For those who aren't familiar with it, FX recently announced a new direct-to-streaming series on Hulu, titled "Y: The Last Man". It's based on the 2000s-era Brian K. Vaughan-written Vertigo comic book of the same name, where an incident occurs that kills every mammal with a Y-chromosome on the planet - except for one dude named Yorick Brown, and his pet male capuchin monkey. With half the population instantly dead, you can imagine that chaos ensues, especially when you factor in that a good majority of infrastructure support jobs are handled by - you guessed it - men. (And that's not even taking into account the death of uncountable species across the world as they will no longer be able to procreate, the destruction of food supply, etc).
You can see the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EEQ5Lj-cXM
Obviously this series was written back before the huge push for inclusivity started, so its comic book iteration is not as horribly woke as it could be, but I'm just waiting for the shoe to drop on the TV version. Obviously, nature and genetics don't give two shits about your fee-fees and what you identify as, so that means if they go the full nine yards on this they're either going to have to:
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Ignore the existence of trans people entirely,
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Break the narrative and have it do something stupid like leave M-to-F trans alive but sterilize them,
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Downplay the whole event by claiming it killed "trans-women" as well, or
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Accept that M-to-F transgendered people genetically aren't women and lean into it and just show them as dead as well.
Somehow I think it's probably going to be option 2 or 3, but if it catches traction then the amount of salt this show is going to generate could season the world's popcorn for decades to come.
They never exactly say what caused the plague or why Yorick and Ampersand survived. One of the major theories put forth in the book is that there is one more dude that survived, Doctor Matsumori, who was a geneticist who developed a compound that was injected into Ampersand, who was then mis-delivered to Yorick. All three were affected by the compound, which was why they survived the event.
Vaughan has been intentionally vague as to the actual cause in interviews regarding the book. He claims the answer is in there, but they never clearly stated "THIS IS THE CAUSE OF THE PLAGUE" in the book, with several potential causes being floated over the course of the series.
Yeah, it's typical of speculative plotholes where the writer has no clue where the story is going. I'm guessing the elevator pitch went something like:
BKV: Okay, here's the deal: All the men and male animals in the world DIE except for this one dude and his monkey, and all he wants to do is get reunited with his girlfriend.
Editor: Okay, but why does everyone but him and the monkey die?
BKV: I dunno, reasons, we'll figure it out later, but it's a great hook for a post-apocalyptic feminist take-over, right?
Editor: Sounds good, find an artist and run with it