Context: Omega is some clone in this new animated show and she’s a girl. I haven’t watched it but the wiki is pretty clear about her being genetically unaltered. Also trans fem clones in the series are not unprecedented :thonk-trans:
Yeah, like, what? You want two identical x chromosomes? I don’t know shit about biology but I feel like that would cause some kind of horrifying super-illness
Nah it’d be fine. One of them inactivates in every cell anyway
This sent me down a Google rabbit hole so here’s me dumping that info.
1 in 500 males are born with XXY chromosomes. It’s known as Klinefelter Syndrome and its effects are often mild enough that the people who have it aren’t aware they have it.
It also wouldn’t be strictly necessary to double the X chromosome, just to remove the Y. This is called Turner’s Syndrome and 1 in 2000 females have it. If a fetus with Turner’s survives the first trimester (99% rate of spontaneous termination), females with Turner Syndrome typically live to at least 50 years old. There are a lot more medical issues involved here, though.
There’s a Hank Green video somewhere where he explains why developing a sperm and egg from the same person’s stem cells and fertilizing the egg with the sperm would be horrifying. As far as I remember, it’s less about the presence of extra chromosomes and more about the sheer amount of information that would be lost. But I assume that the existence of cloning already implies a way to get around this problem.
I think this all exemplifies the sort of mental gymnastics you need to jump through the justify a character not being trans, but it also shows how bad reactionary Star Wars fans are at “basic biology”. Turns out that being trans is a better explanation for someone’s gender changing than chromosomal alterations. Big surprise there.
There’s a Hank Green video somewhere where he explains why developing a sperm and egg from the same person’s stem cells and fertilizing the egg with the sperm would be horrifying. As far as I remember, it’s less about the presence of extra chromosomes and more about the sheer amount of information that would be lost. But I assume that the existence of cloning already implies a way to get around this problem.
in the book I’m writing, one alien species solved the extinction risks of managing low population counts in long-separated populations. An example scenario would be, what if 50 members of the species left the galaxy to do crime or weed in another galaxy, then their home galaxy unexpectedly got destroyed. If humans encountered this scenario, and no living populations of humans had more than 500 members, extinction within 1000 years is basically guaranteed. But really, do you want to travel to a galaxy with over 500 other people? Maybe you’d like to go by yourself or with only your parents or three friends. It might not be possible to return home then ask more people to come back with you if you find a great place to hang out so far away.
Anyways, they solved this by genetically engineering themselves so that each individual will have the genetic diversity of 2 million individuals with legacy reproductive organs, in addition to the other obvious genetic engineering ideas like no cancer and live longer. Thus, a single member of the species can perform a sexual construction of a fetus and birth without the historically required partner or external birthing hardware like hospitals.
Oh shit that’s neat. Are there are real world analogues to that sort of reproductive strategy?
