Wishful science.

I was thumbing through last semester's biology textbook yesterday and looking at the stuff on Barr bodies, which got me thinking about a comic book/series I read once called "Y: The Last Man".

So as a trans woman I have a Y chromosome (I presume, I've never checked but I have a sneaking suspicion it's there). Cis women (usually) have two X chromosomes, BUT, only one functions at a time--the other is deactivated soon after one's conception and becomes a packaged-up thing called a Barr body (actually small parts of it continue to function, but in general it is inert).

So my first thought was, would it be possible to "deactivate" my Y-chromosomes the same way? (Science project time!) But that wouldn't do anything anyway--it takes testosterone for the Y to DO anything, and with an androgen blocker going on nothing is happening anyway (though I guess it would decrease the medication I have to take). It was just an interesting thought, though, especially as the Y chromosome has relatively little information on it to begin with.

Which got me thinking about that comic book.
SPOILERS AHEAD, BY THE WAY
In it, shoddy (though entertaining) science makes every Y chromosome on Earth self-destruct (except for those of the titular last man and a couple of astronauts). The part where this happens is awfully bloody, with lots of vomiting and screaming. But that's not what would happen, unless the chromosomes literally detonated or something. 50% of the world survives on basically one X chromosome. Now I'm not sure EXACTLY what's on the Y chromosome and whether or not it's super-important, but somehow I imagine its loss would not be an immediate mass death knell. Maybe it would kill people eventually, yeah, but not EVERYONE in the thirty seconds it took in the comic.

Just biology-ranting for a second there.