Comics I Don’t Understand

Identical Twins

Cidu Bill on Jan 12th 2010

Oh yeah, one or two people sent me this one. Flashback.

Filed in Bill Bickel, Real Life Adventures, comic strips, comics, humor | 26 responses so far

26 Responses to “Identical Twins”

Taigan Jan 12th 2010 at 10:39 pm 1

W…wow. That… I have no words to describe it.
Tim Jan 12th 2010 at 10:44 pm 2

This is truly stupid. Somebody needs to look up the word “fraternal.”
Kamino Neko Jan 12th 2010 at 10:46 pm 3

Obligatory Tropes Link.
Nicole Jan 12th 2010 at 10:50 pm 4

one is transgendered …. DUH
fuzzmaster Jan 13th 2010 at 12:34 am 5

I’m just thinking, if one’s a girl and one’s a boy, there might be another way to tell them apart.
Judge Mental Jan 13th 2010 at 12:35 am 6

I have to admit, I don’t understand if the “Real Life Adventures” comic is an instance of characters being stupid, the author being stupid, or both

Is the joke

a) simply a gender sterotype gag where the author is oblivious to the fallacy of calling the twins identical. (author is stupid)
b) the first women (I presume is mother) refers to them as identical and both women are over-looking the obvious way to discern them (characters are stupid)
c) both women are over-looking the easiest way to discern the two, but author fails to realize the fallacy of terming them “identical (both are stupid)
Judge Mental Jan 13th 2010 at 12:38 am 7

Here I am throwing out the term “stupid” left and right, and I refer to a single female as a “women”

(A “single” female meaning “one”, not “unmarried”)
Elyrest Jan 13th 2010 at 12:38 am 8

Nicole - I’m one of the ones who sent it in. Later in the day my sister was complaining to me about the same comic, but then mentioned an episode of, I think, CSI that involved twin boys. One of the boys was emasculated during a circumcision and was turned into a girl. So yeah, in the television universe this might fly.
Usual John Jan 13th 2010 at 12:47 am 9

I’m pretty sure that the cartoonist intends that these twins, at least, are not, in fact, identical. It’s a variant of the old joke about the two identical horses.

A farmer had two horses that were almost exactly alike. No matter how carefully he tried, he couldn’t tell them apart. Finally he measured them and finally found a way that, with a tape measure at least, he could figure which was which: The black horse was exactly two inches taller than the white horse.
mkilby Jan 13th 2010 at 02:19 am 10

I agree, it’s a variant of the “horses” joke. The cartoonist could have avoided the “stupidity” question entirely simply by omitting the word “identical” from the first balloon.
Nicole Jan 13th 2010 at 02:51 am 11

Elyrest #8 .. That actually happened. During the 50’s a circumcision was botched and the parents were convinced by a doctor to raise the boy as a girl. The doctor was using the child to prove his theory that gender identity is societal. The short form is that the doctor was wrong and the boy’s life was hell, as he reached puberty he found out the truth and started living his life as a male. Unfortunately the damage was done and he committed suicide in his 40’s.
Charlene Jan 13th 2010 at 04:15 am 12

To be fair, in the 50s “female” was often defined by the general public as “the lack of a penis”, as if all the stuff women have under the hood were irrelevant. The parents wouldn’t likely have needed to be “convinced” by a doctor since they would have absorbed the cultural idea that an incomplete male would be female anyway. This affected thousands of kids who were born intersex, as well as those with damaged or unusual genitalia. Even today the intersex are often treated by parents (and especially dads) as female unless they have full male external genitalia, no matter what the chromosomes say.

Most doctors these days recommend that children who are intersex be raised as gender-neutrally as possible in the very early years and closely watched to see whether the child prefers to be treated as a female or as a male. With most kids it’s obvious by age three or four. Even then surgeons (here at least) won’t operate until the intersex person is an adult and legally able to make up his or her own mind about the matter.

To this day I’m surprised by people who don’t know that intersex conditions exist, or that they’re relatively common. In some Western populations over 2% of the population is intersex - in parts of Saudi Arabia the percentage is more like 5%.
chuckers Jan 13th 2010 at 05:00 am 13

“You keep saying that word. I don’t think it means what you think it does.”
Nicole Jan 13th 2010 at 07:50 am 14

Charlene

The story is detailed in the book “As Nature Made Him”. In the book the doctor is definitely portrayed as a preditor using the family to do his desired research.

I read the book a long time ago so I don’t remember all the details, but I do remember the family was confused what to do. The doctor took advatage of that confusion to convince the family that raising the boy as a girl was the right thing to do.
Nicole Jan 13th 2010 at 07:52 am 15

let me add that I realize that the book was written with a specific point of view and that the doctor’s portrayal may have been exagerated
mister obvious Jan 13th 2010 at 08:27 am 16

I think it is actually possible to have identical twins of opposite sex. In this case, “identical twins” doesn’t mean “exactly same genetic makeup” so much as “sourced from the same egg.”

See here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7802036

(plus there are several other articles in the sidebar)

Note that “has the same genetic makeup” is a result of “sourced from the same egg,” so the latter condition is the stronger. Fraternal twins are sourced from different eggs, merely at the same time.
mkilby Jan 13th 2010 at 09:22 am 17

@ Chuckers (13) - Nuts, that quote is vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it. What was the word in the original?
mister obvious Jan 13th 2010 at 09:32 am 18

“Inconceivable.” From “The Princess Bride”
Carl Jan 13th 2010 at 09:39 am 19

@16, that would be monozygotic but NOT identical twins. The difference is caused by a somatic mutation (a mutation not happening in the germ cell line) after fertilization.
PepperjackCandy Jan 13th 2010 at 06:51 pm 20

Nicole @ 11 wrote: During the 50’s a circumcision was botched and the parents were convinced by a doctor to raise the boy as a girl. [snip] Unfortunately the damage was done and he committed suicide in his 40’s.

I’m assuming that you’re talking about the Reimer twins. They raised David as a boy from birth until almost two years of age. Later, all of the adults would freak out whenever behaviors that he’d been taught him during those first two years resurfaced after he was being raised as a girl.

And Brian also committed suicide. Two years before David did.

Pedantic response is pedantic. Sorry about that.
J-L Jan 13th 2010 at 07:53 pm 21

I’m reminded of a time in college when I heard a speaker tell a story that included his twin sister. “He has a twin,” I said aloud, “I wonder if they’re identical?”

A young woman turned to me with a scowl and, evidently not getting the humor, proceeded to explain that they couldn’t be identical, because one was male and the other was female.

I then explained that some twins are identical, and some twins come in boy/girl pairs, therefore “demonstrating” that the speaker and his sister could still be identical twins.

She then proceeded to correct me, and we went back and forth “correcting” each other for a while.

It’s funny how people can be so adamant about correcting you when they don’t realize you’ve just made a joke.
Nicole Jan 13th 2010 at 09:41 pm 22

PepperjackCandy #20 … that would indeed be the case
Tullia Jan 13th 2010 at 10:47 pm 23

This turned up in a David Lodge book — English guy who writes comic novels about literature professors. (They’re not bad.) I think the kids were named Darcy and Elizabeth, and they looked just alike. I read it about ten times to make sure Dr. Lodge wrote what I thought he wrote, and yes, he did.

I can only assume that some people think identical twins are twins who look almost exactly alike, no matter the physical sex.
Powers Jan 14th 2010 at 06:54 am 24

J-L: How could she possibly realize that you were making a joke? Some people really are stupid enough to make the argument you were making, so how did you telegraph that it was a joke that she should laugh off?
Lord-z Jan 14th 2010 at 08:31 am 25

And then there is the old joke “”My wife has a twin” “Do you ever kiss the wrong one by accident?” “No, her brother has a moustache”".
J-L Jan 14th 2010 at 10:28 am 26

Powers (#24): You make a good point. Not even my friends can always tell when I’m making a joke, so how would a stranger know?

What’s weirder is a similar scenario will sometimes happen at work. Co-worker A will make an observation, to which I’ll respond with something that can’t possibly be true. Co-worker B laughs out loud, and then co-worker A proceeds to correct me. I make another statement more outlandish than the last, which causes co-worker A to correct me again.

Eventually I say, “That was a joke, it’s supposed to be funny” to which co-worker A (sometimes) responds, “I know it was a joke, I was just playing along.” At this point the canned laughter would erupt, if only we were a sit-com in prime time. (Soon after we would be cancelled, and we would be at a loss to explain why.)