This Biology Teacher Disproved Transphobia With Science – TeenVogue.com

We've seen a lot of bigotry over the past year, from the passage of North Carolina's HB2, which bans transgender people from certain bathrooms, to the Trump administration rescinding civil rights protections for transgender students in public schools. And if you've ever tried to counter this type of discrimination, you might have come up against someone who truly believes that their bigoted viewpoints are based in science. A biology teacher from New York saw this scenario on Facebook, and she was fed up. Instead of just scrolling by, Grace Pokela destroyed a transphobic post with science.

According to Observer, Grace saw someone post a meme on Facebook that tried to pass transphobia off as scientific. The post argued that there are only two sexes in sexual species, as determined by chromosomes. The post says anything other than an XX (female) or XY (male) chromosome pairing is a mutation, and it argues those chromosome pairing also determine our gender. We already know sex and gender are different, so this post is automatically untrue but Grace pointed out there's actually a whole lot of science that proves it even more false.

"First of all, in a sexual species, you can have females be XX and males be X (insects), you can have females be ZW and males be ZZ (birds), you can have females be females because they developed in a warm environment and males be males because they developed in a cool environment (reptiles), you can have females be females because they lost a penis sword fighting contest (some flatworms), you can have males be males because they were born female, but changed sexes because the only male in their group died (parrotfish and clownfish)," Grace wrote.

In case the meme was talking about humans, Grace continued.

"Oh, did you mean humans? Oh ok then. You can be male because you were born female, but you have 5-alphareductase deficiency and so you grew a penis at age 12. You can be female because you have an X and a Y chromosome but you are insensitive to androgens, and so you have a female body. You can be female because you have an X and a Y chromosome but your Y is missing the SRY gene, and so you have a female body. You can be male because you have two X chromosomes, but one of your X's HAS an SRY gene, and so you have a male body. You can be male because you have two X chromosomes- but also a Y," she wrote. "You can be female because you have only one X chromosome at all. And you can be male because you have two X chromosomes, but your heart and brain are male. And vice - effing - versa. Don't use science to justify your bigotry. The world is way too weird for that shit."

PREACH GRACE. In one swift post, Grace absolutely destroyed transphobia using cold, hard facts. The meme she responded to, Grace told Observer was another in an ongoing attempt to muddy actual facts.

Facts have become so nebulous recently, Grace said. To see someone spouting such rage towards a truly oppressed group made me very upset. Using falsehoods to promote hate just rubbed me the wrong way.

Exactly. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but when people start passing off fake science and made up facts as reality, we enter dangerous territory. Facts are facts, and there's no alternative truth to them. While people may have opinions about those facts, fudging facts or using falsehoods passed of as truth to make a case about an opinion is harmful, particularly when we're talking about a group of humans. If people think they have scientific basis to discriminate against another group of people, that may put that group in danger.

Grace really hit the nail on the head with her post. It proves once and for all that there's actually a pretty strong scientific argument against transphobia, and definitely shows that science can not be used to promote the bigoted viewpoint. This is one science lesson worth studying.

Related: A 10-Year-Old Girl Slammed Transphobia in One Sentence

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This Biology Teacher Disproved Transphobia With Science - TeenVogue.com