In a way, all cells are female, because DNA from sperm and egg is the software, but it always runs on female hardware (the egg).
This is also why "cloning dinosaurs" might be extremely difficult even if you found complete DNA, you lack compatible enough hardware to run that DNA on.
Afaik the mitochondria of the sperm cell is located in the tail to power it which then gets detached from the head just after it has borrowed into the egg ???.
From the Wikipedia page (read the original source for details):
The controversy about human paternal leakage was summed up in the 1996 study Misconceptions about mitochondria and mammalian fertilization: Implications for theories on human evolution, which was peer-reviewed and printed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.[15] According to the study's abstract:
In vertebrates, inheritance of mitochondria is thought to be predominantly maternal, and mitochondrial DNA analysis has become a standard taxonomic tool. In accordance with the prevailing view of strict maternal inheritance, many sources assert that during fertilization, the sperm tail, with its mitochondria, gets excluded from the embryo. This is incorrect. In the majority of mammals—including humans—the midpiece mitochondria can be identified in the embryo even though their ultimate fate is unknown. The "missing mitochondria" story seems to have survived—and proliferated—unchallenged in a time of contention between hypotheses of human origins, because it supports the "African Eve" model of recent radiation of Homo sapiens out of Africa.
[15] Ankel-Simons F, Cummins JM (November 1996). "Misconceptions about mitochondria and mammalian fertilization: Implications for theories on human evolution". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 93 (24): 13859–63. Bibcode:1996PNAS...9313859A. doi:10.1073/pnas.93.24.13859. PMC 19448. PMID 8943026.
Interesting. It sounds like they used cells from someone with Klinefelter's syndrome (XXY sex chromosomes) but I'm curious if a similar technique could be used to generate male and female cells from any male (XY sex chromosomes). Does anyone on here have an idea of why they needed to start with cells derived from someone with "mosaic" Klinefelter's?
Not a geneticist, but X is not female and Y is not male. Rather, XX is female and XY is male. To make XX from a single XY person would be to clone the X and I would guess would lead to unviability problems when the chromosomes are put to use
Edit: for those downvoting, can you tell me how I’m wrong, if that is the case?
You're correcting a claim which wasn't made by the GP (Not sure if it has been edited though), as well as calling out that you're being downvoted which is against HN guidelines.
>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
I’m pretty sure you’re the one commenting about voting. Their edit asks why they’re wrong and using the fact they are being downvoted to encourage people to reply.
The replies since then have been interesting and not boring at all. Until I got to yours.
Seems obvious to me why they led with that clarification and then directly responded to the point of why you might be able to make XX from XXY but not XY.
Also not a geneticist, but I'm pretty sure this is wrong because you only get recombination between analogous autosome pairs. The allosomes, or sex chromosomes, you just get from one parent anyway. Females get the X from the mother and the X from the father, but rather than recombination producing an X that is different from either parent, one of them just gets deactivated randomly in every cell during embryonic development and the offspring ends up with a single active X in each cell, usually roughly 50/50 split between exactly the same as the father and exactly the same as the mother. This is true in placental mammals, but in marsupials, it is always the father's X that gets deactivated.
So it seems like making XX from a single XY person would just end up doing something genetically similar to what already happens with marsupials, which doesn't result in non-viability.
Of course, cloning at all does result in not getting genetic diversity you would normally get from recombination, which can eventually result in population-level problems if you're doing enough of it.
The recombination happens when the gametes are produced, during meiosis.
While in males there is no recombination between the X and Y chromosomes, in females sometimes there is recombination between the two X chromosomes.
Therefore the X chromosome received by a child from the mother may either be 1 of the 2 X chromosomes of the mother, chosen randomly, or it may be a combination of those 2 X chromosomes.
The inactivation of an X chromosome happens only in the female somatic cells, where the remaining active X chromosome is either the X chromosome of the father or 1 of the 2 X chromosomes of the mother or a combination of the 2 X chromosomes of the mother.
My understanding is that the master switch for sex determination has been identified as the "SRY" gene normally found on the Y chromosome. Active SRY means development heads down the "male" path in the genes; no SRY (or non-functional SRY) means development heads down the "female" path.
SRY can cross over to the X chromosome (resulting in an XX male), but the end result is usually sterile as there are other genes elsewhere on the Y chromosome that are also necessary for complete development.
I suspect that making an XX from the same X would result in expression of all the recessive genes, which would be the ultimate in inbreeding. Probably with quickly fatal consequences.
Consider that in all males, all of the X chromosome genes are expressed.
What's more, with X inactivation, one of the chromosomes in XX becomes almost completely inactive and all of the genes on the other chromosome are expressed.
> X-inactivation (also called Lyonization, after English geneticist Mary Lyon) is a process by which one of the copies of the X chromosome is inactivated in therian female mammals. The inactive X chromosome is silenced by being packaged into a transcriptionally inactive structure called heterochromatin. As nearly all female mammals have two X chromosomes, X-inactivation prevents them from having twice as many X chromosome gene products as males, who only possess a single copy of the X chromosome (see dosage compensation).
> What's more, with X inactivation, one of the chromosomes in XX becomes almost completely inactive
There is a huge distance between "almost completely inactive" and "inactive". A Turner's syndrome patient (only one X chromosome) usually has several obvious physical defects, including sterility.
Interestingly, as far as I'm aware the things we usually think of as "X-linked" (more common in men, inherited as a recessive phenotype on the X chromosome - things like red/green colorblindness and male-pattern baldness) aren't as common in Turner's patients as you might expect.
> for those downvoting, can you tell me how I’m wrong, if that is the case?
Sure. Your claim that X is not female is correct. Your claim that Y is not male is wrong. Y is male. If one or more Y chromosomes are present, a male will develop, and if zero or fewer are present, a female will develop.[1]
Cloning a normal male's single X chromosome would lead to the type of problems familiar from inbreeding, but would be unlikely to lead to nonviability; two different X chromosomes, which all normal women have, are already too many and parts of them must be inactivated so that normal development can proceed.
The Y chromosome is unimportant enough that chromosomal abnormalities generally leave the organism in a viable, if often defective, state. The subject of this experiment is an example, with three (XXY) sex chromosomes. One X chromosome and no Y chromosomes (which would usually be described "XO", not "X") would get you a female with Turner syndrome.
In a handy table:
X alone: female, Turner syndrome
Y alone: male, but nonviable; this will be a miscarriage.
XX: female, normal
XY: male, normal
YY: male, nonviable
XXX: female, triple X syndrome
XXY: male, Klinefelter syndrome
XYY: male, Jacobs syndrome
YYY: male, nonviable
[1] There is an exception related to androgen insensitivity. There you have a genetic male that develops into what is mostly a phenotypic female. Such people have female psychology and female external anatomy, but they do not have a female reproductive system and are therefore sterile.
This individual had T-cells that were: XX, XXY, and XY (mosaic Klinefelters), but otherwise genetically identical. They collected the XX and XY cells and coaxed them into being stem cells. Now researchers can use this stem cell line for research.
I see. So it was more about capturing the cells with the desired chromosomes and converting them to stem cells than about creating cells with the desired chromosomes. Thank you for your explanation!
I don't know if this totally answers your question but sex is actually determined by the male haploid cells (sperm). Females have XX chromosomes and thus can only produce daughter haploid cells with X chromosomes. Males have XY chromosomes and produce daughter haploids cells with either X or Y chromosomes. The sex of the fertilized zygote is determined by whether an X or a Y chromosome containing sperm reaches the egg.
It doesn't quite work due to genetic imprinting.[0] basically some chromosomes are labelled "from mum" and some "from dad" and specific portions from each are active. It's all rather complex but where imprinting doesn't work right you do get distinct genetic conditions (compare Prader Willi and Angleman syndromes).
Why do you need to paint all males with the same brush? If what you've described is "applied feminism", I'd strongly suggest you take a hard look at your own sexism (and genocidal tendencies). I've no horse in this race, but such rhetoric is toxic and unwelcome on hacker news.
I have no issue with thought experiments. However, your choice of words (i.e. "useless male") clearly illuminates your nasty intent. As such, I can't afford your original post any interpretation more charitable than sexism, regardless of your attempt to frame it now as a "thought experiment".
Edit: In response to your follow up, "useless" can be used as matter of fact, or as an implication of "worthlessness". Again, your choice of words "applied feminism" betrays your claim.
>That's the only purpose of a male when compared to the female - this is a simple fact, no need to take it personally.
There is nothing factual about this unless your world view is an infantile one which believes the only valuable difference between men and women is the ability to create sperm vs the ability to carry eggs. Common complaints from women clearly reveal that isn't the case.
You could also develop tech to elimate the woman from the process and that maybe easier . Genetically speaking in broad terms the male geneome contains both XY chromesomes and female contains XX and miss the Y.
Practically it is lot more complex with imprinting and other interactions.
As a social thought experiment :when such tech becomes achievable, it will be likely available for either sex and combined with gene editing sex will become more fluid and meaningless biologically and only have asthetic purpose .
Species where the male is only of value for impregnation tend to have the males die off after impregnation. The fact that human males live long afterwards means that evolution selected for that to happen because males have a critical role in the education, support and defense of the children.
This won't work. Male genomes are imprinted to form a placenta. For example, when embryos receive two sets of genes from a male and none from the female, they turn into molar pregnancies (a giant, aggressive placenta). Embryos receiving both set from a female and none from a male do not form a placenta and can't implant.
I think this will be the norm in the future: women can simply reproduce artificially without any injections from men, and their children will all be female. Men will quickly die out, and the world will probably be better off honestly (just look at who fills up the prisons, and who starts and fights in wars).
Besides what other response have said, the X chromosome passed from a mother to an offspring is not typically identical to either of the X chromosomes in her own body. Rather, the X chromosome passed on through her eggs is a blend of her two X chromosomes. This process is called genetic recombination and is basically what allows sexual reproduction to roll new genes.
Since men (typically) only have one X chromosome to start, the X passed in their sperm is identical to that of their somatic cells. So two sisters with the same parents will share one identical X from their father, but the second X from their mother will be different combinations of her two X's.
Edit to add: if genetic recombination didn't happen, then lots of siblings would end up as genetic twins. (50% chance within the same gender). And that would also be identical to the offspring from one crossing one grandparent on each side... Fortunately this doesn't happen!
I meant if genetic recombination didn't happen at all in organisms, just as an illustration. In reality all chromosomes, not just X, undergo recombination.
What was accomplished here occurs in nature, in a condition called sex-hormone discordant chimerism, where replication errors in embryos result in persons who have a mix of otherwise identical (in terms of genetics) male and female cells in their body. In very rare cases this can result in intersex morphology (https://www.nature.com/articles/s10038-020-0748-4). Generally in mammals, though, such chimerism doesn't result in dramatic phenotypic variance from normal male/female morphology. This is because mammalian secondary sex characteristics expressed by cells are mostly determined by the hormone bath the cells live in, so if a body has wholly or overwhelmingly one-sex gonads, they will develop as that sex. The situation is quite different in insects in birds, where secondary sex characteristics are largely determined by the sex chromosomes of individual cells. This leads to some dramatic phenotypes, such the bilateral gynandromorph (e.g., https://www.birdnote.org/listen/shows/cardinal-thats-half-ma...).
Having a sex at birth isn't, but the idea of gender being a separate thing from gender is contentious precisely because it's connected to sexual practice.
Because there's no particular reason to act differently from your birth sex other than for sexual practice. What else does gender actually mean, if it means anything at all? The fundamental conflict of the current culture-war is "Is sexual attraction a choice or is it innate?" and "It's innate" is the only polite thing to say, but it also creates contradictions.
"there's no particular reason to act differently from your birth sex other than for sexual practice"
When a four year old wears a dress and plays with dolls, are they doing it for a sexual practice? I don't think so.
Your response seems to imply that if a cis woman puts on a dress and walks down the street to buy a cup of coffee, then it is not sexual, but if a transwoman does exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, then it becomes sexual. Why?
Let me pose a possible explanation: Perhaps the difference between these two scenarios is in your mind, not the cis or trans woman's. In which case, the trans woman cannot really do anything about the sexual thoughts in your head, can she?
"What else does gender actually mean, if it means anything at all?"
This is just restating the question I asked. But: I have a gender, and it's my gender when I'm eating lunch, and when I'm brushing my teeth, and at all times in between, and those are not sexual practices. I put on clothes in the morning, and they are gendered clothes, but they are not revealing or sexual, nor is wearing clothes a sexual practice. So how is it different for a trans person? The greatest aspiration of most, if not all, trans people is to "pass", meaning that they become invisible and nobody know they are trans. In what way is that sexual?
"sexually-maladjusted adults who are using the ability to hide behind an identity as a way to fulfill their kinks"
This is no less of an offensive stereotype than saying Mexicans are lazy, or something like that. I had a feeling that your reasoning would come down to something like that, and sure enough..
Maybe in 50 years I'll sound as cringey as Song of the South or something, but I still maintain that gender identity is a created social phenomenon and that encouraging alternative identities is destructive.
Let's not blame pharmaceutical companies here. I have done some research and looked for any pharmaceutical companies involved and can't find any (for purposes of short-selling). The medical side is advanced through doctors and hospitals using off-label generics and profitable procedures and surgeries. Pharmaceutical companies have out right rejected spending a dime on research in this area as they all know it is a land mine. On the one hand we have various doctors organizations saying it is "established science" and all the pharma companies regard it as highly experimental and do everything to distance themselves.
One takeaway is that the genome is highly integrated, i.e. just because there are two sex-linked chromosomes doesn't mean that they aren't also interacting constantly with the other 22 pairs of chromosomes found in every reproducing human cell (and the proteome, and the microbiome, for that matter). From linked paper:
> "Although some of the sex differences arise from hormonal effects (Gurvich et al., 2018), it is now acknowledged that many differences are due to sex chromosome complement (Arnold, 2012). Studying the effects of sex chromosome complement on gene expression and biological phenotypes is impeded by variation in genetic background. Therefore a large sample size is needed to identify sex-related differences (Ronen and Benvenisty, 2014). To date, there is no human model to study sex differences that can overcome the variation in genetic background."
Another complicating factor must be the random nature of X-chromosome inactivation in XX cells, as only one of the two copies is actively transcribed. Hence even if you clone an XX-type cell, its progeny cells will at some point randomly (and permanently) switch off one of those X chromosomes (to avoid making too many gene products).
> "The two X chromosomes have an equal probability of being silenced. Silencing, once established, is stable: the same X chromosome remains inactivated in all subsequent cell generations. As a result, each female is a mosaic of cells in which either the maternally inherited or the paternally inherited X is silenced."
So with X inactivation it sounds like it hardly matters whether the X Chromosome is a duplicate or different, other than any effects that might be seen by having 100% of your cells be behaving a certain way instead of a mix of the two evening some things out. Like metabolism, endocrine and renal function.
> > Silencing, once established, is stable: the same X chromosome remains inactivated in all subsequent cell generations. As a result, each female is a mosaic of cells in which either the maternally inherited or the paternally inherited X is silenced.
For those curious about it, a visual example of this is tortoiseshell and calico cats.
The orange or black in a cat is X linked. A simple, not quite correct, representation of this would be that a male cat can be either XoY or XbY while a female cat can be XoXo, XoXb, XbXb. The XoXb cats are both black and orange and are frozen at the time when one of the chromosomes were silenced.
The other factor unaddressed here is methylation. To form a complete human person, as far as we know, you must have one set of chromosomes from a female imprinted via an ovum and another from a male imprinted via a sperm. If this doesn't take place, you may have strange genetic symptoms. Male bodies deactivate certain genes and reactivate some others so that, when combined with the way in which female bodies do the same thing, the resultant genome has a full set of proteins sufficient to form of a homestatically stable human.
When this goes wrong, genetic disease can occur such as what happens with Angel man and Prader willi syndrome, which is caused by the exact same mutation but dependent on the sex of the parent it was inherited from.
It's very difficult to go through life being treated with disdain, which is the treatment a lot of nonbinary and transgender people get. Even if you think it's justified, you don't have to be the reason their lives are difficult.
It ain’t the activists fault society has been so vile to those populations that they had to turn to extreme public instigations to get any attention and subsequent respect
There are at least three basic formats that the One Joke comes in:
1. "I identify as X." Okay, how should I address you?
2. "X (nonsentient) identifies as Y." Nonsentient objects don't have identities.
3. "X (sentient) identifies as Y." This may or may not be a statement of fact, but if you're using someone else's identity as a punchline, what's that say about you?
I sincerely hope you have a source of meaning in your life that you can tap into instead of making fun of people with different lifestyles on the Internet. Cheers.
> It ain’t the activists fault society has been so vile to those populations
This is true.
> that they had to turn to extreme public instigations
This is false. Activists don’t have to turn to an obviously incoherent ideology, nor do they need to harm people who are not harming them.
> to get any attention and subsequent respect
They have attention, but they haven’t gained respect. In fact they have reduced it. Activists don’t represent anyone but themselves, and through their actions are harming the very communities that claim to support.
Perhaps it is legitimate to hold that view. I mean, the concept of non-binary requires holding the irrational, non-empirical belief that men and women are loosely defined as a set of sexist stereotypes, rather than sex.
They've taken a socially conservative ideal of what women and men should be like (per whatever culture they're in), assumed that this is what actually defines women and men, and decided to carve themselves an opt-out in the form of an extra category. When they probably should be taking a step back and wondering why they hold these rigid definitions of men and women in the first place, and applying some critical thinking.
> I mean, the concept of non-binary requires holding the irrational, non-empirical belief that men and women are loosely defined as a set of sexist stereotypes
I don’t think there is anything irrational about the view that gender expression is in part based on stereotypes and social construction. Cross cultural and intergenerational comparisons clearly show that there are cultural differences in how genders are expressed.
It is not irrational to believe that some people are drawn to gender expressions not traditionally associated with their biological sex, nor is it irrational to suppose that there is suffering associated with being prevented from doing so, or humiliated or ostracized if they do.
What is irrational is to claim that there is no such thing as biological sex, that sex rather than gender is a continuum, and that the only difference between a man and a woman is what someone claims themselves to be.
Except that's not what they claim, at least not in the way you're claiming, which seems deny that there are men and women out there with sex genes other XY and XX and that intersex people don't exist. Because when people claim that "sex is a continuum" it's pointing out that while men and women cluster around having XY and XX chromosomes, the reality is more complicated.
People can be intersex, people can have sex gene aneuploidies, people can have male sex genes buy end up developing as females, as can the reverse happen. Such people are a minority, but they do exist, and that's what the spectrum is. And in case you're thinking the numbers are vanishingly small, they're not: intersex people alone are more common than red heads.
Those are discrete, sex-related developmental conditions, e.g. males with Klinefelter syndrome, females with trisomy X, etc.
People with these conditions aren't middling points on some sort of male-female 'sex spectrum', as there's no continuous variable of sex from which one could obtain a value.
This idea that sex is a spectrum really is nonsensical.
Of sex characteristics, I mean if I was attempting to be accurate as possible to what sex is, it'd be some composite of morphology, chromosomes and gamete structures, which would place most humans in two main tranches, but some individuals would fall in between or outside of those two, which sounds a lot like a spectrum to me.
Not that we're debating, but your reply seems a little gish-gallopy. What type of information are you seeking by asking "A composite how exactly"?
Are you asking how what I described is a composite? How I'd create a composite? If I were trying to define sex, I'd try to find the most relevant attributes to human sexual dimorphism, and if and when I encountered exceptions, to me that would imply a spectrum exists and sex is non-binary.
What am I measuring? I'd be trying to find the biological measures relating to sexual dimorphism, and how they consistently they correlated to the other biological measures I listed. I'd also be looking for exceptions, which do certainly exist.
How are you translating it into a continuous variable? I wouldn't be, I imagine that upon seeing that there are exceptions to the attributes I included in my composite, where people in one or more ways fall outside of the two typical morphological/gamete/chromosomal norms, that would be what implies a continuum/spectrum. I'm not translating it, I'd just be seeing nonbinary data, I didn't translate the data to fall outside of a binary pattern or force it into a continuum, it just exists that way. Correct me if you think I'm wrong.
Why are you calling this variable sex? As I said, in my best attempt to create a composite of all traits that could be contained within a definition of sex, that's what it'd be.
> which seems deny that there are men and women out there with sex genes other XY and XX and that intersex people don't exist.
You are reading something in that I didn’t write. I didn’t deny the existence of intersex people or those with chromosomes other than XX and XY.
> Because when people claim that "sex is a continuum" it's pointing out that while men and women cluster around having XY and XX chromosomes, the reality is more complicated.
It’s true that reality is more complicated than XY and XX. But then I never said it wasn’t.
It’s not true that people are “just pointing this out”. They are deploying this read herring as as the Motte part of a motte and Bailey argument.
It’s true that there are certain discrete exceptions to a rigid sex binary. This is the easily defensible ‘motte’.
It’s plainly not true that there is no such thing as biological sex. You might like to learn about the processes surrounding your conception and birth if you are unsure.
It’s also false that declaring that you identify as a different gender does anything to change your biological sex, regardless of your chromosomes.
These are the absurd ‘Bailey’ arguments that the red herring is disingenuously used to defend.
Based on those questionably real experiences relating to your coworker's pronouns and last name, it kinda seems like you decided in advance to now plant your flag on being standoffish and pretty foul towards people who chose not to act as sex they were assigned at birth, by calling their gender identity "imaginary" when the topic comes up. Which is just prejudice I think? Kind of a pick your battles moment really, are you really going to preemptively be irritated at any mention of nonbinary or trans people forever?
Well, this is all based on my perception and feeling, but in this case at least it appeared to be merely at the mention of how this story might relate to nonbinary gender identity. Just my perspective, but you appeared to really jumped at the opportunity to describe their their gender identity as imaginary and liken it to a sexual kink (are kinks imaginary either? IDK). Just seems as if this topic has fallen into the focus of your ire, which I just feel is a bit prejudiced.
For you it's at worst an extremely rare, uncomfortable but minor inconvenience to you. But now you jump at this kinda shitty reactivity towards the topic, which must sorta stink for other HN readers who just try to live their lives, but happen have a nonbinary or trans gender identity. IMO you're just piling on in a needlessly irritable way.
Just an outsiders perspective. Happy holidays and I hope you have a nice rest of your day, fwiw.
Huh, that's an interesting analogy and not one I'd ever really thought about before. After all, there are people with terrible combovers and toupees that most people pretend they don't notice (no offense if that's you, OP). I'm trying to imagine how much "not playing along" you'd have to do before you ended up in HR over it, and I'd think it would have to be quite a bit - certainly just pretending you didn't notice and not agreeing or disagreeing when the guy in question says his hair is completely natural wouldn't be enough.
The hair analogy would be a person feeling distress at having hair, and so shaving it off. They shouldn’t be harassed for doing this, but they would cross a line if they then sought a place in an alopecia support group.
Fortunately for me, I don't care if you think it is real or not. I'm also not suggesting that it is a "hate crime" for you not to play along. By all means, descend into solipsism!
"Personal identity is constructed by definition." -- tentative agreement on the personal.
Ah, but that last one. No. Your identity is no more or less real than mine ... TO YOU. If you decide that your personal identity is that of a six year old girl named "Stefonknee," that may be real to you (you might claim in insincerely), but it certainly isn't real to me.
I can agree with that statement. It just doesn't jibe with the bit you ignored above: forcing another person to play along with the fantasy of someone else's identity, trying to make "misgendering" a crime (which itself can be rather incoherent, you cannot misgender someone who claims that gender doesn't apply to them).
It's the being forced to play along with the six-year old Stefonknee's playtime to which I object. Evading it with solipsism and "what your definition of 'is' is" word games is a distraction.
You bristle at "being forced to play along with a fantasy" because you prefer a different and equally fantastic fantasy.
And who's forcing you into anything? Who's trying to make misgendering a crime? It's impolite, the same as violating any other boundary is --- imagine if I started doing it to you on purpose --- but there is no possible way for it to be legally codified in an enforceable manner, and I can assure you that trans people don't want that anyway.
Doesn’t this line of reasoning lead you to necessarily conclude that the other’s identity is strictly less objectively real than your own? Your identity is continuously simulated on your own wetware, but the other’s identity simulation has only recently started running and suffers from a low synchronization rate.
TLDR: For all you know, your sparring partner is ChatGPT.
This gets into some philosophy-of-mind weeds that I may not be well equipped to navigate, but my contention is that identities aren't objectively real at all. They are constructions. They're as real as the real line.
Literally every nonbinary person I know (with the exception of a tiny number of people who also happen to be intersex) and everyone that I know that knows a non-binary person or has done the slightest bit of research into the issue, is well aware that being non-binary is not a matter of chromosomes but rather a matter of gender roles.
Were you genuinely unaware of this, or did you have some different goal in asking this question?
I feel like I may be downvoted, but it's hard for me not to read your question as trolling (and if so it's working; see sibling responses). If I am wrong I apologize.
The Ericsson method has been around since the 70s and works pretty well. ~70% chance of getting the sex you want. It works because the Y chromosome is a lot smaller than the X so Y sperm can swim faster.
> A laminar-flow fractionation method, developed primarily for removing dead sperm from human semen, was successfully modified to enrich X and Y sperm to 80% purity, and to characterize each enriched fraction for individual swimming behavior. Y-sperm fractions were rapidly detected by fluorescent cytogenetic staining. Subsequently, the degree of enrichment was quantitated with DNA extracted from each sperm fraction probed with a human male-specific recombinant DNA clone. In stationary fluid, X and Y sperm swam in circles with the same average speed. However, in a flowstream, X sperm shifted to a nearly straight path of movement in a significantly decreased angular velocity. This shift was four times more pronounced in X sperm than in Y sperm, especially after the initial transition from stationary fluid to flow. The velocity gradient across the flow axis was essential for separating X and Y sperm; uniform flow velocity did not separate them effectively.
> Currently, there are three available methods for sex selection. The first option is prefertilization sperm sorting using flow cytometry, which can provide a semen sample enriched with sperm that bear the desired sex chromosome. Its accuracy is in the 84-92 percent range, and it is not yet available in the US [6, 7]. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the most extreme form of sex selection occurs after conception in the form of elective termination of pregnancy if prenatal testing shows the sex of the fetus is the opposite of that desired. In certain regions of the world, such as India, such procedures are commonly performed, despite being illegal [8, 9].
The title used to say Male and Female (not XX/XY), and that's the title of the actual article. Normal HN policy is to keep the article title unless it's long or clickbait. Why was it edited?
The article title is a factually incorrect representation of the study being discussed. If you read the article and the study, you'll see the study was about changing chromosomes in a cell line, not about changing the sex of a person.
Everything about primary and secondary sex characteristics would not be affected by changing someone's chromosomes. Homologous sex structures diverge before birth based primarily on dht metabolism. Even then, chromosome expression doesn't always determine how dht will metabolize, meaning whatever chromosomes a person has can still lead to someone having any kind of primary and secondary sex characteristics. The six most common sex chromosome patterns in humans are XX, XY, XXY, XYY, X, and XXXY (in that order).
Sex and gender are both far more complex than merely chromosome expression, and chromosome expression is anything but a binary. This study has nothing to do with being male or female.
> “This is a very well-designed study that validates the notion that sex differences start early in development—and that they depend on the sex chromosomes because that’s the only thing that can account for those differences,” says Nora Engel, a professor of cancer and cell biology at Temple University, who was not involved in this work.
There's two problems here. One is that XX/XY is not even a majority of the common human chromosome karyotypes, and changing karyotypes does not change someone's sex characteristics; those are determined at one specific moment during gestation, which may or may not be affected by changing the chromosomes beforehand, but certainly would not be affected by changing their chromosomes after that moment. Primary and secondary sex characteristics are determined by androgen metabolism, not by chromosome karyotypes.
Secondly most of the human karyotypes are not assigned a sex until some time after birth, and XY is often assigned female at birth because the divergence of homologous structures depends on androgen metabolism, not chromosome karyotype. Sex and gender don't exist for cell lines in the same way they do for people.
TL/DR; This is an article about a study that found they could change a cell line's karyotype, not a person's sex characteristics which are determined not by chromosome karyotypes but by androgen metabolism during gestation. Whoever wrote the headline didn't understand the topic.
I can't speak for whoever changed the title, but XX/XY is far more accurate and less clickbaity than Male/Female in this context.
There is far more to human biological sex than the chromosomal distinction. Take an XY cell, but it in an otherwise female body, and it will, in many ways, express itself similar to that of an XX cell. This is the theory behind hormome replacement therapy (HRT).
That is not to say that an XY cell in a female body would be identical to an XX cell in the same. For instance, an XY eye in a female body would likely be similar to a male eye with regards to color blindness; because we have traced colorblindness directly to a chromosonal difference.
However, most sex differences (in humans) are not chromosonal. Instead they are triggered by a single gene (SRY), that just so happens to occur on the Y chromosone. That single gene codes for a protein that triggers almost all of the sex differentiation. Splice that single gene onto a X chromosome and you can get an XX human that appears male.
Exactly what differences are directly chromosomal, and what are developmental is a largly open area of research, and exactly what this achievement hopes to further enable.
SRY triggers development of testis, but in fact, if you have a translocation of just SRY onto X, and thus are an XX male, you may have issues with reproduction, as the Y chromosome contains other supporting genes for the production of sperm.
We can go on about male v female as a social construct, but biologically, males produce the smaller gamete, so if one has SRY and has an otherwise male phenotype, but isn't producing sperm, from a strictly biological perspective, it's not at all clear that the statement 'SRY is the determinant of maleness' is necessarily true.
It certainly will make you develop testicles and male secondary sex characteristics.
You are correct on the cell naming. Cells cannot be male or female. That is a characteristic of a complete person. They can be derived from a male or female, but what the scientists did here did not change that attribute of a cell.
> To create such a model, ... [they] ... obtained ... cells previously collected from a person with ... an extra X chromosome
So, the title is rather misleading. They just had to get cells to shed one of the three chromosomes, they didn't get an XX female to somehow produce a Y, nor an XY male to duplicate their X.
Hmm. If anyone can suggest a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article), we can change it again.
From the article they specify "with Klinefelter syndrome" which is the XXY version of trisomy 23. This fits the word limit: "Scientists generate XX and XY cells from a person with Klinefelter syndrome"
178 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadThis is also why "cloning dinosaurs" might be extremely difficult even if you found complete DNA, you lack compatible enough hardware to run that DNA on.
It's the old bootstrapping problem - how do you get a running C compiler from code if you don't already have a running C compiler?
There is no example in nature where you get a fully functional cell starting exclusively from DNA.
As in most absolute statements, this may not be completely true. Sperm has some mitochondria that likely is incorporated into the zygote.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_mtDNA_transmission
The controversy about human paternal leakage was summed up in the 1996 study Misconceptions about mitochondria and mammalian fertilization: Implications for theories on human evolution, which was peer-reviewed and printed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.[15] According to the study's abstract:
[15] Ankel-Simons F, Cummins JM (November 1996). "Misconceptions about mitochondria and mammalian fertilization: Implications for theories on human evolution". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 93 (24): 13859–63. Bibcode:1996PNAS...9313859A. doi:10.1073/pnas.93.24.13859. PMC 19448. PMID 8943026.Edit: for those downvoting, can you tell me how I’m wrong, if that is the case?
>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
The replies since then have been interesting and not boring at all. Until I got to yours.
Instead, they're probably talking about taking three cells with XY, and then using that to create an xx, an xy, and then some leftover parts.
If that is the case, your correction might seem arrogant or assuming.
So it seems like making XX from a single XY person would just end up doing something genetically similar to what already happens with marsupials, which doesn't result in non-viability.
Of course, cloning at all does result in not getting genetic diversity you would normally get from recombination, which can eventually result in population-level problems if you're doing enough of it.
While in males there is no recombination between the X and Y chromosomes, in females sometimes there is recombination between the two X chromosomes.
Therefore the X chromosome received by a child from the mother may either be 1 of the 2 X chromosomes of the mother, chosen randomly, or it may be a combination of those 2 X chromosomes.
The inactivation of an X chromosome happens only in the female somatic cells, where the remaining active X chromosome is either the X chromosome of the father or 1 of the 2 X chromosomes of the mother or a combination of the 2 X chromosomes of the mother.
SRY can cross over to the X chromosome (resulting in an XX male), but the end result is usually sterile as there are other genes elsewhere on the Y chromosome that are also necessary for complete development.
What's more, with X inactivation, one of the chromosomes in XX becomes almost completely inactive and all of the genes on the other chromosome are expressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation
> X-inactivation (also called Lyonization, after English geneticist Mary Lyon) is a process by which one of the copies of the X chromosome is inactivated in therian female mammals. The inactive X chromosome is silenced by being packaged into a transcriptionally inactive structure called heterochromatin. As nearly all female mammals have two X chromosomes, X-inactivation prevents them from having twice as many X chromosome gene products as males, who only possess a single copy of the X chromosome (see dosage compensation).
There is a huge distance between "almost completely inactive" and "inactive". A Turner's syndrome patient (only one X chromosome) usually has several obvious physical defects, including sterility.
Interestingly, as far as I'm aware the things we usually think of as "X-linked" (more common in men, inherited as a recessive phenotype on the X chromosome - things like red/green colorblindness and male-pattern baldness) aren't as common in Turner's patients as you might expect.
Sure. Your claim that X is not female is correct. Your claim that Y is not male is wrong. Y is male. If one or more Y chromosomes are present, a male will develop, and if zero or fewer are present, a female will develop.[1]
Cloning a normal male's single X chromosome would lead to the type of problems familiar from inbreeding, but would be unlikely to lead to nonviability; two different X chromosomes, which all normal women have, are already too many and parts of them must be inactivated so that normal development can proceed.
The Y chromosome is unimportant enough that chromosomal abnormalities generally leave the organism in a viable, if often defective, state. The subject of this experiment is an example, with three (XXY) sex chromosomes. One X chromosome and no Y chromosomes (which would usually be described "XO", not "X") would get you a female with Turner syndrome.
In a handy table:
X alone: female, Turner syndrome
Y alone: male, but nonviable; this will be a miscarriage.
XX: female, normal
XY: male, normal
YY: male, nonviable
XXX: female, triple X syndrome
XXY: male, Klinefelter syndrome
XYY: male, Jacobs syndrome
YYY: male, nonviable
[1] There is an exception related to androgen insensitivity. There you have a genetic male that develops into what is mostly a phenotypic female. Such people have female psychology and female external anatomy, but they do not have a female reproductive system and are therefore sterile.
[0] https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Genetic-Imprinting
Edit: In response to your follow up, "useless" can be used as matter of fact, or as an implication of "worthlessness". Again, your choice of words "applied feminism" betrays your claim.
That's the only purpose of a male when compared to the female - this is a simple fact, no need to take it personally.
There is nothing factual about this unless your world view is an infantile one which believes the only valuable difference between men and women is the ability to create sperm vs the ability to carry eggs. Common complaints from women clearly reveal that isn't the case.
Practically it is lot more complex with imprinting and other interactions.
As a social thought experiment :when such tech becomes achievable, it will be likely available for either sex and combined with gene editing sex will become more fluid and meaningless biologically and only have asthetic purpose .
You can put a woman's X chromosome in a sperm but it'll be labelled "from mum" and not work quite right.
See Prader Willi and Angleman syndrome for examples.
Since men (typically) only have one X chromosome to start, the X passed in their sperm is identical to that of their somatic cells. So two sisters with the same parents will share one identical X from their father, but the second X from their mother will be different combinations of her two X's.
Edit to add: if genetic recombination didn't happen, then lots of siblings would end up as genetic twins. (50% chance within the same gender). And that would also be identical to the offspring from one crossing one grandparent on each side... Fortunately this doesn't happen!
When a four year old wears a dress and plays with dolls, are they doing it for a sexual practice? I don't think so.
Your response seems to imply that if a cis woman puts on a dress and walks down the street to buy a cup of coffee, then it is not sexual, but if a transwoman does exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, then it becomes sexual. Why?
Let me pose a possible explanation: Perhaps the difference between these two scenarios is in your mind, not the cis or trans woman's. In which case, the trans woman cannot really do anything about the sexual thoughts in your head, can she?
"What else does gender actually mean, if it means anything at all?"
This is just restating the question I asked. But: I have a gender, and it's my gender when I'm eating lunch, and when I'm brushing my teeth, and at all times in between, and those are not sexual practices. I put on clothes in the morning, and they are gendered clothes, but they are not revealing or sexual, nor is wearing clothes a sexual practice. So how is it different for a trans person? The greatest aspiration of most, if not all, trans people is to "pass", meaning that they become invisible and nobody know they are trans. In what way is that sexual?
This is no less of an offensive stereotype than saying Mexicans are lazy, or something like that. I had a feeling that your reasoning would come down to something like that, and sure enough..
Satire is a difficult art, but I'll suffer the downvotes with dignity and the slightest tremble of the lip.
> "Although some of the sex differences arise from hormonal effects (Gurvich et al., 2018), it is now acknowledged that many differences are due to sex chromosome complement (Arnold, 2012). Studying the effects of sex chromosome complement on gene expression and biological phenotypes is impeded by variation in genetic background. Therefore a large sample size is needed to identify sex-related differences (Ronen and Benvenisty, 2014). To date, there is no human model to study sex differences that can overcome the variation in genetic background."
Another complicating factor must be the random nature of X-chromosome inactivation in XX cells, as only one of the two copies is actively transcribed. Hence even if you clone an XX-type cell, its progeny cells will at some point randomly (and permanently) switch off one of those X chromosomes (to avoid making too many gene products).
> "The two X chromosomes have an equal probability of being silenced. Silencing, once established, is stable: the same X chromosome remains inactivated in all subsequent cell generations. As a result, each female is a mosaic of cells in which either the maternally inherited or the paternally inherited X is silenced."
https://jbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/jbiol95
For those curious about it, a visual example of this is tortoiseshell and calico cats.
The orange or black in a cat is X linked. A simple, not quite correct, representation of this would be that a male cat can be either XoY or XbY while a female cat can be XoXo, XoXb, XbXb. The XoXb cats are both black and orange and are frozen at the time when one of the chromosomes were silenced.
This is known as X-inactivation and the Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation ) even has a picture of a tortoiseshell cat.
When this goes wrong, genetic disease can occur such as what happens with Angel man and Prader willi syndrome, which is caused by the exact same mutation but dependent on the sex of the parent it was inherited from.
1. "I identify as X." Okay, how should I address you?
2. "X (nonsentient) identifies as Y." Nonsentient objects don't have identities.
3. "X (sentient) identifies as Y." This may or may not be a statement of fact, but if you're using someone else's identity as a punchline, what's that say about you?
Your prior comment falls under case 2.
Sometimes life imitates memes.
>Do you find that funny?
Damn, three jokes!
This is true.
> that they had to turn to extreme public instigations
This is false. Activists don’t have to turn to an obviously incoherent ideology, nor do they need to harm people who are not harming them.
> to get any attention and subsequent respect
They have attention, but they haven’t gained respect. In fact they have reduced it. Activists don’t represent anyone but themselves, and through their actions are harming the very communities that claim to support.
They've taken a socially conservative ideal of what women and men should be like (per whatever culture they're in), assumed that this is what actually defines women and men, and decided to carve themselves an opt-out in the form of an extra category. When they probably should be taking a step back and wondering why they hold these rigid definitions of men and women in the first place, and applying some critical thinking.
I don’t think there is anything irrational about the view that gender expression is in part based on stereotypes and social construction. Cross cultural and intergenerational comparisons clearly show that there are cultural differences in how genders are expressed.
It is not irrational to believe that some people are drawn to gender expressions not traditionally associated with their biological sex, nor is it irrational to suppose that there is suffering associated with being prevented from doing so, or humiliated or ostracized if they do.
What is irrational is to claim that there is no such thing as biological sex, that sex rather than gender is a continuum, and that the only difference between a man and a woman is what someone claims themselves to be.
People can be intersex, people can have sex gene aneuploidies, people can have male sex genes buy end up developing as females, as can the reverse happen. Such people are a minority, but they do exist, and that's what the spectrum is. And in case you're thinking the numbers are vanishingly small, they're not: intersex people alone are more common than red heads.
People with these conditions aren't middling points on some sort of male-female 'sex spectrum', as there's no continuous variable of sex from which one could obtain a value.
This idea that sex is a spectrum really is nonsensical.
Are you asking how what I described is a composite? How I'd create a composite? If I were trying to define sex, I'd try to find the most relevant attributes to human sexual dimorphism, and if and when I encountered exceptions, to me that would imply a spectrum exists and sex is non-binary.
What am I measuring? I'd be trying to find the biological measures relating to sexual dimorphism, and how they consistently they correlated to the other biological measures I listed. I'd also be looking for exceptions, which do certainly exist.
How are you translating it into a continuous variable? I wouldn't be, I imagine that upon seeing that there are exceptions to the attributes I included in my composite, where people in one or more ways fall outside of the two typical morphological/gamete/chromosomal norms, that would be what implies a continuum/spectrum. I'm not translating it, I'd just be seeing nonbinary data, I didn't translate the data to fall outside of a binary pattern or force it into a continuum, it just exists that way. Correct me if you think I'm wrong.
Why are you calling this variable sex? As I said, in my best attempt to create a composite of all traits that could be contained within a definition of sex, that's what it'd be.
Yes it is.
> at least not in the way you're claiming,
In exactly the way I’m claiming.
> which seems deny that there are men and women out there with sex genes other XY and XX and that intersex people don't exist.
You are reading something in that I didn’t write. I didn’t deny the existence of intersex people or those with chromosomes other than XX and XY.
> Because when people claim that "sex is a continuum" it's pointing out that while men and women cluster around having XY and XX chromosomes, the reality is more complicated.
It’s true that reality is more complicated than XY and XX. But then I never said it wasn’t.
It’s not true that people are “just pointing this out”. They are deploying this read herring as as the Motte part of a motte and Bailey argument.
It’s true that there are certain discrete exceptions to a rigid sex binary. This is the easily defensible ‘motte’.
It’s plainly not true that there is no such thing as biological sex. You might like to learn about the processes surrounding your conception and birth if you are unsure.
It’s also false that declaring that you identify as a different gender does anything to change your biological sex, regardless of your chromosomes.
These are the absurd ‘Bailey’ arguments that the red herring is disingenuously used to defend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_reproduction
For you it's at worst an extremely rare, uncomfortable but minor inconvenience to you. But now you jump at this kinda shitty reactivity towards the topic, which must sorta stink for other HN readers who just try to live their lives, but happen have a nonbinary or trans gender identity. IMO you're just piling on in a needlessly irritable way.
Just an outsiders perspective. Happy holidays and I hope you have a nice rest of your day, fwiw.
Should i be able to force you to pretend im not balding?
Huh, that's an interesting analogy and not one I'd ever really thought about before. After all, there are people with terrible combovers and toupees that most people pretend they don't notice (no offense if that's you, OP). I'm trying to imagine how much "not playing along" you'd have to do before you ended up in HR over it, and I'd think it would have to be quite a bit - certainly just pretending you didn't notice and not agreeing or disagreeing when the guy in question says his hair is completely natural wouldn't be enough.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Personal identity is constructed by definition." -- tentative agreement on the personal.
Ah, but that last one. No. Your identity is no more or less real than mine ... TO YOU. If you decide that your personal identity is that of a six year old girl named "Stefonknee," that may be real to you (you might claim in insincerely), but it certainly isn't real to me.
That's all.
It's the being forced to play along with the six-year old Stefonknee's playtime to which I object. Evading it with solipsism and "what your definition of 'is' is" word games is a distraction.
And who's forcing you into anything? Who's trying to make misgendering a crime? It's impolite, the same as violating any other boundary is --- imagine if I started doing it to you on purpose --- but there is no possible way for it to be legally codified in an enforceable manner, and I can assure you that trans people don't want that anyway.
TLDR: For all you know, your sparring partner is ChatGPT.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Literally every nonbinary person I know (with the exception of a tiny number of people who also happen to be intersex) and everyone that I know that knows a non-binary person or has done the slightest bit of research into the issue, is well aware that being non-binary is not a matter of chromosomes but rather a matter of gender roles.
Were you genuinely unaware of this, or did you have some different goal in asking this question?
I feel like I may be downvoted, but it's hard for me not to read your question as trolling (and if so it's working; see sibling responses). If I am wrong I apologize.
Ah, so they're still male and female, but we've added a dumber new aged twist on tomboys and sissies. Got it.
Alternatively, go read that short story by Isabel Fall.
That's not the same as creating male embryos deliberately.
> A laminar-flow fractionation method, developed primarily for removing dead sperm from human semen, was successfully modified to enrich X and Y sperm to 80% purity, and to characterize each enriched fraction for individual swimming behavior. Y-sperm fractions were rapidly detected by fluorescent cytogenetic staining. Subsequently, the degree of enrichment was quantitated with DNA extracted from each sperm fraction probed with a human male-specific recombinant DNA clone. In stationary fluid, X and Y sperm swam in circles with the same average speed. However, in a flowstream, X sperm shifted to a nearly straight path of movement in a significantly decreased angular velocity. This shift was four times more pronounced in X sperm than in Y sperm, especially after the initial transition from stationary fluid to flow. The velocity gradient across the flow axis was essential for separating X and Y sperm; uniform flow velocity did not separate them effectively.
AMA Journal of Ethics - Sex Selection for Family Balancing https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/sex-selection-f...
> Currently, there are three available methods for sex selection. The first option is prefertilization sperm sorting using flow cytometry, which can provide a semen sample enriched with sperm that bear the desired sex chromosome. Its accuracy is in the 84-92 percent range, and it is not yet available in the US [6, 7]. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the most extreme form of sex selection occurs after conception in the form of elective termination of pregnancy if prenatal testing shows the sex of the fetus is the opposite of that desired. In certain regions of the world, such as India, such procedures are commonly performed, despite being illegal [8, 9].
Everything about primary and secondary sex characteristics would not be affected by changing someone's chromosomes. Homologous sex structures diverge before birth based primarily on dht metabolism. Even then, chromosome expression doesn't always determine how dht will metabolize, meaning whatever chromosomes a person has can still lead to someone having any kind of primary and secondary sex characteristics. The six most common sex chromosome patterns in humans are XX, XY, XXY, XYY, X, and XXXY (in that order).
Sex and gender are both far more complex than merely chromosome expression, and chromosome expression is anything but a binary. This study has nothing to do with being male or female.
> “This is a very well-designed study that validates the notion that sex differences start early in development—and that they depend on the sex chromosomes because that’s the only thing that can account for those differences,” says Nora Engel, a professor of cancer and cell biology at Temple University, who was not involved in this work.
Is this your area of expertise?
There's two problems here. One is that XX/XY is not even a majority of the common human chromosome karyotypes, and changing karyotypes does not change someone's sex characteristics; those are determined at one specific moment during gestation, which may or may not be affected by changing the chromosomes beforehand, but certainly would not be affected by changing their chromosomes after that moment. Primary and secondary sex characteristics are determined by androgen metabolism, not by chromosome karyotypes.
Secondly most of the human karyotypes are not assigned a sex until some time after birth, and XY is often assigned female at birth because the divergence of homologous structures depends on androgen metabolism, not chromosome karyotype. Sex and gender don't exist for cell lines in the same way they do for people.
TL/DR; This is an article about a study that found they could change a cell line's karyotype, not a person's sex characteristics which are determined not by chromosome karyotypes but by androgen metabolism during gestation. Whoever wrote the headline didn't understand the topic.
There is far more to human biological sex than the chromosomal distinction. Take an XY cell, but it in an otherwise female body, and it will, in many ways, express itself similar to that of an XX cell. This is the theory behind hormome replacement therapy (HRT).
That is not to say that an XY cell in a female body would be identical to an XX cell in the same. For instance, an XY eye in a female body would likely be similar to a male eye with regards to color blindness; because we have traced colorblindness directly to a chromosonal difference.
However, most sex differences (in humans) are not chromosonal. Instead they are triggered by a single gene (SRY), that just so happens to occur on the Y chromosone. That single gene codes for a protein that triggers almost all of the sex differentiation. Splice that single gene onto a X chromosome and you can get an XX human that appears male.
Exactly what differences are directly chromosomal, and what are developmental is a largly open area of research, and exactly what this achievement hopes to further enable.
We can go on about male v female as a social construct, but biologically, males produce the smaller gamete, so if one has SRY and has an otherwise male phenotype, but isn't producing sperm, from a strictly biological perspective, it's not at all clear that the statement 'SRY is the determinant of maleness' is necessarily true.
It certainly will make you develop testicles and male secondary sex characteristics.
You are correct on the cell naming. Cells cannot be male or female. That is a characteristic of a complete person. They can be derived from a male or female, but what the scientists did here did not change that attribute of a cell.
Note that we replaced it with what the article itself says it's about, once it gets to the stage of actually saying that.
So, the title is rather misleading. They just had to get cells to shed one of the three chromosomes, they didn't get an XX female to somehow produce a Y, nor an XY male to duplicate their X.
None of us will have heard of Klinefelter syndrome before, but maybe that's a good thing.