Sex chromosomes are complicated
When I was pregnant, my partner and I didn’t want to know if our baby was a boy or girl. We weren’t fussed either way, and not knowing meant we could avoid being inundated with loads of pink or blue stuff before the baby had even arrived.
In the end, I had to have an emergency c-section, and when the doctor showed us our baby for the first time, we didn’t notice what was between its legs.
We just saw a baby yelling in shock as it breathed its first few breaths. As they took our baby away to check it over, we both yelled out, wait – is it a boy or a girl?
Because, of course, that’s what we learned in school science classes.
Humans come as males or females. Of our 46 chromosomes, two are the sex chromosomes: XY for male, XX for female. Simple.
As with most things in life, it turns out to be a little more complicated than that.
Some people are born with a single sex chromosome (X or Y), and others with three or more (XXX, XYY, XXY, and so on).
Some males are born XX because of a duplication of part of their Y chromosome, and some females XY because they’ve lost a bit of an X chromosome.
And that’s just the sex chromosomes. Sometimes other genetic changes can influence how our bodies make or respond to hormones, and how we develop when we hit puberty.
In other words, the reality is that people don’t fit into two neat categories, and sometimes, they know they don’t fit the sex they were assigned at birth.
Because of this, the Government is proposing to make it easier for people to change the sex recorded on their birth certificate to reflect how they know they truly are, whether that’s as the opposite sex, intersex, or an unspecified sex.
Not everyone’s happy with this move, but I for one am really pleased to see the Government acknowledge that things aren’t always as clear cut as we think they are.
And if you think humans are complicated, wait until you hear about some of the other organisms we share this planet with.
People don’t fit into two neat categories, and sometimes, they know they don’t fit the sex they were assigned at birth.