'Males have given birth naturally through the birth canal'

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Who knew? Every day's a school day on Twitter.

This is the case claimed as evidence: www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mostly-male-woman-gives-birth-to-twins-in-medical-miracle-10033528.html

As many people have capably pointed out, this is an extraordinary case of a person with a DSD (Swyer syndrome, so genetically male but developed as female with a womb but no ovaries) giving birth to twins via CS (so not through the birth canal ) after receiving a huge amount of medical support to conceive through IVF and to keep the pregnancy going to near term. This is not the gotcha Oger appears to think.

1 "male" compared to 3 billion women on the planet. Well that makes all the difference.

And we don't know anything at all about the health of the babies, because thIs always seem to be the missing element in these reports.

She already had the most of the plumbing to do it. Not really the same as a male with a cock and balls giving birth.

Also did that twitter user just misgender that woman. She clearly identifies as female.

Presumably it was the female 5% that did the giving birth though? If she had only Male dna it would have been impossible.

I should have described her as a woman rather than a person. From what I understand of Swyer Syndrome, it's the DSD that featured on Call the Midwife. At conception the zygote is male because it has XY chromosomes. However, there's a defect on the Y chromosome which means the body doesn't develop in the typically male way. The foetus doesn't develop a penis or testicles and does develop labia, vagina and a womb, so looks externally like a female, but there are no ovaries, or ovaries but no eggs. The baby will be brought up as a girl.

However, puberty won't happen naturally as her body won't produce oestrogen and progesterone, so no menstruation, widening of the hips, development of breasts. This is the point when it usually gets diagnosed nowadays and it can be treated with HRT to force a typical female puberty. Pregnancy can only occur via IVF using donor eggs as the woman has none.

Estimated that this happens in 1 in 100,000 births. So very, very rare.

So, an unusual case of an intersex woman (who would have been infertile without donor IVF) - absolutely nothing to do with trans. There's a surprise.

The tweet seems to demonstrate a low level of understanding of female biology on the part of Oger.

This is a rare case of someone who is genotypically male but phenotypically female and who needed modern medical technology to conceive. Nothing to do with bog standard males like Oger.

The tweet seems to demonstrate a low level of understanding of female biology on the part of Oger.

I suspect Oger could have a perfect understanding of said biology, but it would be ignored for anything that could usefully be used as propaganda.

absolutely nothing to do with trans.

This

Billions of women have give birth but his one, isolated case trumps absolutely everything. 🤦‍♀️

Then she's a woman.

When words such as woman, breast and vagina are fraught with so much difficulty for believers of trans ideology, I'm surprised the word birth is used so freely.

I'm a pretty un-feminine woman, but the two times I have given birth were a uniquely female experience; I realised this amazing physical connection with my mother, her mother, and all our grandmothers going back in time. Like Russian dolls opened up and spread out accross centuries.

Might have been tripping on the gas & air a bit.

Nonsense argument. Let's unpack it:

Males have given birth naturally through the birth canal.

Before the discovery of chromosomes, we figured out the sex of a baby based on what genitals it was born with.

In this case, that of Swyers Syndrome, babies look unambiguously female. Their external sex is female, they also have a vagina, a functional uterus and fallopian tubes.

Problems arise in puberty, because what they don't have are sex glands (aka gonads aka ovaries or testes). They have what's called streak or fibrous scar tissue instead.

Because their bodies cannot produce sex hormones, these girls do not go through puberty at all. So, if we leave it to nature, nothing would happen at all.

But we don't leave it to nature, doctors prescribe these girls female sex hormones to allow their female reproductive organs and their secondary characteristics to develop. They go through puberty and start menstruating.

As they don't produce their own eggs, again, no pregnancy happens "naturally". But assisted fertility clinics can help these women to get pregnant. Their womb is fully functional and they can carry a baby to term. Vaginal birth may be difficult, however. Hence the c-section in this case.

This very rare DSD is actually a good example to explain why we don't determine sex based on sex chromosomes alone (which we've only been able to do for a fraction of human history in any case).

Today we look at

-chromosomes
-gonads
-sex organs and genitals

We don't look at a baby born with female genitals, raise her as female and then call her male when puberty doesn't set in. Besides, by nature, such a child has even fewer male attributes than female ones:

No male genitals
No male gonads
No male secondary characteristics
No male reproductive system

Yes, she has a y-chromosome. And she has:

Female genitals
Female reproductive organs

With hormone therapy, she also develops

Female secondary sex characteristics

Oger may choose to ignore the fact that in ambiguous cases sex is determined on the basis of several attributes. Or that using someone with a complex medical condition for a gotcha that doesn't even get us is low.

But the word "naturally" is spectacularly ill chosen here.

And most importantly, it continues to be the case that no male human has ever been pregnant and given birth. Whether naturally or otherwise.

@CharlieParley 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 can I be your BFF?

This is in no way applicable to other "males", if that's what people are thinking... I read about a similar case on here (www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3320759-XY-woman-gives-birth) where the woman had mosaicism - where there are two genotypes present in the body. Some cells are XY and some are XX.

It was also in India, and the woman had come from multiple generations of people with genetic abnormalities. I suspect genetic scientists seek out people like this to experiment on... This would never have happened without the meddling of scientists, and no way would a baby could have been brought to term without an actual WOMB involved!

According to the news report this woman had no idea she had '95 per cent male genes'. Clearly she and her husband were having trouble conceiving, which was when her unusual genetic type was discovered.

I have a lot of sympathy who are in this woman's situation and I am glad that she and her (thankfully supportive) husband were able to have the children they wanted.

It was only a matter of time, though, before the trans brigade hijacked a genuine case of 'intersexness' or however it is described to push their own tiresome agenda.

In other news, a whale is not a fish. It's an insect.

(2m 20secs)

It's quite obscene that this woman, who has an incredibly rare intersex condition, is used by people like Oger to justify a deluded position that they are biologically female.

Oger has fathered three children (presumably) the old fashioned way using male reproductive organs and we're supposed to just overlook this fact all because of one very rare medical case that bears no relation to Oger whatsoever.

The fertility doctor who treated her seems to have deliberately sensationalized the story (and therefore his success) by stressing she was "genetically male" and claiming it's like a male giving birth.

No, as the articles show, it's nothing like that. Unlike what happens in these cases if doctors diagnose the condition when puberty doesn't set in, this patient never sought help for that reason but for infertility after getting married and trying to conceive. Her body never went through puberty and her uterus remained at a prepubescent stage of development.

I have no idea why the doctor would claim this is like a male giving birth - males do not have a uterus, not even a prepubescent one.

You know who has an underdeveloped, prepubescent uterus? Prepubescent girls and women with various DSDs. Not males.

This woman is definitely not biologically male as some of the articles claimed. As ArnoldWhatshisknickers points out above, she is genotypically male (her genetic make-up is male) and phenotypically female (her observable external and internal physiological characteristics are female). The latter of course means that she is indeed biologically female (details in my previous comment).

This is not just desperate stuff, not just disrespectful to this patient and those with DSDs as a group, it's also just plain stupid.

The argument seems to be:

A is a healthy, typical member of group 1, meeting all membership criteria and achieving something exclusive to members of group 1.

However, A wishes to belong to group 2, meeting no membership criteria.

B meets many of the membership criteria of group 2 and only one criteria of group 1. Both society and the medical profession consider B to belong into group 2. With medical assistance, B then goes on to achieve something exclusive to members of group 2.

A argues the existence of B means that A should be considered a member of group 2.

The logic does not compute. Can you make sense of it?

STCM654 you're most welcome. Glad you liked my comment.

Oh if only they could.

How does this fit with the "A woman is of the sex who makes large gametes" position, though? Am I correct in thinking that this condition means that a person would be incapable of making any kind of gametes? In which case, since both systems are "broken" using FondOfBeetles' terminology, how is the determination of sex between the differing expressions of genotype and phenotype decided? (Apologies if I've used the wrong language, my biology GCSE is stretched beyond its limits by this!)

How does this fit with the "A woman is of the sex who makes large gametes" position, though?

It fits just fine. Remember "sex" in that definition refers to a categorisation of humans into two groups. The definitions I use are either:

Female: typically possessing XX chromosomes, ovaries, a uterus and a vagina
Or
Female: of or denoting the sex class capable of producing large gametes and bearing offspring

The first definition already hints that some females may be atypical, as we know is the case with DSDs. However if they have most of these attributes, they are still female and not male as are those who may lose their womb or ovaries through illness.

"Male" does not simply denote someone who lacks one or more female attributes, or vice versa - the more popular version: a woman is not a man without a penis.

For the second definition, I refer to class-based analysis:

We are defining the attributes of distinct and mutually exclusive, specific sex classes (female: large gametes, male: small gametes).

Individual deviations from characteristics common to the class as a whole do not invalidate the class.

A female who does not produce large gametes does not produce small ones either. She is simply a female who does not produce large gametes. A perfectly normal state of affairs for human females throughout our lives - up to menarche, we produce none. After menopause, we produce none. When we are pregnant or breastfeeding, we may not produce large gametes, same goes for illness, stress, professional level sports training, being underweight, having hormonal imbalances etc.

If an individual female is not capable of producing large gametes, it does not exclude her from the female sex class and it does not include her in the male sex class either. She is a female at a particular point in her development or a female with medical issues.

Class-based definitions also work like this:

Not every female produces large gametes or bears off-spring, but every person who does is female.

Thinking about this, the article says 95% male; but she has xy chromosome and the y doesn't work.

The y is what makes you male, but she doesn't have a function y. So how is she male at all. She a woman with only one working chromosome which is the x.

Yes, Swyer syndrome is more comparable to XO aneploidy (Turner syndrome) than to standard XY. Women with both disorders are sterile and may require HRT (because ovaries don’t develop completely) and have other health issues.

“Genetically male” actually means “has functional a SRY gene (and other y linked primary male pathway genes)” rather than “has a Y chromosome”

There are also XX males where sry has trans located (moved) from the y to another chromosome via mutation. They are similar to the more common XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome) in that they are phenotypically male but have some medical issues.

XX sry translocation are genetically male, despite being XX

XY sry (or other Y gene) inactivation are genetically female, despite being XY