Activists Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern have launched an online platform to recognize the importance of “biological reality”. The subject is debated within feminist movements; but what about the view of the different fields of biology.
Admittedly, the embryo seems to accommodate up to about eight weeks of an intersex status. Admittedly, we see a genital tubercle emerging which still hesitates between clitoris and penis. But, very quickly, sex takes shape on the surface and in depth. Depending on whether the embryo is a boy or a girl, initially common anatomical structures develop while others regress. Rolls will form the labia majora around the vaginal orifice or weld together to form the bursae in which the testicles will be housed. The genital tubercle asserts itself clitoris or penis. All this under the influence of sex chromosomes and hormones that guide development.
Thus, in boys, around the ninth week of intrauterine life, there is a marked increase in testosterone secretion by the testicles, which may be correlated with the changes observed. Men and women are distinguished by their levels of sex hormones – estrogen and testosterone in particular – whose concentrations differ markedly according to sex.
A study from Yale University published in Nature in 2011 showed that in the human brain, more than a hundred genes common to men and women were expressed differently according to sex. Among them, genes linked to pathologies, including one for depression and one for schizophrenia.
Ignoring increasingly documented differences cannot be an option in medicine. Based on a Danish study published in 2019, the manifesto posted online by Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern deplores the fact that many pathologies are diagnosed later in women than in men. The lack of consideration for women’s specificities is indeed a subject that has focused the attention of research organizations for years, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States.
“Sex and gender play a role in how health and disease affect individuals,” said Janine Austin Clayton, who directs women’s health research at the NIH, in 2016. “There was a time when we studied men and extrapolated the results to women, but we learned that there are biological differences between them,” she added.
“Women and men have different hormones, different organs, and different cultural influences – all of which can lead to differences in health. We know, for example, that women are more prone than men to autoimmune diseases, that their symptoms of myocardial infarction are different, that they do not react in the same way to antidepressants, etc
