Did Bill Nye The Science Guy Really Say Gender Determined “By Chromosomes?”

The claim circling on social media was that Bill Nye the Science Guy” said that gender is determined “by your chromosomes” during an episode of his popular kid’s show.

During the international March for Science, an image appeared on the net showing a meme from an old episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy episode with a caption stating “Gender is determined by your chromosomes”:

This meme gained popularity shortly after the debut of Nye’s new show, Bill Nye Saves the World, which featured an episode entitled “The Sexual Spectrum.”

Here’s how Nye opened the episode:

These are human chromosomes. They contain all the genes you need to make a human person. This one is called an X chromosome and this one down there, that’s a Y chromosome. They are sex chromosomes. Females usually have two Xs and males usually have an X and a Y. But it turns out, about 1 in every 400 pregnancies have a different number of sex chromosomes. Some people only have one sex chromosome, some people have 3, 4 or even 5. For me, I usually feel like I have a lot.

But using science, we know that sex and every aspect of human sexuality, well, it’s a little complicated.

The world is wonderfully diverse. As scientists we use the scientific method to try and understand that diversity. That is what is happening with the study of human sex and sexuality. Right now, biologists, sociologists, anthropologists, they all are trying to figure this out. And they are finding out that human sexuality is on a spectrum.

h/t snopes