this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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though the meme is cool, gender isn't particularly a biology (or 'advance biology') thing. biology deals with sexes, their expressions and functionalities. gender is more of a personal and social concept but often related to sex characteristics (cis).
and yes, advanced biology tells sex determination isn't as easy as XX or XY or even looking at genitals like a creep.
and oh, for giggles consider fungi :)
Adding to this: XX and XY works for mammals, but not for other vertebrates (fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians). Birds and reptiles have Z and W chromosomes, and unlike in mammals where females are homozygotes, males in these groups are homozygotes. Some reptiles have temperature dependent sex determination, where ambient temperature above some value will produce males or females (depends on species). Some reptiles are composed entirely of females.
Some fish will straight up change sexes depending on age and male-female ratio in a social group.
In other groups it's not even different chromosomes but simply copy number of specific genes.
Plants can do all sorts of whacky things like produce seeds and pollen in the same individual.
Fungi are an entirely different cluster fuck because they have mating types which are not simple binaries.
Eukaryotic sex determination isn't a binary and it isn't even a nicely categorizable spectrum. It's a grab-bag of whatever doesn't perma-fuck your genome.
Source: me, I'm a biologist. Though admittedly I work on animals so my understanding of fungi and plant stuff is fuzzy at best.
And bee queen generate full-animal-sized flying sperm, aka drones.
plenty of animals can gender swap, be hermaphrodites, or produce asexually.
But it easy, we just make it complicated with social bullshit and attention craving. The fact that no one is exactly set to be perfect copies, doesnt mean anything. The fact that outliers exist, doesnt mean anything. You ask the owner of a dog if its a boy or a girl, they will tell you. And you wanna know how they know? They looked between its legs. It really is, that easy.
The kind of logic being pushed today, is basically saying that you cant class human beings as a bipedal species because 200 per million people are born with no legs. Which is dumb as fuck.
https://xkcd.com/435/
I would say gender is probably centered about around psychology, ranges mostly from sociology to biology, with a just little bit going into chemistry
maybe like
What's the y-axis?
purity.
as in whether it applies to the real world is entirely a symbolic construct that has no use/reflection of the real world.
practical importance to gender
As perceived by me
(only the most scientific of measurements)
More yes
Reason for another XKCD comic about bad graphs (or ten).
Slime mold(which is not a mold or fungi) looks around nervously in it's 13 different sexes.
Psychology is technically a branch of advanced biology