I have an experiment for you.

[ThanksMsMay]

Go to google images and type in "human body"

What do you notice?

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

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...

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.

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.

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

They are also always white.

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).

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.

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

True