Sex is assigned during spermatogenesis

submitted by jjdub7Gay Male Guest Commentator from self.GenderCritical

I realized this might be the most important point that GC people have in our Arsenal.

The fallacy of “sex assigned at birth” is what allows room for the magical thinking of “gender identity” as the “true sex” of an individual by prescribing error to a doctor’s (sigh) objective assessment of secondary sex characteristics as a socially-constructed remnant of “colonialism” (or whatever woke nonsense they’re spewing these days).

If you’re GC, you should be attacking that phrase “sex assigned at birth” (and it’s corollaries AMAB/AFAB) whenever they’re uttered by reminding the audience that no, sex is determined through meiosis, specifically during spermatogenesis, since only the father has a Y to offer in the shuffle.

This assertion kneecaps much of the rest of the gender woo ramblings, in that it re-centers sex as an immutable trait by destroying the semantic games used to distort the reality of the situation.

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[–]MarkTwainiac 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

Many of us have been protesting this language for years. Especially those who are biologists or mums.

But your claim that

Sex is assigned during spermatogenesis

Is just as inaccurate as "sex is assigned at birth."

The accurate statement is: Sex is determined at conception.

Conception occurs when an egg and sperm combine in the process known as fertilization. This normally happens in one of the two Fallopian inside the body of a girl or woman, though it can be done in a lab through IVF too. After fertilization, meiosis occurs; the clump of cells is called a blastocyst. The blastocyst will make its way down the tube into the uterus, and 5-6 days post fertilization, it will implant into the uterine wall and the placenta will begin to grow. If the blastocyst succeeds in implanting, and the development of the placenta proceeds with no problems, a viable pregnancy begins, and the blastocyst becomes an embryo. At 7-8 weeks, the embryo becomes a fetus.

For fertilization/conception to occur requires spermatozoa, colloquially known as sperm. Sperm is made in the male gonads, the testes. But spermatogenesis - the process by which sperm is made - does not itself determine the sex of offspring.

Sex is determined at conception by the merging of one sperm with an egg. But during spermatogenesis males make vast numbers of sperm. WebMD and other sources say that each time a male adolescent or adult ejaculates, he releases 100 million sperm. Half of these will be X, half will be Y. By contrast, women who ovulate release only one egg every 28 days, or 13 each year. Eggs are always X.

Also, once spermatogenesis occurs in the testes, a lot of other things have to happen for sperm cells to get from inside the testes through the male reproductive tract, out the tip of the penis and into a female body where sperm cells can swim up the female reproductive tract towards the Fallopian tubes search of a usually solitary egg. The 100 million sperm cells released each time a male ejaculates all compete for the chance to reach and pierce a single egg.

Even when fertilization occurs, which in the case of most events of ejaculation does not happen, only one out of 100 million sperm cells will be the one to pierce the egg. And which, if any sperm get to pierce an egg is not simply decided by which sperm cell is fastest, strongest and pushiest. The egg plays a role in determining which, if any, sperm cell is let in.

Also, sex is a bit more complicated than just X and Y. Genes and gene mutations on the chromosomes also play a role in determining whether human offspring is male or female. The SRY gene that's usually on the Y chromosome is the main determinant of male sex. But every once in a blue moon, the SRY gene ends up on an X chromosome, so you end up with XX males. Also, since the X chromosome has many more genes than the Y, including the gene that controls both male and female androgen receptors, there are disorders affecting XY sex development such as CAIS, PAIS and MAIS that are on the X chromosome, meaning inherited from the mother. Moreover, in the rapid cell division that occurs immediately and shortly following fertilization, new gene mutations affecting sex development can and do occur.

Finally, what sex a child is thought to be, and which sex is recorded on a child's legal documents, is not determined by

a doctor’s (sigh) objective assessment of secondary sex characteristics

One reason is that, by definition, secondary sex characteristics do not appear until puberty. A child's sex is usually observed long before that, LOL.

Another reason is that most human births through history have not been attended by doctors, and most newborns have not been assessed by doctors soon after birth. Even when women nowadays do give birth in medical settings, the HCP present is likely to be a midwife, and the medical assessment of the newborn's height, weight, Apgar score, heart rate, respiration, color of gums, genital configuration, number of fingers and toes, etc is likely to be done by the midwife or a pediatric nurse.

For many decades now, it's been routine in all medically-monitored pregnancies (and many pregnancies that are not medically monitored) to do prenatal scanning in the second trimester, usually at 14 weeks. These scans can tell fetal sex based on the fetus's primary sex characteristics: gonads and genital configuration. For more than half a century, fetal sex chromosome and genetic testing have also been done. Nowadays, the chromosomal/genetic sex of a fetus can be determined with 100% accuracy at 8-9 weeks through the NIPT, a test of pregnant women's blood drawn from her arm or finger in the standard way. For many years now, the sex of human offspring in parts of the world where women have access to a sonogram machine, and/or basic prenatal medical care, has already been observed and ascertained in utero many months before birth.

When going through prenatal scans and/or prenatal genetic testing, many mums ask that the medical personnel involved not tell us the sex of our fetus because we want to hold off on that knowledge until birth. But even when that happens, most mums do not rely on doctors or other HCPs who might be present at birth to tell us the sex of our newborns. Movies, TV shows and books often depict a stock image of human childbirth in which an often male medical professional who receives the child as it comes out the vagina, or lifts it after cutting into the uterus in a C-section, announces to the woman who's just given birth "It's a boy/girl!" in a dramatic eureka moment. This kind of cliched scene is the product of deep-seated misogyny and medical hegemony: it's meant to depict the doctor or other HCP as the star of the show and the mother as merely a secondary player who after giving birth waits passively to be told the sex of her baby by the all-knowing, all-important representative of medical authority. But that's not how human childbirth usually works, even when HCPs attend and assist births.

Mums can see the sex of our newborns for ourselves with our own eyes, thank you very much, and we can touch our babies with our hands when they are placed on our chests right after birth as they commonly are unless they are in life-threatening physical distress. In fact, it's been customary for decades for women to use mirrors to see their children come into the world - and mirrors are customarily used even in C-sections so that women can see.

Finally, in terms of who decides what a child's legal sex is, in most jurisdictions the responsibility for registering a child's birth and applying for a birth certificate rests with the parents, principally the mother. Not with doctors or any other HCPs. HCPs who assess newborns do record their sex in medical records. But medical records are not the same as birth registries. When a child's birth is reported to a government birth registry, the person who attests to the child's sex is the person who fills out and signs the forms, usually the mother. Even if the woman is illiterate and needs someone to fill in the paperwork for her, she (or the father) will still be the one providing the information and legally attesting to its accuracy to birth registry authorities.

TL;DR version: human sex is determined at conception; observed and ascertained through prenatal testing during development in utero; and observed again at birth. Human sex is recorded in medical records during gestation in utero, and again upon or after birth. After birth, a child's sex is recorded for legal purposes in government records when the birth is reported to the registrar of birth that has jurisdiction in each case and a government birth certificate is applied for.

[–]jjdub7Gay Male Guest Commentator[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Yes, this is true in that an individual does not even exist until fertilization. My point was more to emphasize the deterministic nature of the process while pointing out that in all cases, the conference of the SRY gene must be done during the father’s meiosis.

after fertilization, meiosis occurs

Do you mean mitosis here? Meiosis does again occur after fertilization, albeit 10-12 years after.

[–]MarkTwainiac 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Do you mean mitosis here? Meiosis does again occur after fertilization, albeit 10-12 years after.

Yes, I should have said that after fertilization, mitosis occurs - or rather, mainly mitosis.

One reason for the confusion is that in the first two days after fertilization, the egg goes through some processes that were considered phases of Meiosis II back in ye olden days when I learned about biology and had kids. It used to be frequently said that fertilization triggers "completion of meiosis" for ovum, and that the earliest cell division that occurs in the first 48 hours take place in a phase called "the transition from meiosis to mitosis." A lot of teaching materials and texts still in use today employ this sort of language, such as these two from 1998 from 2000 respectively:

Fertilization triggers continuation of meiosis II. The ovulated oocyte is maintained at metaphase II nuclear status by increased maturation promoting factor (MPF) activity (A). Fertilization triggers continuation of meiosis II, resulting in a two-pronuclear pre-embryo displaying two polar bodies and pronucleus (B). The proposed molecular mechanisms are shown at the bottom: the fertilizing spermatozoon induces oscillations in the intra-oocyte concentrations of Ca 2. This results in proteolytic degradation of c-mos and cyclin-B, and thus discontinuation of MPF activity, which allows the pre-embryo to leave meiosis and resume regular cell divisions.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Fertilization-triggers-continuation-of-meiosis-II-The-ovulated-oocyte-is-maintained-at_fig5_13553203

Not only does fertilization lead to the mixing of paternal and maternal chromosomes, but it also induces a number of changes in the egg cytoplasm that are critical for further development. These alterations activate the egg, leading to the completion of oocyte meiosis and initiation of the mitotic cell cycles of the early embryo.

The increase in cytosolic Ca2+ following fertilization also signals the completion of meiosis (Figure 14.42). In eggs arrested at metaphase II, the metaphase to anaphase transition is triggered by a Ca2+-dependent activation of the anaphase-promoting complex. The resultant inactivation of MPF leads to completion of the second meiotic division, with asymmetric cytokinesis (as in meiosis I) giving rise to a second small polar body.

Following completion of oocyte meiosis, the fertilized egg (now called a zygote) contains two haploid nuclei (called pronuclei), one derived from each parent. In mammals, the two pronuclei then enter S phase and replicate their DNA as they migrate toward each other. As they meet, the zygote enters M phase of its first mitotic division. The two nuclear envelopes break down, and the condensed chromosomes of both paternal and maternal origin align on a common spindle. Completion of mitosis then gives rise to two embryonic cells, each containing a new diploid genome. These cells then commence the series of embryonic cell divisions that eventually lead to the development of a new organism.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9901/

What occurs soon after fertilization is very complex, and is still being unraveled. An article from 2014:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4021448/#:~:text=Following%20fertilization%2C%20the%20egg%20exits,male%20haploid%20pronucleus%20is%20formed.

A brief description of what happens after fertilization here, in plainer language:

For the first 12 hours after conception, the fertilized egg remains a single cell. After 30 hours or so, it divides from one cell into two. Some 15 hours later, the two cells divide to become four. And at the end of 3 days, the fertilized egg cell has become a berry-like structure made up of 16 cells. This structure is called a morula, which is Latin for mulberry.

During the first 8 or 9 days after conception, the cells that will eventually form the embryo continue to divide. At the same time, the hollow structure in which they have arranged themselves, called a blastocyst, is slowly carried toward the uterus by tiny hair-like structures in the fallopian tube, called cilia.

The blastocyst, though only the size of a pinhead, is actually composed of hundreds of cells. During the critically important process of implantation, the blastocyst must attach itself to the lining of the uterus or the pregnancy will not survive.

If we take a closer look at the uterus, you can see that the blastocyst actually buries itself in the lining of the uterus, where it will be able to get nourishment from the mother’s blood supply.

https://medlineplus.gov/ency/anatomyvideos/000025.htm

As to your to claim that regarding human gametes

Meiosis does again occur after fertilization, albeit 10-12 years after.

I think it's important to point out that this is not true across the board: what you say only applies to male humans. The germ cells of female humans undergo Meiosis I whilst we are still embryos.

Starting at 4 weeks of development, primordial germ cells begin differentiating into oogonia in the ovaries of female embryos. Once the oogonia are formed, they enter Meiosis I and undergo DNA replication to form primary oocytes. A future girl/woman's primary oocytes are formed by the 5th month of fetal life and remain dormant in a prophase of Meiosis I until later on when puberty commences.

This is why it's long been commonly said that girls/women are born with all our eggs already; indeed, we had all our gametes when we were still inside our mothers' wombs.

Recent research has suggested that females might be able to generate new ova later on in life, so the longstanding claim that we come into the world with all the eggs we'll ever have already in our ovaries might not be entirely accurate.

But that aside, as of the present day, it's still considered an established fact that only male humans begin germ cell meiosis and the process of gamete production at puberty.

To your main point: yes, the principal determinant of whether a human develops as male or female is whether the sperm cell that combines with an ovum in fertilization is either X or Y. But to me, your framing seemed to be trying to equate the creation of sperm cells in the testes - spermatogenesis - with the creation of sexed human offspring. This struck me as very simplistic, because obviously a whole lot more has to happen for even a potential sexed human life form to come into being than just guys making sperm.

Your framing also stuck me as sexist, because it seemed to me that you were attempting to play up and center the role that male humans play in determining the sex of offspring, and to downplay, sideline and overlook the female role as though it's secondary, minimal or even non-existent. After all, your comment focused solely on spermatogenesis, the process of making male gametes, and only mentioned one parent, the male one, the biological father. You continue demonstrating what to me looks like a sexist bias by in your recent post by claiming:

the conference of the SRY gene must be done during the father’s meiosis.

As though all there is to making a male child and becoming a father is generating sperm containing the SRY gene.

When the reality is, most human males make hundreds of billions or trillions of viable sperm in their lives, but not a single one of those innumerable sperm cells have any chance of leading to offspring of either sex without major contributions and efforts by someone female. For a human being of either sex to come into being requires that a sperm cell fuse with an ovum made by a female person, something we do only 13 times a year for only about half our lives, plus innumerable other contributions from the female person after that. The male role in human reproduction is to make sperm and to ejaculate it or have it removed from the testes with medical assistance. But for female people, maturing and releasing eggs is only a tiny portion of what human reproduction entails and requires of us. Minimizing or entirely ignoring what reproduction requires for the female half of the human race is something that I find all too many men engage in way too freely.

BTW, I am not accusing you of being sexist personally, or of having sexist intent. I'm just saying that your framing in this instance came off to me as sexist; indeed, it seemed reminiscent of what used to be called "male chauvinism" and a new iteration of efforts by males over the course of history to "big up men" in an area of life where nearly all the effort, cost, risk, pain and accomplishment is borne and done by females. But I admit, this might simply be due to my own perhaps skewed perceptions and heightened sensitivities. I have no idea what your intent was, and I do not mean to cast aspersions on you as a person.

One final point. I know that in the vanishingly rare instances when XX people have the SRY gene or fragments of it, the assumption is that the X chromosome containing the SRY or SRY fragments is from the father - and that some error occurred during meiosis of male gametes for this to happen. But has this been proven? Could it be that some ova somehow end up with SRY fragments? I have no idea is there's any way that this is possible, but it seems to me that the the male bias which regards males as the norm and always depicts males as the leading and central players in human endeavors that has run through medical science from the start has led to a lot of mistaken assumptions.

[–]FlippyKing 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

is determined even right? One can make a determination about something that already exists, but a manager of a burger joint does not determine the schedule, such a manager doesn't determine who will work Friday night, but decides it or assigns it. One might make a determination about something that is from looking at a range of things that are, I just don't know determine feels right in this context. Assign might be ill-fitting too, but I think it is close. I don't need six paragraphs about biology though to justify determine over assign. There must be better words than both.

Maybe: "The sex of a person is carried into the embryo by the sperm at conception", or "The sex of a person is self-evident at conception", or maybe if this is actually true "the sex of a person is set at conception, and can be determined in utero through a variety of means which are always consistent".

None of these are succinct nor as punchy as a counter to the "assigned at birth" nonsense "sex is assigned at conception'. It flows in conversation/debate easily. "Sex is assigned at birth, but gender is forever (or whatever bs they say). "No, sex is assigned at conception by the sperm that fertilized the egg, and gender is a lie." I don't do "rolls off the tongue" very well I guess.

[–]MarkTwainiac 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

As with many words, "determine" can be used in different ways, each with a slightly different shade of meaning. Oxford says the first meaning of the verb "determine" is

cause (something) to occur in a particular way; be the decisive factor in

Synonyms for the way "to determine" means to establish, decide, set, ordain, fix, rule, govern.

Determination has a different meaning. Though the verb "determine" and the noun "determination" have roots in the same words in Latin, Old French and Middle English, the meanings of two different words branched off from one another a bit.

I don't think "sex is assigned at conception" works here because "assign" has a very different meaning to determine, establish, fix. I think the sentences where you use "set" work best.

To assign as I see it always involves a decision or intervention. Assigning sex, nationality or a place in a queue is either the result of some kind of thought process - whether by a sentient being, a machine or AI - or some other kind of process involving human cognizance, intent and action, like pulling a name out of hat or using a bingo ball machine. Most people don't think that's how nature works.

In this sentence of yours, I think "set" works well:

"the sex of a person is set at conception, and can be determined in utero through a variety of means which are always consistent".

But I'd ditch the "always consistent" part at the end because sometimes chromosomal/genetic sex that can be revealed at 8-9 weeks through the NIPT or CVS is not consistent with the genitals and gonads that can be seen via sonogram starting at 14 weeks.

I'd also say "human sex is set at conception" rather than "the sex of a person is set at conception" coz the latter gets into the thorny issue of when a human blastocyst/embryo/fetus becomes a person. This not only takes the convo into the politically charged debates around abortion, but it can lead to needless pain for many women who have miscarried - which is a lot of women.

Fact is, fertilization of an egg does not automatically result in a viable pregnancy, or in any pregnancy; and a lot of pregnancies that do start will end up terminating naturally, particularly in the first trimester but not only then. I am not sure of this is still believed to be true, but a couple of decades ago it was thought that one-third of all fertilizations either led to pregnancy that resulted in miscarriage, or never led to pregnancy at all because the blastocyst failed to implant in the uterine wall or grow a proper placenta. So whilst all persons start at/with conception, not all human conceptions result in persons.

[–]FlippyKing 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Excellent points. I think the divergence between determine and determination probably has more to do with just how they are used than any divergence in meaning, as a lot of verbs can be used as nouns by adding the -tion suffix. Ruination is a noun used in the circles I travel in but "the ruination of" could better be said "to ruin". I suspect a lot of -tion constructs like that are better said another way.

Human sex is set at conception rolls off the tongue sort of, but really sex is set at conception, no?

[–]MarkTwainiac 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Human sex is set at conception rolls off the tongue sort of, but really sex is set at conception, no?

Since we're trying to counter claims of gender ideologues here, I think it's best to specify human sex or mammalian sex. Otherwise, it gives the genderists an opening to bring up clownfish, banana slugs and other relatively rare species in which sequential or simultaneous hermaphroditism occurs.

I would say, "human sex is set at conception" or "In humans, sex is set at conception" rather than "mammalian sex" because gender ideology is focused mainly on human sex. The aim of the trans movement isn't to undermine sex as a category amongst farm animals, fish species or even other primates - the aim is to challenge human sex as a category and replace it with gender. They want to pretend there are no physical difference between human males and human females that matter and or have permanence. But they're not trying to make light of the differences between males and females of other species. They're not saying that there's no difference between what comes out when you milk a bull compared to when you milk a cow, or that bulls can become cows and cows can become bulls.

Also, human sex is complicated enough without bringing in any other species. I personally am confident talking about human sex specifically because I'm somewhat well versed about many aspects of human sex, human reproduction, human female biology, and the physical differences between male and female humans. But I don't know much of anything about other species, not even other mammals, including primates. All I know is that whenever I look into other animals, I learn that even mammals are different from humans in many ways. For example, I didn't know until a couple of years ago that kangaroos have two uteruses and three vaginas.

That said, when discussing what sex is and how biologists distinguish between male and female, I am comfortable making some broad, general statements that apply to all species of animals and plants that reproduce sexually and only sexually. Such as the statement that males make small games, whilst females make large gametes.

[–]FlippyKing 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Fair enough, but we are arguing against people who run to seahorses and clownfish and animae characters every chance they get to make their faux-arguments.

I think by saying "sex is set at conception" makes it more succinct. Adding the word human offers another target for them to punch at or another place they can try to make distractions. They idea that embryos go through various stages that reflect evolutionary stages of life gives them a chance to distract the gullible with some nonsense about what stage this all happens in or some other thing.

A good boxer has a stance and approaches the opponent in a way that exposes very little to try to punch. Saying human sex, and not just sex, makes it seem like we're saying human sex is some uniquely complicated thing separate from sex. The only real extra complications added to "human sex" are the lies we tell ourselves and too many others in pursuit of sexual activity and, now that "trans" is a thing, the lies about how "human sex" is supposedly a social construct and one's un-empirically assessable "gender" is sacrosanct.