3-D Printer analogy

geoff1000

Human beings are like 3-D Printers. We can make all sorts of things.

However :
Only a female 3-D Printer can make another 3-D Printer ; and it takes 9 months for the production run, with a batch size of usually only 1
Only a male 3-D Printer can make the single-use USB stick that carries the blueprint for themselves, and which the female 3-D Printer needs to make a hybrid of themselves and that blueprint. They can churn out an almost unlimited number of such USB sticks, over a longer number of years ; and really enjoy doing so, even if there is no female 3-D Printer needing one at the time.

Good analogy but everything is going USB-C now lol

"There are test-tube babies and three-parent babies, and both generate plenty of controversy. But as it stands, making a baby still requires an egg from a mother and sperm cells from a father. Scientists say that won’t always be the case, though, because someday it will likely be possible to make babies from skin cells alone. Last year, scientists in Japan revealed that mice had been born of eggs made from a parent’s skin cells, and researchers believe the same technique can one day be used in humans."

geoff1000

@DarrenWalker
Exactly. When technology can beat our limitations, the future is very uncertain, for either type.

As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex.

A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby's chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine—but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother's womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male. “That's kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,” says James.

...

Many people never discover their condition unless they seek help for infertility, or discover it through some other brush with medicine. Last year, for example, surgeons reported that they had been operating on a hernia in a man, when they discovered that he had a womb. The man was 70, and had fathered four children.

—Sex Redefined, a 2018 article on Scientific American (first published in 2015)