#differences-of-sex-development-dsd

#differences-of-sex-development-dsd

'Because sperm are highly mobile and have minimal cytoplasm, they quickly exhaust their stored energy reserves and have limited capacity for repair,' co-lead author Dr Rebecca Dean, from the University of Oxford, said.

Their results revealed that women with lower 2D:4D are more likely to be lesbian. Meanwhile, men with higher 2D:4D are more likely to be gay. 'Bisexual women are more similar to heterosexual women in digit ratios, but there may be further nuance,' the researchers explained.

NHS England is "separately reviewing the evidence for the use of MAF in adults with gender dysphoria" with the aim of launching a consultation on its findings in late 2026. A separate section clarifies that its ban on new prescriptions will only apply to youth gender services, adding that the NHS will continue to prescribe hormones for adult patients in its gender identity clinics (GICs).

The parents object that these policies prevent schools from telling them about their children's efforts to engage in gender transitioning at school unless the children consent to parental notification. The parents also take issue with California's requirement that schools use children's preferred names and pronouns regardless of their parents' wishes.

Prof Jacob George, who was appointed chief medical and scientific officer at the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in January, raised concerns that led to the Pathways trial being put on hold by the government, according to the Sunday Times. But the regulator announced on Saturday that George would recuse himself from involvement in the trial after gender-critical social media posts made last year emerged.

For more than 60 years, contraception has been almost exclusively a women's responsibility. Today, women have more than 14 modern contraceptive options, while men have just two: condoms and vasectomies. That imbalance has pushed women to shoulder physical side effects, financial burden, medical risks, and the career impact of family planning-costs that have been accepted as the "status quo" for far too long.

Researchers studying brain-imaging data from people aged between 8 and 100 found that sex differences in the brain's connections are minimal in early life, but then increase drastically at puberty; some of these differences continue to grow throughout adult life. The study was published as a preprint on bioRxiv, and has not yet been peer reviewed. The work could help us to understand why men and women have different likelihoods of developing some mental-health disorders - and perhaps give insight into treating them, say the researchers.

When fertility treatment leads to IVF with donor eggs, sex may have dropped off significantly. By this point, intimacy has often been under strain for some time. While this path can hold real hope of completing one's family, with many hurdles and no guarantees, it also adds another layer of pressure and emotional labor-helping explain why sex may have receded, not because desire is gone, but because sex has been tied to stress for too long.

When Lola was eight years old, she went through a massive growth spurt and started developing acne. Her mother, Elise, thought Lola was just growing fast because of genes inherited from her father. But when she noticed that Lola had grown pubic hair too, she was floored. A visit to an endocrinologist in 2023 confirmed that Lola's brain was already producing hormones that had kick-started puberty.

The findings of a study conducted on a sample of 2.7 million people in Sweden over a 35 year period, and published this Thursday in the medical journal BMJ, suggest that the male to female ratio of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has decreased over time. In early childhood, before the age of 10, the male to female ratio is 3:1 (the most widely accepted ratio a few years ago was 4:1).

As the shaky evidence base for youth gender medicine has become better known, activists have retreated to an argument from authority. Never mind the Cass Report, whose findings resulted in the closure of Britain's leading youth gender clinic. Never mind the study by a leading American practitioner showing that the treatments she championed did not improve minors' mental health. Never mind reports that some adolescents were being put on a medical pathway after only a single clinic visit. For advocates, the important thing to remember was that "gender-affirming care" for minors-puberty blockers and hormones, plus surgery in rare cases-was endorsed by all of the major American medical associations.

During that time, I've had two long-term male partners, who shared similar issues. The first felt the IUD several times during sex. I had my doctor snip the strings shorter. This did not help. It still poked him, and he even bled once. My second long-term partner (and current husband) had the same issue. I got a new IUD and kept the strings long since they're supposed to "curl up." Didn't help.

Administration health officials praised a statement released Tuesday by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) that advises against conducting "gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery" on people under the age of 19, even though such procedures are rarely conducted on minors. The ASPS based its statement on two recent reports from the U.K. and the U.S. that were widely criticized by transgender healthcare advocates as being biased.

Rady Children's Hospital stopped providing such care on February 6 in response to the current presidential administration's threats to end federal funding to medical institutions that offer gender-affirming healthcare. Superior Court Judge Matthew Braner said the case involved "an extraordinarily thorny issue" that placed the hospital "between a rock and a hard place," but said that ending the care would place the hospital's 1,900 trans youth patients under "a risk of relative degrees of harm," Voice of San Diego reported.

Transgender women possess no physical advantage over those who were born female, a controversial study claims. Researchers from the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil analysed the strength, fitness and body composition of transgender people undergoing hormonal treatment compared to cisgender individuals. Their findings suggest that while transgender women still have greater muscle mass following hormone therapy, their physical fitness is 'comparable' to other females.

In this episode: coming out. Academia can think of itself as an area that can ask the difficult questions. Science, after all, is all about getting to the bottom of things, seeking an understanding of the world around us in all its complexity. But when it comes to the complexity of researchers themselves, academia can often struggle to have the tough conversations.

Legal experts at Good Law Project revealed in a Saturday (7 February) report that deaths by suicide among trans youngsters surged to 22 in England between 2021 and 2022. The number is nearly six times higher than reported deaths in 2020-21, according to its freedom of information (FOI) data, with at least four trans and non-binary young people in 2020-21. Comparatively, the number of reported deaths went down by one between 2019-20 and 2020-21.