There's a lot of controversy over gender neutral bathrooms right now. One of the main conflicts preventing a decision is the legitimacy of a chosen gender. Is gender something you can choose? Does some who identifies as a different gender have the right to live as their chosen gender? A lot of people say it's fine to identify as whatever you please so long as you use the bathroom of your biological sex. I've noticed a lot of people on that side of the argument use science as their basis. Scientifically, there are only two sexes right? A person can be either male or female; nothing in between. Well, in reality, the science of sex has a lot more grey areas than you might think.
If you've ever taken a biology class, you might recall that a person's sex is determined by X and Y chromosomes. Females have two X's and males have one X and one Y. Seems pretty cut and dried, but that's only if things go as they should. Which, in real life, seems to never happen. There are tons of mutations that can change how your chromosomes and your sex match up. First of all, it's possible to have less or more than two sex-determining chromosomes. There are a number of genetic diseases that prevent chromosomes from separating properly before they are passed to an offspring. Meaning a man can be XXY or XYY or even XXYY, and a woman can be just X. In most cases, this doesn't affect a persons physical appearance. Because Y is the dominant one, as long as a person has at least one, they will be male. It does however typically prevent the person from having children.
Another kind of mutation can make it so your sex doesn't match up at all with your genetics. These usually occur when there's a problem with what is called the SRY gene. This gene, which is found on the Y chromosome, is what tells a body to make testosterone, thus making the person male. Occasionally though, the chromosome will loose the part that contains this gene. Without testosterone, the person will look and function like a female, but they will genetically be male. The same can happen in reverse; an X chromosome can receive the gene, making the person appear male but be genetically female. This poses an interesting question. Should a person's sex be determined by their appearance, or by their genetics?
Both of these mutations can sometimes go unnoticed through a person's entire life, since they don't cause any health problems or noticeable changes in appearance. Some of the people reading this might have one of them, and they would have no idea because they've never seen their genetic code! But there are a bunch of other mutations that are hard not to notice. You may have heard of a few. Sometimes people have traits of both sexes. Occasionally, someone can have their outsides look completely male but have the inner workings of a female, or vice versa. It's also possible to be mostly one sex, but have secondary sex characteristics of another; secondary sex characteristics being things like breasts for women and facial hair and Adam's apples for men. There are lots of different causes, from hormone imbalances to deactivated chromosomes, for these types of mutations. But no matter the cause, it's not hard to see how difficult it might be for these people to choose a bathroom. Imagine having the appearance of a man - facial hair and all - but having the body of a woman. Do you choose the men's bathroom where you look like you belong, or the woman's where your body type fits?
Of course, sex and gender are very different things. Whether or not a person identifies with the sex they were born as can be completely unrelated to whether or not they have any chromosome mutations. Sometimes perfectly normal people just don't feel comfortable in the body they were born in. But it's important to keep in mind that sex is not as black and white as a lot of people think it is. If we could accept that fact, maybe accepting the idea of people identifying as a different gender won't be as difficult. There is no distinct line between male and female. Even from a scientific standpoint, there's a whole spectrum of sexes.
