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DNA has a very strong signal for man, woman, and everyone in between.


I was a little blithe with my reply here, and feel bad about the scientific inaccuracy I'm perpetuating. The "everyone in between" spectrum often has strong signals, but sometimes it's not very strong straight from DNA alone! And it's also incredibly complex, far far more complex than doing mutation calls, to the point that automating it is quite difficult. Sure, finding XX, XY, XXY, and the many other combinations of sex chromosomes as they appear in nature is easy. Finding subtle inactivations of the genes on the Y chromosome is much harder. In fact analysis of genomes of intersex people is a common use of consumer whole genome and whole exome sequencing, so any consumer sequencing company that simply reports XX as female and XY as male is laughably amateurish, and your customer support lines will be swamped with extremely knowledgeable self-educated intersex people that will being providing tons of information for the company to up their game.


> so any consumer sequencing company that simply reports XX as female and XY as male is laughably amateurish

To my knowledge there is no XX person who can produce sperm and there is no XY person who can produce eggs. So while "XX is female" is over-simplified, "XX is not male" seems fairly clear.


> your customer support lines will be swamped with extremely knowledgeable self-educated

In no other field this combination (self-educated, actually knowledgeable, and calling customer support) seems to exist, so that alone might be worth further study.


They are highly motivated people trying to understand the genetic basis of themselves better, and have usually been seeing doctors throughout their lives towards that end, and usually they'll know more than their doctors because of the rarity of their phenotypes. I have tons of respect for that.




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