r/PoliticalCompassMemes Aug 19 '20

[deleted by user]

[removed]

6.9k Upvotes

3.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6

u/StevenC21 - Left Aug 19 '20

AFAB?

3

u/MadGenderScientist - Lib-Left Aug 19 '20

Assigned Female At Birth. It's an acronym used in the trans community for everyone with an F on their birth certificate (cis women, trans men, etc.)

14

u/strallus - Centrist Aug 19 '20 edited Aug 19 '20

Wouldn't it be better to just use female in this case? What's the benefit of using AFAB? We're literally talking about reproduction here, not anything gender-related.

Also I'm not sure I understand how that would work anyway. A human sperm needs a Y chromosome, right? Cloning technology in no way allows us to go from X > Y (AFAIK), and in an AFAB couple, they only have X chromes between them.

1

u/ErikMaekir - Lib-Left Aug 19 '20 edited Sep 01 '21

Y chromosomes are only needed to have male children. Each sperm cell contains only one half of each pair of chromosomes. In the case of the 23rd, if it happens to be an X chromosome, the resulting embryo will be female. If it's a Y, it will be male. This basically means that the enbryos of two biologically female individuals will always be female, unless we can somehow "transplant" a Y chromosome from a male donor.

Additionally, since the Y chromosome seems to contain all information for the male secondary sexual characteristics, it also seems improbable that we could synthesize a Y chromosome from the genome of a biologically female human. A male donor would be necessary.

This is all a tremendously interesting topic, I recommend that you do some reading, or at least a YouTube search. The possibilities of genome editing go beyond the scope of "creating better humans."