random cis who’s taken 8th grade biology at max: ok but if you actually took biology classes you would realize you’re not female
trans woman biologist: um lol

The best piece of advice that I ever had about science was from one half of my pair of secondary school chemistry teachers (husband and wife comedy duo) – it was, essentially, that the entirety of secondary school science is lies.

Basically, it was “We’re going to lie to you about this, it’s not exactly true, but it’s good enough to get the broad idea of how it works… if you want to know how it /really/ works then you’ll have to go do ‘A’ Levels”. When I did ‘A’ Levels they said exactly the same thing, but then said you’d need to do a degree.

Of course…when you do a degree they say ‘Well, we don’t know exactly how this works, but this is what we do know, if you want to know more… you’ll have to research it yourself’.

Which is great, because you’ve got to the frontier of knowledge and you get to go explore.

Of course, if you don’t get told that then you might foolishly think that X and Y chromosomes are the be-all and end-all of both sex and gender.