnant (lesbians/husbands have had vasectomy and other scenarios) or did I misunderstand that

The default is that women can't be trusted not to have sex/be believed to tell the truth

Yep, sorry got my '2' and '3' mixed up...

Perhaps you could use this new-fangled thing called Google Cadno? Especially as you don't trust a mere woman who is an expert in these things to tell you the truth?

ahhh...we have 23 pairs - got the two digits twisted up. ....so what are the other 22 pairs doing then ?

mmm...that might be wrong, I thought we had 32 pairs of chromosomes. I'll need to look it up now....

31 pairs Cadno?? Where on earth did you get that number from?

rather that the blastocyst (10 days to implantation) is developed from the X chromosome with maternal RNA developing it further

? Begs the question as to what the genes on the other 31 pairs of chromosomes are doing at this point of development. It beggars belief that only genes on the X chromosomes are being read at the blastocyst stage.

Also Maternal RNA ? - Do you mean the messenger RNA that's kicking around in the egg just prior to the point of fertilisation ? Wouldn't this get diluted quite quickly with the forthcoming rounds of cell division. There simply must be new RNA production based on the new genome or the entire process doesn't make sense - and as you suggest the X chromosome is being read and, in girls, one of those is the paternal chromosome.

Very interesting regrouted. Of course, in actual fact, women tend to be more physically resilient than men and their life expectancy is significantly higher.

Semantically, it''s not that a foetus starts out as female in form, rather that the blastocyst (10 days to implantation) is developed from the X chromosome with maternal RNA developing it further. At six weeks of gestation, the developing gonads have bipotential - so have the capability to differentiate into either testes or ovaries.

As a medical historian, I understand why men still are positioned as the "standard model" from the echoes of Aristotelian medicine. This model explained women as underdeveloped versions of men led to men being considered as the gold standard of health which women's bodies were compared to. If the right conditions in the womb were sought (dry and hot) you would have a male and if it went wrong (cold and wet) you would have a female - the vagina was described as a literal undescended penis because of these unsatisfactory conditions in the womb by Galen. This pervaded until the 19th century, where the emergence of gynaecology as a distinct medical specialism, incorporated this into the medical model, where women's bodies went wrong because that was the inherent part of being female. Psychiatry also develops into a professional, distinct medical specialism during this time that medical historians have themed as the "feminisation of madness"; moving from brutish monstrous imagery of the chained mad man to the female experience of lunacy with diagnoses of every stage of female development e.g. madness of menstruation, lactational insanity, puerperal psychosis, the mad old maid... Descriptions of the menopause see women being rationalised and becoming more like men, becoming rational and logical beings at long last (I still have a long way to go then).

All foetuses start out as female in form, so actually male is the variant.

I remember realising in Medical School that we were taught the male as the "normal" and the female as the variant , in everything (anatomy/physiology,etc)
I used to flip things the other way round
Eg " The clitoris is like a vestigial penis" becomes "the penis is like an overgrown clitoris"

it's obvious they are rarely tested on pregnant women:
mosaicscience.com/story/pregnancy-testing-drugs
"our efforts to protect women and their fetuses have actually put them both in jeopardy.".
Kind of what I said above; the reasons for not testing are an effort to protect, not exclude

Would you agree to test a drug whilst pregnant? I would not have.

Googling 'human evolution' images is just as depressing.

Trusting women isn't sufficient? Even if they are explicitly told the risks and asked to be clear that they are not pregnant?

Well, the article I posted seemed to indicate that it was testing on pregnant women which was lacking, not women in general, so maybe that is sufficient?
(Maybe my diversion re: H&S at work was a red herring - there's no risk/reward benefit to allowing potentially pregnant women to work with known harmful chemicals, whereas in a drug trial there is).

Trusting women isn't sufficient? Even if they are explicitly told the risks and asked to be clear that they are not pregnant?

I'm not suggesting testing using pregnant women at all, it seems unethical to me to explicitly test things on unborn babies. I'm talking about testing using women who are of child bearing age, and excluding them on the grounds that they might not know they were pregnant. When you could simply do a pregnancy test, and also state that you are very unlikely to be pregnant (ie single and not sexually active).