At conception, none of us had any reproductive organs or cells. But at least there are those who are trying to reconcile what is being said with what is physically true. Such examinations can lead people to shift political affiliations once they understand. And that is cause for hope.
Technically if we are basing it on the reproductive gametes at conception, then that would mean that everyone is agender, since no one has gametes at conception.
So, either no sex exists - as in that clump of initial cells - or everyone is female since that’s how we all start??? And a fertilized egg is NOT a person. 🫠
Sex isn’t gender, and sex is t genitalia. All are female until they aren’t, and some men have vaginas and some women have penises. Something didn’t occur to do a physical switch. This is all simple if you know science but they don’t believe in science because facts get in the way of their agenda.
it's not pedantic. it's plastering the language that a human is a person with personhood at conception everywhere that it can be because they're coming for the wombs. this is gilead, nothing is accidental here.
We have laws protecting our trans citizens in Minnesota. Executive orders are powerless. We are Minnesota nice, but don’t fuck with our neighbors. FAFO
1/ So this definition is a FEMALE produces the large reproductive cell (aka the egg, or ovum) ~100u diameter,
and a MALE produces the small reproductive cell (aka the sperm) ~5u diameter.
Your chromosomes *do* remain more or less the same throughout your life. There are transcription errors but nobody gets a whole new one. But of course you can't tell *at* conception because nobody knows you exist yet.
True, the only reason I know is because my dad was a DNA analyst. (This wasn't to confirm paternity, I was just a convenient example to use when explaining DNA to a jury.)
Hardly surprising, is it?
Transphobia is the present big push from the religious right; the same crowd who opposed gay marriage 20 years ago; the same crowd whose own sense of moral superiority is in being anti-abortion & whose support depends on appealing to the anti-abortion extremists.
Just to be clear: the people behind those things don't believe in them. They're just a way of fund-raising and gaining influence with the anti-sex crowd, and thus politicians. The cause is greed. The consequence is anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ policy.
Check some embryology textbooks. I like Moore’s “The Developing Human” myself, but Larsen’s “Human Embryology” is pretty standard reading for medical students.
These clowns don't give a shit about science. If they did, they wouldn't even bother with trying to legislate people's gender.
They're just bigoted assholes playing on the ignorant prejudices of anti-scientific religious people who want to take away the basic human rights of the people they hate.
Anyway that we can make social media bots that spread true information about sex and gender to drown out the misinformation spread by fox news and maga?They spout out the same talking points, should be easy program counter replies supported by sources and spread them on Twitter and Facebook.
So the “masculine energy” they’re on about is about letting us know they’ve got the smallest reproductive cells? OK, sir, your germ cells are very very tiny. You’re a big boy.
And they failed again bc most of the pregnancy were ALL female. Do they just defined man out of the picture entirely. According to this wording there are no “men”. 🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂
They are based on the Cells they are "supposed" to produce if they weren't "disordered" according to the greatest Transphobic biologists around which sounds a bit like intelligent design doesn't it.
I consider the sperm to be the large reproductive cell. Therefore this point is moot. The egg is small to me compared to the body so therefore it is small
Not quite, because they "male"/"female" not as producing gametes but as "belonging to the sex" that produces those gametes. So it's a circular definition - I could claim to "belong" to either sex
This is what happens when Republicans cross the streams.
Fascist Trump apparatchiks like Stephen Miller don’t really care about or understand gender issues, but they know that they need an order bashing trans people, and that pro-lifers always talk about stuff starting at conception.
They are governing by trolling: saying and doing the most triggering and terrible things to see how far they can push our boundaries as a society. It’s awful but as others have pointed out we gotta get organized.
What's even more crazy is that "at conception" every fetus is female, soooooo he literally just null and voided every male passport in the nation including his own.
Congrats to all the trans women out there who just got validated. Sorry to the men, trans and otherwise. Guess we're all ladies now. As are Elon and Donald.
Threading the needle of not being awful to trans folk while humiliating the Rapist. That's a toughie. I suppose there are other ways to humiliate the Rapist Traitor.
The scary thing is the fact this makes no sense at all won't matter. They'll enforce it however they please.
There's no way other than genetic testing to determine what gametes the eventual person might produce at conception and phenotypic sex doesn't arise until much later, but a judge won't care
yeah, it's not as if there's a significant number
of embryos with XX who develop male genitalia
and XY who develop female genitalia
as well as some of either born with both sets of genitals,
but they're too dumb to realize any of that
Yeah, she's just been brainwashed by the maga people. Intersex people can't exist because then all their ideas about biology are invalidated. I kind of want to make her watch Every Body Clockwork Orange style, but I doubt even that would help.
Aging lawyer here. Thinking through the hearing in a criminal case:
Prosecutor: We submit, your honor, that Defendant Samantha was male at the moment of conception.
Court: What proofs do you offer?
P: The People submit his birth certificate and kove for admission.
Defense: Objection /1
Your honor, as to relevance. The document offered proves the sex assigned at birth and cannot speak to the sex at conception.
P: It's the same.
D: YOU have the burden of proof.
Ah, so finally we know what those GOP congresspeople were getting at when they asked nominees to define a woman. The definition now being those at conception fated to create the large reproductive cells. Dunno, but I wonder what percentage of the populace would have defined a woman in that way.
it’s meant highlight replies that could get buried (and i think is generally used for jokes) but in this case i just wanted to boost your post because i strongly agree
Not to mention that some people are born intersex. Will there be government-approved checkers of infant genitalia hired as well? Sure, why not - just cut some of those dumb nutrition and education programs to get the right funding. Pro-life, after all.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if turned out that their entire anti-trans thing was always just a pretense to get fetal personhood legitimized. Kinda feels like they're trying to trick us into doing it FOR THEM.
The state of Georgia already has a law that defines the unborn as a person, so it's only a matter of time until that is taken up nationally. and by a matter of time i'm not talking about decades. i'm talking possibly like first 100 days or within the first year.
Surely there must be examples—my first guess would be in the realm of botany—that would undermine this “large reproductive cell”/“small reproductive cell” thing.
Catholic doctrine teaches that our bodies are ephemeral but that our souls are eternal. If a person's soul makes them strangers to the body they have, then they should be allowed to transition and be respected for the integrity and courage they showed.
Using “at conception” in this context, is a politically driven phrase rather than one grounded in medical science.
The order not only undermines the rights of transgender individuals but also signals broader attacks on reproductive rights, personal autonomy, and science-based policies.
It's because they don't know shit and don't live in the reality. Every definition of two sexes must fail, because there are people who do not fall into either category, regardless of the definition. And we're not even talking about the reality of gender and transgender.
You do know that there are people who are born with no "reproductive cells", larger or smaller, or reproductive organs for that matter, don't you? What gender are they, huh?
The people—using that term loosely—who purport to know more about human anatomy, biology, physiology, psychology than actual doctors and scientists, don’t know that fertilization and conception aren’t the same thing.
No, but most of them are. There are a variety of other arrangements, and Trump is explicitly establishing a religious retcon view about whether XXY and similar chromosomal arrangements are "male" rather than "female"
No. Until a few weeks after conception, a fetus is sexually undifferentiated. After aex hormones begin to be produced, sexual differentiation usually occurs.
The idea that we're all female as a fetus is a very old misconception
Absolutely. There's all sorts of arrangements. Most are fatal.
But there's a large amount of variation both in the somatic and sex determining chromosomes. And even then, given a surviving karyotype, there's tons of variations in expression within it.
And sometimes the chromosomal arrangement is not fixed at conception. Which means that occasionally you get identical twins where one is phenotypic male and the other is phenotypic female. Both twins have 45,X/46XY mosaicism. Biology doesn’t like binary.
Not stupid—it’s a common misconception. In short, no. At fertilization, the chromosomes are determined (most commonly XX or XY), but that’s only one factor in determining sex. As development proceeds, embryos develop two sets of ducts: mesonephric (Wolfian) and paramesonephric (Muellerian). 1/
The former, with the right hormones, will become the epididymus, vas deferens, and seminal glands of typical male anatomy. The latter become the uterus, uterine tubes, and vagina of typical female anatomy. So there is a time when an embryo has precursors of both male and female anatomy 2/
At the same time! Because embryology is wild and embryos don’t follow our adult rules!
Anyway, it’s up to genes to ensure that the right hormones get released at the right time to promote the growth of one set of tubes and tell the cells in the others to die off. 3/
That all links back to the chromosomes. But XX chromosomes doesn’t always correspond to developing female reproductive organs, and XY doesn’t always correspond to male, because there’s a lot of steps in between.
Anyway, embryology is cool and complicated, but we don’t all start off female.
These clowns don't give a shit about science. If they did, they wouldn't even bother with trying to legislate people's gender.
They're just bigoted assholes playing on the ignorant prejudices of anti-scientific religious people who want to take away the basic human rights of the people they hate.
23X egg fertilized by 23Y sperm to produce 46XY zygote. Zygote divides to produce two embryos. One embryo has a replication error early on leading to the loss of the Y chromosome. Result: identical twins with discordant sex, one 46XY♂️, one 45X♀️.
Or rather, they don't think of them at all, because they have an ideologically blinkered view of sex and gender and the existence of people with any sort of intersex condition makes their dogma about trans people untenable.
But this isn't just a hypothetical. Such persons exist.
this feels like it went through several takes of ‘dumb it down for me’ and then someone added the “at conception” for the anti abortion zinger and now it makes no sense as a definition. How do I determine what sex cells an egg and a sperm that just combined will produce?
Maybe. I see it more as evidence of their bizarre confused pseudoscientific world view. Zygotes don't produce any gametes. And a male fetus does not produce them at any time during gestation.
What happens to that small number of dudes who never ever produced a "small reproductive cell", ie. they only shoot blanks?
What's their gender going to be in the Trumpian world?
Concentration camp inmates? That'll be next. What are they going to do with all the trans people in the US? Forced detransition or rounded up in to camps? It seriously makes m3 wonder?
Knowing them and their intended effects, I'm pretty sure that the trumpian world would classify their gender as "useless" at best, and "dead" at worst.
At conception, all fetuses aren't even fetuses. They are zygotes. We've got two whole stages of development before we can talk about fetuses!
Zygotes are sexless. The idea that everyone technically starts off as female is a simplification of a complicated biological topic. I'll try and elaborate: 🧵
Embryos start with "bipotential gonads" which usually become Müllerian structures "by default" unless the SRY gene is present with sufficient testosterone. The presence or lack of a Müllerian structure alone does not make someone female—even when trying to force people to conform to a strict binary.
I am still way oversimplifying, but I'm attempting to condense a topic that's 120+ course hours into 300 characters.
Since everyone is sexless at conception, this order makes heterosexual sex impossible! But is all sex now lesbian sex? Well, as a professional lesbian, I approve this interpretation!
AFAICT people with Complete Androgen Insensitivity have to be treated as male, even though usually their bodies appear female and the condition is often undiscovered until puberty.
Wait no…….. your conception is female. You gain the male genes as your grow in the womb……. So does this mean he’s a woman now or. How did we let uneducated people get power
At conception we all look the same. At around the 7th wk, a fetus develops sexual organs, hopefully without any missteps. We just don't hear about the babies born with two sets of sexual organs or underdeveloped, confusing sexual organs.
Nothing is ever as simple as the #GOP would have us believe.
I'm sure it will be muted on all news outlets as he'll (Trump) sorry she'll ban them from mentioning anything regarding trans people. This is an oligarchy dictatorship now.
Republicans control the House and Senate, Democrats can't do a thing against that majority but try to put a jam in the cogs from time to time, which they will try to do. So you need to put the responsibility where it belongs, on Republicans. They have sold you out and will continue to do so.
More accurately; all humans have the potential to be either sex at conception, and hormone washes in utero during the 3rd month of gestation (well after "heartbeat bills" say they are "alive") are what kicks development down one path, the other, or somewhere in between.
Quack doctors can now assign conceived cells male all the time (a non-scientifical assessment) simply so every female-born person is immediately labeled as transgender. No longer is assigned gender made by doctors with a reference-based assessment.
Hmm, not even a "told you so " can fix the hste and anger that this administration is going to do with the united states. From this info to eomens rights. Everything that Project 25 stated will happen! How to we thr people remove him from office now!!
At conception, all fetuses only have the large cell. So I guess Trump just transed all the men in The US. He didn't even give them a choice. Sorry cis men, I still respect your gender, even if the government doesn't.
Comments
Science does not exist as of
Sex is not changeable.
Does that clear it up for you?
and a MALE produces the small reproductive cell (aka the sperm) ~5u diameter.
What are their genders then?
Do they get to choose?
Or is it a third gender?
Transphobia is the present big push from the religious right; the same crowd who opposed gay marriage 20 years ago; the same crowd whose own sense of moral superiority is in being anti-abortion & whose support depends on appealing to the anti-abortion extremists.
I might just start using that.
They're just bigoted assholes playing on the ignorant prejudices of anti-scientific religious people who want to take away the basic human rights of the people they hate.
Is this the first time fetal personhood language has shown up in an EO?
Two birds, one stone.
These fucking idiots
Fascist Trump apparatchiks like Stephen Miller don’t really care about or understand gender issues, but they know that they need an order bashing trans people, and that pro-lifers always talk about stuff starting at conception.
This screenshot appears to be accurate. Here is the full EO:
https://ballotpedia.org/Executive_Order:_Defending_Women_From_Gender_Ideology_Extremism_And_Restoring_Biological_Truth_To_The_Federal_Government_(Donald_Trump,_2025)
Or peole who, at conception can produce neither?
this makes no fucking sense
People are real.
There's no way other than genetic testing to determine what gametes the eventual person might produce at conception and phenotypic sex doesn't arise until much later, but a judge won't care
of embryos with XX who develop male genitalia
and XY who develop female genitalia
as well as some of either born with both sets of genitals,
but they're too dumb to realize any of that
Are they defining male as a sperm cell and female as an egg cell?
(I say this fully aware they don't care and will dehumanize anyone that doesn't fit their norms, but the laughing stops the tears).
Ms soon to be Mr Jenner?
But yes to figuring out an alternative way for your MAGA aunts to watch Every Body. 😘
Prosecutor: We submit, your honor, that Defendant Samantha was male at the moment of conception.
Court: What proofs do you offer?
P: The People submit his birth certificate and kove for admission.
Defense: Objection /1
P: It's the same.
D: YOU have the burden of proof.
I suggest using whichever interpretation is funniest at the time.
it’s meant highlight replies that could get buried (and i think is generally used for jokes) but in this case i just wanted to boost your post because i strongly agree
"Please write a scientific essay saying there is no gender, only sex, and there are only two of those"
They probably couldn't even use ChatGPT because it is all so incorrect.
- a physician who would not
The order not only undermines the rights of transgender individuals but also signals broader attacks on reproductive rights, personal autonomy, and science-based policies.
The idea that we're all female as a fetus is a very old misconception
The best of the GOP can't pronouce "chromosomal arrangement" on their best day, so we get this childish inanity.
It's goatfucker speak.
But there's a large amount of variation both in the somatic and sex determining chromosomes. And even then, given a surviving karyotype, there's tons of variations in expression within it.
May well have been XXY.
It could have at least done
Goatfucker.speak!
Anyway, it’s up to genes to ensure that the right hormones get released at the right time to promote the growth of one set of tubes and tell the cells in the others to die off. 3/
Anyway, embryology is cool and complicated, but we don’t all start off female.
They're just bigoted assholes playing on the ignorant prejudices of anti-scientific religious people who want to take away the basic human rights of the people they hate.
These bozos think they're both male.
But this isn't just a hypothetical. Such persons exist.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10203729/
What's their gender going to be in the Trumpian world?
Zygotes are sexless. The idea that everyone technically starts off as female is a simplification of a complicated biological topic. I'll try and elaborate: 🧵
Since everyone is sexless at conception, this order makes heterosexual sex impossible! But is all sex now lesbian sex? Well, as a professional lesbian, I approve this interpretation!
sexual differentiation happens later in the pregnancy
these people are so freaking ignorant
Nothing is ever as simple as the #GOP would have us believe.
“(e) the sex that has a staff of life.”