Nobody calls it the “gender chromosome”


Wow. Answers in Genesis falls back on the old simplistic notion that chromosomes determine sex (and gender!) in this video. It’s an amazingly bad clip.

OK, in 40 years of genetics experience, I’ve never heard the Y chromosome called the “gender chromosome” until now. Her absolutist, rigid definition of sex based on chromosome complement is archaic and ignorant. At one point, she rhetorically asks Can you change your chromosomes? Can you change what God knit you to be in the womb of your mother? You cannot “change your chromosomes”, but the pattern of gene activity changes throughout your life. God didn’t do any knitting in anyone’s womb, but you definitely can change — these Biblical ‘literalists’ are denying the reality of biological change, not just over evolutionary timescales, but on developmental timescales. What she is claiming is repulsively stupid.

You may wonder what Jennifer Rivera’s qualifications are. She holds an education doctorate in curriculum and instruction — it’s kind of odd how many creationists hold advanced degrees in education, which is nice, since it means they know how to teach, but they lack any knowledge of what content they should teach. She also has a BA in criminal justice, so AiG has her lecturing on forensic science.

I hope her understanding of fingerprints is better than her understanding of genetics and sex, but I’m afraid to look.

Comments

  1. raven says

    Can you change what God knit you to be in the womb of your mother?

    Cthulhu, this is a stupid claim.

    Yes!!!
    We do it all the time.

    .1. Many children are born with cleft lips and/or palates. Apparently god isn’t all that careful an artist and worker.
    These routinely can be and are corrected by surgery.
    .2. More children than not end up at the orthodontist to have their teeth straightened and bite aligned. A lot also have their impacted wisdom teeth removed.
    God never attended dental school, I guess.
    .3. Cosmetic surgery, much of which is gender affirming for heterosexuals is commonly done.
    .4. The 1.7% of the population that are intersexes sometimes have medical treatment to conform to someone’s idea of what a person should look like. Quite often this treatment is done on babies without their consent and is not what the individuals subjected to this would have wanted.
    .5-.X There are a lot more examples.
    Just walk down the personal hair care aisle of your local supermarket or drugstore.

    To be fair to her god, you can’t blame him for things that you end up fixing or changing after you are born.
    The Invisible Inept Sky Fairy is also the Imaginary Sky Fairy.

  2. brightmoon says

    AiG , figures. As a kid I wanted red hair like Brenda Starr ( im dating myself here) so I got around to dying my hair fuchsia .

    There’s an intersex YouTuber named Blume. I wonder what AiG thinks of her. She’s got a vagina and undescended testicles . Sorry I can’t get the hang of some people’s pronouns . I don’t remember what Blume calls herself , it’s not she/her

  3. says

    “God didn’t do any knitting in anyone’s womb”
    Reminds me of the graffiti on the toilet wall at my former university;
    “My mother made me a homosexual.”
    to which some wit responded;
    “If I buy her the wool will she make me one too.”

  4. christoph says

    Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

    How do you tell a male chromosome from a female chromosome?
    You have to look in their genes!

    I’ll just see myself out….

  5. Akira MacKenzie says

    “What does biology say about gender?”

    Considering that these Christian shits can’t even accept the basic biological facts of evolution, why the fuck should I listen to what they have to say about sex and gender development? This broken clock can’t even be right twice a day, both it’s hands are bent and twisted.

  6. jrkrideau says

    it’s kind of odd how many creationists hold advanced degrees in education,

    !980’s terrorists, reportedly tended to be engineers.

    I suspect it is something in the water.

  7. Steve Morrison says

    AiG never got the memo that gamete size is (now) the only correct definition of gender.

  8. brightmoon says

    Wow that was bad ! And I thought AIG should have been ashamed of their ignorance back in the 90s

  9. birgerjohansson says

    Interesting…forensic science and geology both try to reconstruct the past, but geology is the eneny of biblical literalism.

  10. Walter Solomon says

    brightmoon #3

    I don’t remember what Blume calls herself , it’s not she/her

    Wouldn’t “theirself” be more appropriate in that case?

  11. Daniel Storms says

    I’m not sure how good God’s knitting is, but the crochet work on my islets of Langerhans completely unraveled, and I haven’t found a replacement on either Etsy or Pinterest.

  12. chrislawson says

    AiG probably believes that under Gentian violet staining, X chromosomes are pink and Y chromosomes are blue.

  13. Silentbob says

    @ 2 raven

    It’s funny, you’re (typically excellent) comment reminds me of something about myself I usually forget. If you were to ask me, “tell me something unusual about yourself”, I would struggle. I’m just a regular bloke. And then the conversation turns to birth anomalies and I remember, “Oh yeah, that’s me – I was born unable to eat”! X-D

    This was obviously before my conscious memories, but my mother told me I was born with a folded stomach. I’m sure there’s a medical term, and I’m sure she told me the medical term, but I’ve forgotten. The upshot is there was no passage from my gullet to my intestines. I was born unable to consume food! The clue was I regurgitated all my mother’s milk and was wasting away. She tells me I became extremely frail and emaciated.

    But my good luck was that I was born (just barely, I’m an old fogey) in a society with modern medicine and they cut me open and fixed the problem with a scalpel. I have the evidence. All my life I’ve had a (very faint) scar on my abdomen where they cut me open, and a (very faint) scar on my left arm where the intravenous drip went in to keep me alive.

    Today, I’m a grey-haired old man who has been in robust health for almost his entire life. But without medical intervention, my lifespan would have been measured in hours, days at the most. And that was the fate of all those born with the same condition as me, even decades let alone centuries earlier.

    The point being, even though I forget about it most of the time, I do actually have a very personal reason for thinking all this stuff about, “you are what God made you”, and, “surgery is mutilation”, and, “you should accept the body you were born with”, is utter crap. If it were true, I would effectively have been born a corpse. Because I was born into a society that didn’t accept that – I get to look back on a long life of robust health instead.

  14. benedic says

    One might wonder in the fog of the qualifications proffered by these sectarians one rarely finds Hebraic or Aramaic which, should they be sincere exigent literalists, is the least one might expect before their fantastical pronouncements.

  15. Robin Decker says

    As a non-binary person and an atheist I’m sadly quite familiar with this “argument.” One thing that always kills me about it, and I’m sure it has been remarked upon before, is the audacity of these people claiming that they’re speaking “biological truth” while simultaneously demanding that we believe in their sky fairy.

  16. brightmoon says

    @ John morales . I always google Blume intersex youtube if I want to get her channel . I know just putting Blume is a problem

  17. Prax says

    God knit each and every foreskin in its owner’s mother’s womb, but apparently He regretted it later.

    Also, I seem to recall that Jesus fella talking about people making themselves “eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven,” but that must have been only metaphorically literal. Just like all the bits about how rich people suck.

  18. John Morales says

    Ah, right, brightmoon. Thanks. Same person.

    (There’s a music channel of the same name, much more prominent, I shoulda looked more)

    This video is the closest I can find, see for yourself: Answering Intersex FAQ’s | Interesting & SeXY : Episode 2
    Blume

    “40:10
    encourage people to see me that way like there are certain things that I prefer
    40:15
    like obviously I want to I prefer to be you know called they them or not be
    40:22
    called a woman or a girl or anything like this um but you know at the end of the day
    40:29
    like [fucking] call me what you want I don’t really care at this point because I’m I just know what I am ”

    I added the ‘fucking’, because it’s a naughty word for YouTube autotranscribe :) but I did verify the pronoun preference. Other documentation uses the same, even from their personal website.

  19. John Morales says

    [and a bit of pedantry]

    First person pronouns: I, me
    Reflexive form: myself

    (Gender-neutral, as it turns out)

  20. evodevo says

    Whoa! a degree in forensics? Wonder how much she knows about DNA “fingerprinting” and statistics and genetic chimeras and…and… I don’t think I’d trust her judgement in a case depending on DNA evidence LOL

  21. says

    @8

    AiG never got the memo that gamete size is (now) the only correct definition of gender.

    No no no, they’ve changed it again. They realized gametes are too easy to change and that more than half of babies are born without gametes. Now the only correct definition of sex is “body types organized around the production of gametes.” Something that’s impossible to measure or observe, so they can believe it’s unchangeable.

  22. stochastic says

    @21 Prax
    That was Paul who said the eunuch bit, not Jesus. The Paul who never met Jesus but decided lots of stuff Jesus would have done that he never would have.
    [You can always tell a wacko evangelical by their exclusive quoting of Paul, the Old Testament, or the Jesus quotes from John (who also never met Jesus) that also were never said by Jesus.]

    But Paul’s the one most responsible for folks belief in the Magic Sky Fairy.