Clever people believing silly things

In the history of humankind, we have found a single example of an xxy human with a female reproductive system.

It is also not a 100% xxy organism afaik, but some mosaicism, that obviously did not affect the gonades and gamete. The gamete was still an egg (X), not sperm. Given the gamete determine an organism's sex, the organism is still female.

The existence of mules does not prove that some donkeys are horses.

I think saying it to a woman who has given birth is a 1 in 7 billion likelihood though.

Quite.

Barracker you've truly been on fire the last day or two (maybe longer, but I'm not always lurking as much as other times).

I think saying it to a woman who has given birth is a 1 in 7 billion likelihood though.

Klinefelters is a male disorder of sex development. Boys born with Klinefelters are considered male.
The example quoted upthread is not only rare for the general population, it's extremely rare for Klinefelters too.

"You could be XXY and not even know it." Your colleague was correct. Approximately 1 in 660 men have XXY chromosomes, many have no symptoms and do not know they have XXY . www.nhs.uk/conditions/klinefelters-syndrome/

I agree though that this doesn't prove that humans aren't a dimorphic species.

Surely exceptions prove the rule?

Marvellous.
In the history of humankind, we have found a single example of an xxy human with a female reproductive system.

We must immediately ignore and dismantle any meaning relating to the unambiguous and binary sex status of the remaining 7.2 billion humans because reasons.

Also, up next, why humans don't actually have 46 chromosomes, and why two legged people are a myth.

Yes, there are extraordinary and exceptional cases in medical literature.
Yes, there are quirks in nature that produce variation. These do not prove that the statistical norm is a myth.
The norm is right there, giving context to the remarkable exception.
The exceptions stand in stark relief against the norm.

Arguing that a one in several billion chance sometimes occurs, so the usual several billion occurrences should be ignored is how lottery tickets get sold.

We don't and can't organise society around the notion that a billion examples of reality cannot be relied upon because an exception was once found.

We work with what we can be sure of, and we accommodate those biological exceptional cases individually when they occur.

I dont think it is centred on that one fact regarding XXY

Its centered on the fact that even 'intelligent' people can believe stupid stuff

The thread was centered on whether it was possible to be an xxy female despite being fertile. This case shows it is indeed possible.

As far as I am aware there is precisely one case of this so when the OP says that a colleague tells her she could be XXY without knowing it the odds are about 7.5 billion to one.

Those are the same odds as being Paul McCartney.

If that's asking me (not quite sure) thatdamnwoman, it means that there are indeed a lot of clever people in academia who don't actually know a lot of the real-world context around their supposed subject. Generously it's because they're focused on their specialism. Ungenerously - and this does happen - it's because they've always been in the education system, never wanted to leave it, knew nothing else, and, well, know nothing else. Middle class bubble

And this means?

My husband and I have both worked in university support. Never equate academia and knowledge. Sadly, while there are many academics who are actually dedicated to knowledge such as you op, there are many more who simply never left school.

The thread was centered on whether it was possible to be an xxy female despite being fertile. This case shows it is indeed possible.

I found the report; it concerns an xxy mother with three children, one of whom is also an xxy female: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11173857

Very interesting, drmartin, but how is it relevant to the main point of this discussion?

I have a female brain, a female liver, female skin and female kidneys, in fact female everything. That’s because I am female and have been since conception. I also have a degree in Maths, good spatial awareness and I can read maps. I have worked in an industry where there are very few women, and which requires considerable physical strength and good mechanical skills. I have given birth to two children and cared for my parents in their later years. Sometimes I dress in a very feminine way, sometimes I wear jeans and boots. All of this is entirely consistent with my being a woman.

I got ahead of myself typing. The other case cited was a FERTILE XXY female: "In the literature, different cases with 47,XXY karyotype and clinical features have been reported. Most of these cases were diagnosed androgen insensitivity syndrome while the others were reported in ranged from the infertility to the completely fertile female case." Sorry for the oversight. I'd track down the report on the fertile woman, but I need to get back to work (I'm a librarian)

Here's a clinical report on A New Female Case with 47,XXY Karyotype and SRY. www.omicsonline.org/open-access/a-new-female-case-with-47xxy-karyotype-and-sry-2167-0250-1000157.php?aid=71945 It cites a previous reported in which the woman was female. The truth is, it actually is possible. As someone with another rare intersex condition I've met a wide range of others and learned it is wise to keep an open mind. Weird exceptions are extremely rare, but we do exist. Someone I know found out when she was researching her symptoms and ran across a research paper that turned out to be about HER by her own doctor! The doctor had refused to tell her the truth. Another turned out to have had one leg of her Y chromosome transposed with a leg of chromosome 17, giving her symptoms that usually occur in xy females but she was xx.

We take many short cuts in deciding what we think about things, often not arguing them out fully (I had done this with trans-acceptance before I peak-transed) and therefore I will only respect the opinion of someone who can logically argue their case and back it up with scientific evidence which is widely corroborated. So far I have seen none of that from the TWA viewpoint, just an assertion of ‘feeling’ trumping biology.

I think many supporters of TWAW have not argued it through. In my jobs it has just been blurrily hurried though as if very similar to homosexuality, so of course we unthinkingly go ‘gosh yes gay men and lesbians were treated badly in the past, we must make sure we respect all.’ It is only when we start to look at the details that we realise the difference.

As regards religion, again I think most TWAW supporters are being polite, tolerating something they don’t think is actually true, just as many people are polite about those who believe in God or ghosts or homeopathy (a belief that science doesn’t support and can’t be proved). Some people seem to be able to have the cognitive dissonance to take it further. I used to be a Christian who could balance a kind caring God with random appalling acts of nature and humans, so I can sort of see how it’s possible but only if you elevate your belief (in religion or in gender) to the point of saying it can’t be questioned because it is beyond our understanding.

Plenty of clever people believe in the supernatural, too. Belief in the supremacy and reality of gender identities is just like a religion and I think people follow it for much the same reasons and resist logical arguments for the same reasons as well. I also knew a Christian who had studied evolution at the university level and the elaborate flips he had trained his brain to perform to reconcile these two things were incredible.

I suppose like most people I like to think that I am reasonably intelligent and able to think critically, but I know I have accepted lots of things at face value because I liked or respected the person saying them or simply because they confirmed something I already thought. I don't really believe that very many people are truly immune to this, if any at all - we all have our blind spots, though they will be in different areas. I can explain my own thought processes as an ex-woke wrt trans issues. I used to make my own brain do flips in a desperate effort to make trans ideology make sense because I really wanted to be a 'good feminist' and an 'ally' and my nagging thoughts that it didn't make sense and was damaging to women were threatening that identity. Finding out more about radical feminism gave me permission, if you like, to really properly step out of that box because then I could do it without thinking of myself as hateful or anti-feminist. Though I am still very much aware that a lot of people would still see me in those terms. Perhaps all this simply means I am intellectually weak - I'm certainly no genius - but as I say I think we all have our blind spots and this was definitely one for me. As a contrast, Christianity was not a blind spot because I had none of my image of myself tied up in it (raised nominally C of E but nothing hardcore), so I was easily able to think my way out of that in childhood.

I hear well educated, intelligent religious people making well constructed arguments about aspects of religion. However all their reasoning is based on their belief that God exists. Consequently I discount all they say because I don't personally hold this belief.

When I was young, I was told that it was perfectly OK to question my religion - "ask hard questions!" they said. So I did, only to find it was really only OK if you then accepted the approved answers.

Much about the trans debate is so familiar to me.

It was I think langcleg who I first saw pointing this out but it’s fabulously to the point:

if he believes there’s more than two sexes, where are the other gametes?

Tell him that it is very easy: the very fact that the great majority of people (99%?) are either XX or XY proves that humans are a dimorphic species. The preservation of overwhelmingly XX and XY genetic sets throughout evolution proves that the dimorphism is an indispensible prerequisite of reproduction, on which life depends.
Intersex conditions are reproductively speaking dead ends. They my happen in every new generation, but the do not propagate (infertility).

If your colleague was right, the overwhelming binary of genetic conditions (XX vs XY at 99% or so) would not exist, but instead all kinds of chromosome sets or subsequent diferentiation would be pretty much evenly distributed, as evolution would not have had any selection pressure to keep up the genetic binary. But they are not, proving that the sex binary is at the core of human existence.