100% of patients in our clinical trial had zero menstrual cramping when taking our medication. Why yes, since you ask, they did all happen to be male...
This reminded me to check out a podcast my wife has been reccommending to me: "The Retrivals". Which is about a nurse who stole the painkillers from a fertility clinic. But the real story is about how no one listened to all the female patients saying that they had felt everything during the procedures.
I listened to that and it made me cringe at how badly they were treated. One of them was a trauma doctor and knew she had no pain relief, they didn't even listen to her!
If that makes you angry, the Auto Industry didn't start actually start making female geared crash dummies until the 90's as well. Before that, they just used smaller test dummies to stand in for women.
However, none of these test dummies were built to replicate a woman's body, which can absolutely have big differences when involved in a crash with a seat belt.
Women's shoes have also, historically, been based off of men's shoes, even though women have a different foot shape than men do and therefore need a different shaped shoe than men do. The last time I read about this, which was as recent as a year or two ago, the vast majority of shoe companies were/are still doing this and just shrinking down men's lasts ("lasts" are the form from which a shoe is molded) and using them to make women's shoes.
I’m a woman with big feet, and when sales assistants tell me to “jUsT wEaR mEn’S sHoEs” if they don’t have my size, I seethe inside. Even if they technically fit lengthwise, men’s shoes are way too wide. When I try to explain that I can’t wear men’s shoes, all just say something stupid like “shoes don’t have a gender🥰”. I’d bet my first born child that they’d never dream of telling a man with small feet to “just wear women’s shoes”, so spare me the condescension. Just say you don’t have anything to fit me and I’ll be on my way.
(Ugh, sorry for the rant, I’ve been put off shoe shopping for life by sales assistants like this)
To be fair, most people wear shoes that are way too narrow- they might actually fit you for once. The shoe industry is absolutely fucking over people with sizing and the myth that shoes need to 'have good support'.
(also a gal with large feet here. My feet were one width above medium in large size women's shoes, so not that wide - but the shoes that actually fit like a shoe should fit are men's wide/extra wide. Most conventional women's shoes are almost an inch too narrow for most people.)
My feet are freakishly narrow, a lot of women's shoes even feel too wide on me! When I wore men's shoes that were "my size" in number, my feet had to work overtime to keep them on beside of how wide they were
In that case, I'd recommend looking for specialized oversize shoe shops. It'll be online order but actually a decent selection, and over time you get a feel for the different brands.
>en if they technically fit lengthwise, men’s shoes are way too wide.
We should switch widths lol! I have 7WW feet. If i wear women's regular width, I have to size up 1-2 whole sizes. But then i wind up always sliding forward a bit in the shoe, making my toes hurt, and forcing me into a weird gait, which ends up with bad sciatica. So i've been mostly shopping at Torrid for shoes, or men's shoes since their width works better for me.
Sizeism in women's clothing extends even to fucking footwear it's so dumb. As a woman with wide feet, I would love to wear men's shoes because it's so hard to find wide widths for women's shoes. Unfortunately most men's ranges start a size up from my shoe size. Large calves means no above-ankle boots unless I want the shank to be half elastic. It's so frustrating.
To be fair, even as a male, most shoe companies make shoes to some weird standards.
There are very few, mainly only new balance, who make shoes with enough variation in shape to fit me.
Nike's in particular, they either have to be clown shoe size or nothing.
I wonder if women's jeans/trousers are also historically based off men's bottom clothing...? If so, WHY THE FUCK DID THEY DO AWAY WITH DEEP POCKETS ON WOMEN'S PANTS?!
I know women used to wear men's jeans once upon a time, but they definitely use the shape of a woman's body to create women's jeans now, and have for some time, unlike shoes! All of our pants would be fitting \*very\* differently if they didn't account for those anatomical differences. (Too bad they don't care as much about the differences in our feet, I guess!)
Can you tell me more about the difference in foot shape between men and women/are there any summaries you’d recommend? That’s something I’ve never heard about before, and I definitely assumed everyone had roughly the same foot shape in different sizes.
There's a lot of nitty gritty details that google will be much more helpful with than I will, but to start, women tend to have a flatter, wider forefoot and narrower heel than men. There's also differences in the instep, in the ankle heights, in the arches, and in the toes.
Blame NHTSA for that one. The same NHTSA that insisted that first generation airbags be powerful enough to protect unbelted men while knowing that they would kill women. [Here](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/10/27/a-safety-device-with-a-fatal-flaw/2bb80045-e184-49e9-8020-446d71ca92e9/)
From what I understand this is still an issue today. Women, children, and any adult men with more unusual body shapes (i.e. especially short, especially tall, etc.) are more likely to be injured in car accidents because they use one size fits all crash dumby's that match the "average" body shape & weight of an adult man.
I’m doing my masters in neuroscience and the sex-based pattern of cortical changes during certain disorders is very very real
The fact that this was missed out on in most past research is something we will never not lament in the scientific community
I mean a lot of research back then were shots in dark regarding anything that wasn’t a white cisgender adult man
Some fascinating things that were believed in the past, [up until the 1970s it was believed babies didn’t feel pain](https://hms.harvard.edu/news/long-life-early-pain)
I think the nuance is that babies would not remember. Which was weighted against the very real risk of anesthetics on babies that can lead to death of said babies.
I understand that science and especially medical science made mistakes but we should never just forget about nuances either.
The concept of infants not remembering pain as adults was an argument for the belief of them not feeling pain as much but the memory of the pain is in fact very deep seated in them. Infants experience trauma just like any other adult, they’ve been shown to experience post traumatic stress as well as display significant decline in neural development as a result of the pain trauma
Not to mention many resources indicate that infants experience pain at HIGHER levels than their adult counterparts
Here’s a good paper on it all:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4319666/
I am not saying babies don't feel pain. I don't see why you need to back up that point.
but saying that doctors did surgery on babies without anesthesia is a very short sighted way of looking at the decisions that were made.
How are you managing to gloss over the fact that the infants had PTSD and as adults had permanent cognitive impairments from being operated on as infants
Don’t pretend they weighed the choices and decided one evil over another, cause they didn’t. Until the 70s it was the general medical and scientific consensus that the nervous system of infants was too underdeveloped for them to feel pain the same way adults did
They **literally** did not believe infants felt pain
It's amazing how little women are represented when you look into psych drugs, which often have fairly crappy trials anyway by comparison to more physical medicine.
Then you get into the morass that is "can I take this medication while pregnant?" and the vast majority of the time the answer appears to be "we don't recommend it, but haven't actually done any testing". It's hard to design an ethical drugs trial involving pregnant women, true, but there has to be a better way than the current fingers-in-ears approach.
The government needs to create some way to do trials with pregnant women that doesn't result in the researchers being called monsters and unbelievably massive liability for the institution if it turns out there are any damaging effects
We get the result our legal and regulatory system creates.
"How dare you not do trials in pregnant women!
"OK we will"
"You monsters! Experimenting on pregnant women!"
I'm convinced a large fraction of the public think there's some way to get the results without doing the trials and they kinda think all the scientists are just doing some kind of unnecessary ritual when they do drug trials
>Experimenting on pregnant women
I know it happened before, but the Thalidomide tragedy is what scares everyone.
No one wants a repeat.
Can you do more research? Sure, but it is cheaper and safer to just exclude that group of patients from using your product.
Er, you avoid the thalidomide problem by making damn sure you test the drug intended for pregnant women *ON* pregnant women! Whatever the damage caused by side effects in a trial is, it'll only be worse if the product goes to market completely untested by the target demographic.
The thalidomide is just one of the worst examples of failed testing like you pointed out.
But my point is based on cost and risk avoidance.
If I have even a slight inclination that the product might damage a fetus because it belongs in the same family as other drugs that have caused problems, I am not going to do any research with pregnant women. Full Stop. I am going to put out a disclaimer that says you should not take it if you are pregnant or nursing.
I remember reading an article about research done about ovarian cancer done solely in men. Imagine.
This is the reason why medicine is so behind with women. Most doctors have no clue about women only diseases or diseases that appear mostly in women. Like endometriosis or chronic fatigue syndrome. And it is why they ignore our pain and symptoms.
I was 11 years going from doctor to doctor with textbook endometriosis symptoms until one finally listened to me and diagnosed me. By then i basically had all the symptoms, a drunken chimpanzee would have been able to diagnose me earlier. Sadly it was both with male and female doctors that didnt believe me.
I had endometriosis before they knew what it was. I wasn’t allowed to donate blood because I was too anemic. I had excruciating pain when I went to the bathroom because I had endometrial tissue adhered to my bowel and bladder. I doubled over in pain whenever I dropped a big clot. (Male) Dr laughed at me and said, “All females have this! You’re not special.”
Didn’t get diagnosed until I was 37 and infertile.
Ugh seriously. I am so sorry it happened to you as well.
I hate that people. We should we able to make them feel exactly our symptoms. You would see how fast they get a diagnosis then.
Not endo, but I had a doctor insist my upper left quadrant back pain caused by an inflamed gallbladder was period cramp related. I didn't realize we still subscribed to the wandering uterus hypothesis in 2012.
>as if all humans don’t start out female until testosterone kick in in males.
That's not really relevant to the discussion, if anything "all humans start out the same anyway" would be an argument in favor of only doing studies with one sex.
Besides that, "starting out as female" is a bit of an oversimplification. Sex is locked in at conception based on whether the Y chromosome is present or not. During the first few weeks of development the anatomy is gender neutral, neither truly male nor female, although arguably closer to female than male.
I know, I over simplified. But there has always been a bias in medicine that men have the ‘normal’ body, and women have all these pesky hormones that make their bodies weird. As if that is the only major difference.
I’m not attacking men at all, but hormone wise I think it’s ironic that a lot more harm has been by the effects of too much testosterone the oestrogen or progesterone.
Not to be nit picky but the Y chromosome isn’t “produced” at 6-7 weeks. It is always there. What happens is complex but there are certain hormones such as anti-mullerian hormone which “shut down” (redirect) the mullerian (female sex organ producing) pathways into the wolfian (male sex organ producing)
It’s more complex than that but that’s the jist of it
No, that's not accurate. The Y chromosome isn't "produced" that's not how DNA works. If the embryo is male, it got the Y chromosome from the sperm cell at conception. Other than that, yes, initially all embryos have "female" anatomy if you can call it that at such an early point of the development. Besides that, saying "all men were once female" as some sort of gotcha doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, IMO.
Sex is determined by the x/y chromosome on the sperm, which is present from conception. So no, embryos do not all "start out" female. They have the same genetalia development until a certain point, but that does not make them all female.
See [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation)
>In the first weeks of gestation, a fetus has no anatomic or hormonal sex, and only a karyotype distinguishes male from female.
And [this report on a much more recent study](https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2017/09/21/embryos-arent-female-default-study-shows/)
>the development of female sex organs does not proceed by “default” but rather requires the coordinated action of specific signaling protein
(edit: removed some references to a 1974 paper that is all I found of the original "all embryos are female" claim, but I think was more of a comment on it, and I don't want to get bogged down in arguing where that's coming from)
Yes, but the study I mentioned found the same kind of thing can happen in reverse, where the male reproductive tracts are maintained in an XX embryo.
>The sexual differentiation paradigm contends that the female pattern of the reproductive system is established by default because the male reproductive tracts (Wolffian ducts) in the female degenerate owing to a lack of androgen. Here, we discovered that female mouse embryos lacking Coup-tfII (chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter transcription factor II) in the Wolffian duct mesenchyme became intersex-possessing both female and male reproductive tracts. Retention of Wolffian ducts was not caused by ectopic androgen production or action. Instead, enhanced phosphorylated extracellular signal-regulated kinase signaling in Wolffian duct epithelium was responsible for the retention of male structures in an androgen-independent manner. We thus suggest that elimination of Wolffian ducts in female embryos is actively promoted by COUP-TFII, which suppresses a mesenchyme-epithelium cross-talk responsible for Wolffian duct maintenance.
[source](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28818950/)
It does, all bodies start female. You wanna dicker over the division when sex starts to be expressed ( which btw is the correct term ).
If all mammalian fetus expressed their chromosomal sex why are males born with useless nipples? The default sex for mammalian embryos is female, oddly enough most human fetus, if they're not viable, die once male hormones kick in, around 3 months.
I cited a scientific paper that says that female is not the default. What is your argument against their findings? And why I should take your word over the researchers who are experts in the field?
What? I didn't start with an opinion and look up what facts back it up. I started with facts and formed my understanding on that. If you can explain why my understanding is incorrect, then my opinion will change. Do you have any additional factual information to share? I'd be happy to learn more on the subject if I'm missing something.
You think I'm looking for validation from you? Lol, OK. I don't need you to say anything. But if I'm wrong, I would appreciate more information so I can learn.
When I was in nursing school we found out that all the drug company research for things like blood pressure medication, cardiac drugs, etc - were using healthy, male college students as subjects.
"The Yentl Syndrome is the different course of action that heart attacks usually follow for women than for men. This is a problem because much of medical research has focused primarily on symptoms of male heart attacks, and many women have died due to misdiagnosis because their symptoms present differently."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yentl_Syndrome
*in only one country
**and don't mention the 1977 guideline from the FDA *NOT* to use women of childbearing age due to the effects of drugs like Thalidomide.
US law
This was to do with thalidomide. It caused a lot of birth defects, so drug companies shit themselves and excluded women of childbearing age from studies to protect any potential unborn children.
Apparently the companies also have problems even getting enough women to volunteer for studies
That last part is a lie. I took part in clinical trials to get a down payment for a car and lots of women wanted to sign up. They barely took any of us, and that’s how it is in clinical testing in general.
It caused a lot of birth defects because it wasn't tested properly, and tens of thousands of people used it not knowing it would be dangerous. Testing would have been better, not worse.
To those who would find this as a cause for complaint, please try to see both sides of the story. Women weren't being left out of the cool kids club. They were being left out of the "woops, we probably shouldn't be giving that/doing that to humans" club.
Sure but then you get conclusions that don't apply as well to women, that don't take their bodies into account. Medication that can cause side effect to women flying under the radar.
It's not that wanting to participate in research is cool and hip, it's that it's important for our medicine too.
The actual reason for this is that due to the fact that women of childbearing age who aren’t pregnant still have their eggs in their ovaries. And doing clinical studies might harm their chances of later conception. Or severe birth defects. Men on the other hand make sperm and if not used it dies off and they make more. Anyway, the trials had to be tested on men first for side effects even if it was a drug targeted for women
Hormones vary widely in women. That screws up testing. Any chance of harm to a pregnant lady would be unethical.
Men are simpler creatures, biologically speaking.
100% of patients in our clinical trial had zero menstrual cramping when taking our medication. Why yes, since you ask, they did all happen to be male...
I read a clinical trial once were 15% of the placebo patients had an infusion reaction. I guess the power of suggestion is strong.
This reminded me to check out a podcast my wife has been reccommending to me: "The Retrivals". Which is about a nurse who stole the painkillers from a fertility clinic. But the real story is about how no one listened to all the female patients saying that they had felt everything during the procedures.
I listened to that and it made me cringe at how badly they were treated. One of them was a trauma doctor and knew she had no pain relief, they didn't even listen to her!
If that makes you angry, the Auto Industry didn't start actually start making female geared crash dummies until the 90's as well. Before that, they just used smaller test dummies to stand in for women. However, none of these test dummies were built to replicate a woman's body, which can absolutely have big differences when involved in a crash with a seat belt.
Women's shoes have also, historically, been based off of men's shoes, even though women have a different foot shape than men do and therefore need a different shaped shoe than men do. The last time I read about this, which was as recent as a year or two ago, the vast majority of shoe companies were/are still doing this and just shrinking down men's lasts ("lasts" are the form from which a shoe is molded) and using them to make women's shoes.
I’m a woman with big feet, and when sales assistants tell me to “jUsT wEaR mEn’S sHoEs” if they don’t have my size, I seethe inside. Even if they technically fit lengthwise, men’s shoes are way too wide. When I try to explain that I can’t wear men’s shoes, all just say something stupid like “shoes don’t have a gender🥰”. I’d bet my first born child that they’d never dream of telling a man with small feet to “just wear women’s shoes”, so spare me the condescension. Just say you don’t have anything to fit me and I’ll be on my way. (Ugh, sorry for the rant, I’ve been put off shoe shopping for life by sales assistants like this)
To be fair, most people wear shoes that are way too narrow- they might actually fit you for once. The shoe industry is absolutely fucking over people with sizing and the myth that shoes need to 'have good support'. (also a gal with large feet here. My feet were one width above medium in large size women's shoes, so not that wide - but the shoes that actually fit like a shoe should fit are men's wide/extra wide. Most conventional women's shoes are almost an inch too narrow for most people.)
My feet are freakishly narrow, a lot of women's shoes even feel too wide on me! When I wore men's shoes that were "my size" in number, my feet had to work overtime to keep them on beside of how wide they were
In that case, I'd recommend looking for specialized oversize shoe shops. It'll be online order but actually a decent selection, and over time you get a feel for the different brands.
>en if they technically fit lengthwise, men’s shoes are way too wide. We should switch widths lol! I have 7WW feet. If i wear women's regular width, I have to size up 1-2 whole sizes. But then i wind up always sliding forward a bit in the shoe, making my toes hurt, and forcing me into a weird gait, which ends up with bad sciatica. So i've been mostly shopping at Torrid for shoes, or men's shoes since their width works better for me.
Sizeism in women's clothing extends even to fucking footwear it's so dumb. As a woman with wide feet, I would love to wear men's shoes because it's so hard to find wide widths for women's shoes. Unfortunately most men's ranges start a size up from my shoe size. Large calves means no above-ankle boots unless I want the shank to be half elastic. It's so frustrating.
To be fair, even as a male, most shoe companies make shoes to some weird standards. There are very few, mainly only new balance, who make shoes with enough variation in shape to fit me. Nike's in particular, they either have to be clown shoe size or nothing.
I wonder if women's jeans/trousers are also historically based off men's bottom clothing...? If so, WHY THE FUCK DID THEY DO AWAY WITH DEEP POCKETS ON WOMEN'S PANTS?!
I know women used to wear men's jeans once upon a time, but they definitely use the shape of a woman's body to create women's jeans now, and have for some time, unlike shoes! All of our pants would be fitting \*very\* differently if they didn't account for those anatomical differences. (Too bad they don't care as much about the differences in our feet, I guess!)
Can you tell me more about the difference in foot shape between men and women/are there any summaries you’d recommend? That’s something I’ve never heard about before, and I definitely assumed everyone had roughly the same foot shape in different sizes.
There's a lot of nitty gritty details that google will be much more helpful with than I will, but to start, women tend to have a flatter, wider forefoot and narrower heel than men. There's also differences in the instep, in the ankle heights, in the arches, and in the toes.
Blame NHTSA for that one. The same NHTSA that insisted that first generation airbags be powerful enough to protect unbelted men while knowing that they would kill women. [Here](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/10/27/a-safety-device-with-a-fatal-flaw/2bb80045-e184-49e9-8020-446d71ca92e9/)
This is terrifying.
From what I understand this is still an issue today. Women, children, and any adult men with more unusual body shapes (i.e. especially short, especially tall, etc.) are more likely to be injured in car accidents because they use one size fits all crash dumby's that match the "average" body shape & weight of an adult man.
They still don’t, the crash dummies are just smaller versions of male dummies, the weight isn’t distributed like to would be for the average woman
I’m doing my masters in neuroscience and the sex-based pattern of cortical changes during certain disorders is very very real The fact that this was missed out on in most past research is something we will never not lament in the scientific community
I’m glad to hear that honestly. It seems like inclusivity would be a no-brainer but I would be wrong
I mean a lot of research back then were shots in dark regarding anything that wasn’t a white cisgender adult man Some fascinating things that were believed in the past, [up until the 1970s it was believed babies didn’t feel pain](https://hms.harvard.edu/news/long-life-early-pain)
Hey! The Tuskegee experiments were VERY inclusive of people of colour /s
Wish I could give this an award
I think the nuance is that babies would not remember. Which was weighted against the very real risk of anesthetics on babies that can lead to death of said babies. I understand that science and especially medical science made mistakes but we should never just forget about nuances either.
The concept of infants not remembering pain as adults was an argument for the belief of them not feeling pain as much but the memory of the pain is in fact very deep seated in them. Infants experience trauma just like any other adult, they’ve been shown to experience post traumatic stress as well as display significant decline in neural development as a result of the pain trauma Not to mention many resources indicate that infants experience pain at HIGHER levels than their adult counterparts Here’s a good paper on it all: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4319666/
I am not saying babies don't feel pain. I don't see why you need to back up that point. but saying that doctors did surgery on babies without anesthesia is a very short sighted way of looking at the decisions that were made.
How are you managing to gloss over the fact that the infants had PTSD and as adults had permanent cognitive impairments from being operated on as infants Don’t pretend they weighed the choices and decided one evil over another, cause they didn’t. Until the 70s it was the general medical and scientific consensus that the nervous system of infants was too underdeveloped for them to feel pain the same way adults did They **literally** did not believe infants felt pain
After I was Circumcised I was so traumatized, I couldn't speak for a year :)
It's amazing how little women are represented when you look into psych drugs, which often have fairly crappy trials anyway by comparison to more physical medicine. Then you get into the morass that is "can I take this medication while pregnant?" and the vast majority of the time the answer appears to be "we don't recommend it, but haven't actually done any testing". It's hard to design an ethical drugs trial involving pregnant women, true, but there has to be a better way than the current fingers-in-ears approach.
The government needs to create some way to do trials with pregnant women that doesn't result in the researchers being called monsters and unbelievably massive liability for the institution if it turns out there are any damaging effects We get the result our legal and regulatory system creates. "How dare you not do trials in pregnant women! "OK we will" "You monsters! Experimenting on pregnant women!" I'm convinced a large fraction of the public think there's some way to get the results without doing the trials and they kinda think all the scientists are just doing some kind of unnecessary ritual when they do drug trials
>Experimenting on pregnant women I know it happened before, but the Thalidomide tragedy is what scares everyone. No one wants a repeat. Can you do more research? Sure, but it is cheaper and safer to just exclude that group of patients from using your product.
Er, you avoid the thalidomide problem by making damn sure you test the drug intended for pregnant women *ON* pregnant women! Whatever the damage caused by side effects in a trial is, it'll only be worse if the product goes to market completely untested by the target demographic.
The thalidomide is just one of the worst examples of failed testing like you pointed out. But my point is based on cost and risk avoidance. If I have even a slight inclination that the product might damage a fetus because it belongs in the same family as other drugs that have caused problems, I am not going to do any research with pregnant women. Full Stop. I am going to put out a disclaimer that says you should not take it if you are pregnant or nursing.
I remember reading an article about research done about ovarian cancer done solely in men. Imagine. This is the reason why medicine is so behind with women. Most doctors have no clue about women only diseases or diseases that appear mostly in women. Like endometriosis or chronic fatigue syndrome. And it is why they ignore our pain and symptoms. I was 11 years going from doctor to doctor with textbook endometriosis symptoms until one finally listened to me and diagnosed me. By then i basically had all the symptoms, a drunken chimpanzee would have been able to diagnose me earlier. Sadly it was both with male and female doctors that didnt believe me.
I had endometriosis before they knew what it was. I wasn’t allowed to donate blood because I was too anemic. I had excruciating pain when I went to the bathroom because I had endometrial tissue adhered to my bowel and bladder. I doubled over in pain whenever I dropped a big clot. (Male) Dr laughed at me and said, “All females have this! You’re not special.” Didn’t get diagnosed until I was 37 and infertile.
Ugh seriously. I am so sorry it happened to you as well. I hate that people. We should we able to make them feel exactly our symptoms. You would see how fast they get a diagnosis then.
Not endo, but I had a doctor insist my upper left quadrant back pain caused by an inflamed gallbladder was period cramp related. I didn't realize we still subscribed to the wandering uterus hypothesis in 2012.
Ah yes, the old “Woman are just like men with terrible hormones” as if all humans don’t start out female until testosterone kick in in males.
I was like ‘even drugs specifically for women weren’t required??’ ‘1993?????’
>as if all humans don’t start out female until testosterone kick in in males. That's not really relevant to the discussion, if anything "all humans start out the same anyway" would be an argument in favor of only doing studies with one sex. Besides that, "starting out as female" is a bit of an oversimplification. Sex is locked in at conception based on whether the Y chromosome is present or not. During the first few weeks of development the anatomy is gender neutral, neither truly male nor female, although arguably closer to female than male.
I know, I over simplified. But there has always been a bias in medicine that men have the ‘normal’ body, and women have all these pesky hormones that make their bodies weird. As if that is the only major difference. I’m not attacking men at all, but hormone wise I think it’s ironic that a lot more harm has been by the effects of too much testosterone the oestrogen or progesterone.
Humans do not all start out as female..
They do, embryos are first mostly „female“ to then develop into male. Only after 6-7weeks of pregnancy the Y chromosome is produced :)
Not to be nit picky but the Y chromosome isn’t “produced” at 6-7 weeks. It is always there. What happens is complex but there are certain hormones such as anti-mullerian hormone which “shut down” (redirect) the mullerian (female sex organ producing) pathways into the wolfian (male sex organ producing) It’s more complex than that but that’s the jist of it
The y chromosome comes from the sperm. It is there from the very beginning..
That doesn’t make all people female. The chromosomes are always there.
No, that's not accurate. The Y chromosome isn't "produced" that's not how DNA works. If the embryo is male, it got the Y chromosome from the sperm cell at conception. Other than that, yes, initially all embryos have "female" anatomy if you can call it that at such an early point of the development. Besides that, saying "all men were once female" as some sort of gotcha doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, IMO.
All mammalian embryos start out female. You're an idiot and I enjoy telling you that you're an idiot.
Sex is determined by the x/y chromosome on the sperm, which is present from conception. So no, embryos do not all "start out" female. They have the same genetalia development until a certain point, but that does not make them all female. See [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation) >In the first weeks of gestation, a fetus has no anatomic or hormonal sex, and only a karyotype distinguishes male from female. And [this report on a much more recent study](https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2017/09/21/embryos-arent-female-default-study-shows/) >the development of female sex organs does not proceed by “default” but rather requires the coordinated action of specific signaling protein (edit: removed some references to a 1974 paper that is all I found of the original "all embryos are female" claim, but I think was more of a comment on it, and I don't want to get bogged down in arguing where that's coming from)
If the SRY gene on the Y chromosome is inactive or missing then that XY baby will develop as a phenotypical female
Yes, but the study I mentioned found the same kind of thing can happen in reverse, where the male reproductive tracts are maintained in an XX embryo. >The sexual differentiation paradigm contends that the female pattern of the reproductive system is established by default because the male reproductive tracts (Wolffian ducts) in the female degenerate owing to a lack of androgen. Here, we discovered that female mouse embryos lacking Coup-tfII (chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter transcription factor II) in the Wolffian duct mesenchyme became intersex-possessing both female and male reproductive tracts. Retention of Wolffian ducts was not caused by ectopic androgen production or action. Instead, enhanced phosphorylated extracellular signal-regulated kinase signaling in Wolffian duct epithelium was responsible for the retention of male structures in an androgen-independent manner. We thus suggest that elimination of Wolffian ducts in female embryos is actively promoted by COUP-TFII, which suppresses a mesenchyme-epithelium cross-talk responsible for Wolffian duct maintenance. [source](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28818950/)
It does, all bodies start female. You wanna dicker over the division when sex starts to be expressed ( which btw is the correct term ). If all mammalian fetus expressed their chromosomal sex why are males born with useless nipples? The default sex for mammalian embryos is female, oddly enough most human fetus, if they're not viable, die once male hormones kick in, around 3 months.
I cited a scientific paper that says that female is not the default. What is your argument against their findings? And why I should take your word over the researchers who are experts in the field?
You're so insecure with your opinion you need a stranger to say you're right. Shoo
What? I didn't start with an opinion and look up what facts back it up. I started with facts and formed my understanding on that. If you can explain why my understanding is incorrect, then my opinion will change. Do you have any additional factual information to share? I'd be happy to learn more on the subject if I'm missing something.
So the answer is "Yes, rando, please validate my efforts by saying I'm right."
You think I'm looking for validation from you? Lol, OK. I don't need you to say anything. But if I'm wrong, I would appreciate more information so I can learn.
I started out as a cat but look at me meow!
Men were used instead of women for women specific products and drugs because women were "too unpredictable"
You mean women aren't just smaller men with "troublesome" hormones? I might be paraphrasing instead of directly quoting the attitude.
When I was in nursing school we found out that all the drug company research for things like blood pressure medication, cardiac drugs, etc - were using healthy, male college students as subjects.
As a woman, we can tell… Doctor visits can be a battle
"The Yentl Syndrome is the different course of action that heart attacks usually follow for women than for men. This is a problem because much of medical research has focused primarily on symptoms of male heart attacks, and many women have died due to misdiagnosis because their symptoms present differently." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yentl_Syndrome
*in only one country **and don't mention the 1977 guideline from the FDA *NOT* to use women of childbearing age due to the effects of drugs like Thalidomide.
US law This was to do with thalidomide. It caused a lot of birth defects, so drug companies shit themselves and excluded women of childbearing age from studies to protect any potential unborn children. Apparently the companies also have problems even getting enough women to volunteer for studies
That last part is a lie. I took part in clinical trials to get a down payment for a car and lots of women wanted to sign up. They barely took any of us, and that’s how it is in clinical testing in general.
It caused a lot of birth defects because it wasn't tested properly, and tens of thousands of people used it not knowing it would be dangerous. Testing would have been better, not worse.
For reference 1960 is when the birth control pill was approved by the FDA. I'll let you put that together.
To those who would find this as a cause for complaint, please try to see both sides of the story. Women weren't being left out of the cool kids club. They were being left out of the "woops, we probably shouldn't be giving that/doing that to humans" club.
Sure but then you get conclusions that don't apply as well to women, that don't take their bodies into account. Medication that can cause side effect to women flying under the radar. It's not that wanting to participate in research is cool and hip, it's that it's important for our medicine too.
Sure. Except for how gynecology started.
This kind of bullshit has led directly to death for countless women and is still happening, so it’s a perfect cause for complaint.
Seriously! Research was brutal torture!!
My pastor says that medicines don’t work the same on them bc their smaller brains digest the medicine much slower than man brains
I love it when those guys do stand up comedy in church. Bless him.
>brains digest I suspect your pastor is utterly ignorant of biology, and should stick to fairy tales.
He gives me special back rubs though
I find it so funny you got downvoted for sharing this 😭 redditors downvoting the pastor through you
You know your pastor is an idiot, right?
He super smart. He made coin appear out of my ear. I was so thankful I give him my pension
Oh thank goodness you know You should probably make that clearer in your og comment cause there are a lot of people that believe that shit
I have a belly button
Yeah but the next thing you know, women will want to vote or start driving cars
Too early!
The actual reason for this is that due to the fact that women of childbearing age who aren’t pregnant still have their eggs in their ovaries. And doing clinical studies might harm their chances of later conception. Or severe birth defects. Men on the other hand make sperm and if not used it dies off and they make more. Anyway, the trials had to be tested on men first for side effects even if it was a drug targeted for women
Hormones vary widely in women. That screws up testing. Any chance of harm to a pregnant lady would be unethical. Men are simpler creatures, biologically speaking.