One of the top scientific journals in the world, Nature, has acknowledged the value of studying sex and gender disparities and has actually denounced the” culture of fear and reluctance” that is preventing research on the subject.
In order to encourage honest and courageous conversations on a subject that some scientists shy away from due to concerns about their professional and personal repercussions, the book in May launched” a collection of judgment articles” on the subject to get published over the upcoming months.
” Some researchers have been cautioned by coworkers not to study sexual distinctions.” People, who are already working on gender or female- related topics, are anxious to post their views”, read the editor introducing the series.
“…In occasion, we hope this selection will help to form research, and offer a reference point for moderating usually- inflammatory debates”.
The series ‘ opening lines include” Male-female comparisons are powerful in biomedical research,”” Heed lessons from past studies involving transgender people: first, do no harm,” and” Neglecting sex and gender in research is a public health risk.”
What the collection of articles represents and whether it may reduce tensions in this area of study is still to be seen.
According to Jeffrey Mogil, a scientist and pain scientist at Mcgill University and co-author of one of the articles in Humanity’s sex and gender series, efforts are being made to eliminate or minimize the importance of the idea of sex and sex as a linear changing.
Because sex in animals is “either binary or it sessions to binary” and in doing so it always has been useful and continues to be, and any notion of it that is n’t binary would then establish practical problems on how research is done, Mogil said in a recent phone discussion.
Additionally, he noted, the elimination of the idea of linear sex in mammals would hinder significant advancements in how many medical researchers work today.
There are sex differences in all kinds of traits that we’re interested in and where we did n’t realize they existed, according to Mogil. ” The reason we did n’t know they existed]is ] because until extremely recently, essentially all biology pre- clinical experiments were done with males only”.
” Since regulatory agencies, funding agencies, have demanded that people start using both sexes]in research ]”, he said, “lo and behold, we’re finding sex differences”.
What we thought was a thing’s biology was only the biology of the issue in men, he continued,” and the science of a woman is completely different.”
” This is in our heads”, he said,” an extraordinary technological advance and that progress is at risk of stopping and reverting if, you know, individuals start to believe…dividing creatures into males and females is inappropriate”.
Mogil claimed he did not know how Nature made editorial decisions regarding the selection of articles for their sex and gender collection, but that he and his co-authors felt the article was intended to “demonstrate” the fact that sex is more difficult than sex is, or that it is more complicated than people have made it seem.
The College Fix reached out to a senior communications manager from Springer Nature in early June about the selection process for the series and how sex was presented in some of the other commentaries, but they were unsuccessful in getting a response.
In a late-May phone interview with The College Fix, Daniel Barbash, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell University, was more skeptical than Mogil of Nature’s sex and gender op-ed collection.
Although he acknowledged that he generally held a favorable opinion of the article Mogil co-authored and appreciated that it explicitly stated that there are only two sex categories in mammals, he also acknowledged that other commentators in the series were in some ways “further conflating sex and gender.”
” There’s little things that sometimes give the game away”, he said. ” These articles are using phrases like’ a person’s sex assigned at birth’. I find that phrase amusing. I do n’t think sex is assigned at birth. Biological sex is a fact. It’s not assigned. It’s observed”.
” ]For ] the vast majority of humans, from the moment they’re born”, he said,” there is zero ambiguity whether they’re a male or a female”.
Furthermore, the “overall tone” of the collection, Barbash said, was that” there needs to be more research on gender variation and that there is more complexity to biological sex than a binary”.
According to Barbash, neither of these notions are “universally accepted” among biologists.
He claimed that the series has the potential to “drive funding agencies and other organizations that are involved in the intersection of politics and research in a particular direction that I do n’t think would always be helpful.”
No serious biologist, in my opinion, would dispute the significance of sex in both basic research and biomedical research, Barbash said. ” Of course, any study on the effects of drugs should be conducted separately in males and females, otherwise it will be a very confounding factor if you ignore that.”
Yet, he said,” the notion that we need to do the same thing for gender…is really not supported”, and may not be very feasible.
” Half the population is male and half the population is female”, Barbash said. ” We see all kinds of estimates for transgender and gender nonconforming individuals, but they’re undoubtedly much less frequent than males and females,” said one source.
On account of this, he said, even if research questions regarding gender divergence and transgender individuals are worthwhile, “it would be problematic, for example, to necessitate that all NIH studies of humans include males, females and gender nonconforming individuals or transgender individuals”.
However, he said, he feared” this series of articles could have that kind of impact in influencing policy”.
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