With violent attacks against Asian's on the rise since 2020, Minnesota state Democrats have attempted to strengthen the state's legislation against hate crimes. Included in the bill was added protections for transgender Americans—a group that has also faced record violence in recent years, up by 20% in just 2019.
As the GOP gets ready to shoot down the legislation, one Republican state representative from Minnesota, Eric Lucero, is touting he "believes in science" as his reason for opposition. Coincidentally, the "science" he is talking about is nonexistent.
Lucero told the Star Tribune:
"I believe in science. I believe if you have an XY chromosome you're a male, if you have a YY chromosome you're a female."
He continued:
"And the language here is going to put Minnesotans in the awkward position of being science deniers and having to choose science over somebody's confusion."
Time for a Comic Sands science lesson.
While in a majority of cases, a human will have an XY chromosome pairing or an XX pairing. But there are cases where the individual will have a variation such as XXY, XYY, XXXY etc....
There is not a YY chromosome pairing, as all viable combinations must have an X from the mother to survive.
All viable eggs carry at least one X chromosome. Each sperm can carry at least on X or Y chromosome. YY could only occur if the egg carried no chromosome which would not result in a viable pregnancy.
Now, back to Lucero's version of "science."
Not stopping there, the conservative midwestern Representative attempted to add a now failed amendment to the hate crimes bill to make law enforcement immune to consequences for refusing to investigate crimes based on the gender identity of the victim, effectively making hate crimes against trans or gender non-conforming people legal.
Earlier in the year Lucero introduced House File 1657 which would make it a misdemeanor for transgender women and girls to play on sports teams or use the bathroom that correlates to their gender with a sentence of up to 90 days in jail, $1,000 fine and up to two years probation. Lucero—in a typically misogynist move—ignored the existence of trans men.
Twitter was buzzing with feedback about Lucero's anti-trans tactics.
While gender according to Lucero is explained by equating male as defined by possessing only one X and only one Y chromosome, female is not specifically defined.
So according to this "science" any other combinations would be considered female.
