this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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[–] k4gie@lemmy.world 14 points 10 months ago (6 children)

Do the two tails left of M and right of F mean there are males more male than cis males, and similarly with females?

[–] outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 42 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yes, hyperreal genders do exist, but are not stable outside lab conditions.

[–] Mastema@infosec.pub 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I would submit David Bowie as a counter example.

[–] SeptugenarianSenate@leminal.space 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Are we sure he would describe himself as either consistently “stable” throughout his experiences? Alternately, he might also protest to feeling as though his existence and the context around it might be well described as a sort of experimental setting, albeit not contained within a traditional laboratory setting.

Any world famous musician who not only survives their 30s but is relatively alive and kicking for decades later I would consider to pass the first condition, considering the track record for individuals experiencing that volume of fanatic obsession at young ages.

[–] Mastema@infosec.pub 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You know... Maybe I interpreted the question wrong. I think I added the HYPER modifier to "gender", rather than "real". In my interpretation his gender sort of rotates in and out of 3d space like a hypercube. Now that I've noticed that the modifier was actually on "real", I'm trying to figure out if that changes my answer. Because, while I may not know exactly what gender Bowie was going for, I know that his instantiation of it was far more REAL than most people manage to achieve.

[–] outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Hyperreal refers to a fake tthing that feels more substantial than the real thing. Like a vegan meat substitute being more meaty than meat, or any current mass political thing.

[–] Mastema@infosec.pub 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

So David Bowie represents the Impossible-Gender, or the Beyond-Gender...? I can accept that.

[–] outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 10 months ago

I don't know. I barely know who david bowie was.

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The peaks do not designate "cis", you can be cis and fall anywhere on the chart - being cis is about the sex you were arbitrarily assigned at birth (and whether that assignment aligns or conflicts with your actual gender identity).

And when doctors change assignments, it's really unclear whether you're cis or not if you transition - e.g. a baby assigned female at birth who is then weeks later assigned male at birth later transitions to be a girl, she was originally assigned female at birth - is she trans or cis?

Instead the peaks represent the most common combination of male and female sex traits in humans, with the slopes representing less common combinations of traits, e.g. to the left of the male peak might be men who experience excessive androgenization like lots of body hair, maybe precocious puberty, early balding, and so on (more male traits than average).

This chart as a model of sex actually doesn't make much sense, since sex has been redefined in light of how complex sex is and the differences in sexual development that occur.

Where on the chart would we put someone with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS)? With CAIS a person is born with XY chromosomes and thus has a typical male karyotype, but their androgen receptors do not respond to androgens, so none of the masculinization is able to occur - leading the person to look, develop, and usually live as a woman.

The chart implies a spectrum, when the reality of biological sex is much more complex than a simple spectrum would allow - more like a constellation. Each sex differentiated trait is an axis / spectrum of its own, and there are thousands of ways differentiation can happen.

EDIT: oh, and to answer your question, it sounds like your question is really whether the peaks on a bimodal distribution represent a smaller number than the tails in aggregate, and the answer is that it depends on how you select your aggregates and how much of the peak you lump together. I think the entire point of the bimodal distribution, though, is to show that the majority fall on the peaks while the tails represent a minority.

That said, a MRI study found that when examining brain sex, >90% of people (mostly cis) were not able to be classed as having fully male or female brains, so realistically I think it's fair to say most people are sexually divergent in some way.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 18 points 10 months ago

Well, clearly. If you define a male characteristic as something that's more common in men than in women and vice-versa, then e.g. being tall would be a "male characteristic".

Height isn't a binary thing with men being exactly Xcm tall and women exactly Ycm, so there's people who have more of said male characteristic and people who have less. And you also have women who have more of this characteristic and some men (e.g. there are some women that are taller than some men).

The same can be done for every characteristic that's associated with a gender. Genitals are on a spectrum (large clitoris vs micropenis), fat distribution is on a spectrum (e.g. there are men with breasts and women without), body hair is on a spectrum, hormone distribution is on a spectrum and so on and so on.

If you take a lot of characteristics at once it becomes clear in most cases whether the person you are dealing with is a man or a woman (though there are some where that's more difficult or impossible), but if you take just a single characteristic (e.g. height) it's impossible to say whether the person you are dealing with is definitively a man or a woman.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I don't think it's an accepted term anymore, but you reminded me that they used to call the triple X chromosome syndrome by the term Super-Female-Syndrome.

Probably not what the author intended though.

[–] Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

...

I am a horrible person, but the only thing I can think of reading this is a small-circuit pro wrestling event where all participants have this set of chromosomes, billed as 'The Triple X Throwdown', for the title of Supreme Female.

[–] jsomae@lemmy.ml 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but they decay into sometjing indistinguishable from a cis person in like five seconds outside of extremely exotic lab conditions, so it's more accurate to say they're possible than "they exist".

[–] jsomae@lemmy.ml 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Funny.

If we assume that the distribution is measuring some trait (e.g. "testosterone content," "femininity," measured however you will), and it's bimodal (distribution is dominated by two binary sexes), then there will be people on either side of both peaks.

[–] outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yes but beyond a elrelatively close range it does not remain stable outside of very expensive laboratory conditions. We have not yet found a way to achieve, for example, 16x standard hypermasculinity at room temperature without some very exotic blood chemistry i don't entirely understand, except for the alcohol and testosterone numbers im not aure are survivable without lite support, and (i used to drink with a ucla researcher who was involved) he had to be restrained to keep him from building an exploding ramp to do what they all admitted would have been an extremely sick rocket assisted jump.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It means that traditionally understood cis male can still have some female characteristics (no facial hair, higher pitched voice, bad at driving) but some males will have none.

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

bad at driving is a male trait

(though that's partially for social reasons, biological factors are not the only relevant)

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah, I was kidding.

[–] Bennyboybumberchums@lemmy.world -4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Is not being able to take a light hearted joke a female trait, or just a you thing?

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

wasn't aware the sexism was intended as a light-hearted joke, my bad apparently

[–] Bennyboybumberchums@lemmy.world -4 points 10 months ago

You must be just so much fun to around...