Collaborative. Below are her findings and EXCERPTS from this fascinating article.
Medical Immunity
Males and females respond to infections and disease progression differently. There are also behavioral differences, including differences in the brain and physiological differences in the five senses. Dr. McGregor stated, “Women are not just men with boobs and tubes.”
Males and females do not merely differ from each other in virtue of their genitals and hormones but also in anatomical and physiological differences that go beyond immediately observable sex-related properties. To deny this, according to medical ethicist Dr. Charlotte Bease (2023), is to harm patient populations.
Moreover, the demographics show that the vast majority of the population is born either male or female. As Bease states: Intersex individuals comprise around 0.018 percent of the population. The majority of trans people are not intersex since they possess a biological male of female anatomy.
Examples? Acute coronary syndrome has a different disease presentation in females and males: The blood cells surrounding the heart in women are smaller than in men.
Where drug reactions are involved, aspirin therapy lowers the risk of myocardial infarction in males but not females (Aspirin is harmful to female patients). Women experience an almost twofold risk of adverse physiological reactions compared with men. The way sex mediates drug reactions is also apparent with Zolpidem, a sedative sold under the brand name ‘Ambien’ and first approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1992. In 2013, they found women experienced 25-30 percent higher levels of the drug in their system the morning after taking it.
As Dr. Alyson McGregor stated in a TED talk, the chromosomes in every cell of our body remain active for our entire life.
The Five senses
Nature has organised things rather brilliantly to ensure that men and women were adapted physiologically to the tasks they undertook for 99% of human history. Men and women shared the burden of life pretty evenly. Men were the hunters, while women were the managers, architects, and designers. They built the dwellings and all that went inside them at base camp. They also gathered berries and nurtured the young. Anthropology and physiology make their division of labour clear.
Where physiology is concerned, we can back-engineer the roles of men and women from the robust differences documented by their five senses. We will begin with hearing.
Hearing
The research found that women are more sensitive to loud noises than men. Men tolerate sound some eight decibels louder than women. Women also seem more sensitive to the sound of a crying infant at night, which suggests one possible beneficial effect for offspring. Further, the research found that women process auditory signals more rapidly than men, based on the recording of their brain-evoked potentials. This may have resulted from the women’s role as managers of infants and adults in the base camp while the men were on hunting expeditions.
We move on now to sight, which after height, shows the most number of sex differences.
Sight
Given that just over 70 percent of viewers of the English Premier League in the United Kingdom in 2021 were male, it is no surprise that men are better at distinguishing moving objects in the distance than women. This aptitude gives men pride of place in the animal tracking business, amplified by their targeting accuracy. Men’s eyes are set, on average, 5mm further apart than women’s, as an adaptive mechanism that helped men in their specialised task of hunting.
Women’s visuospatial skills are in other areas. Their ability in object-location memory gives them the edge in the discernment of ripe fruits on a tree or bush. Their differences do not end there. Up to fifty percent of women have a fourth colour pigment giving them access to hundreds of millions more colours than men (with three pigments). Given this, women have a richer vocabulary of colour words, being more apt than men to use refined terms such as ivory, azure, and mauve. Likewise, women are more accurate in matching colour strips to a colour chart.
This enhanced perception of colour served as an adaptive mechanism to women’s task of managing the community at base camp, where they could discern subtle changes in the skin colour of others (perceiving potential flare-ups of tempers and fevers, whether in adults or infants). Also, as mentioned, discern the ripe as against the unripe fruit.
How can a Trans woman be a woman when their eyes are still those of a biological male? It is not possible except in the world imagined by the Social Constructionist. In the research on gender and design that I conducted over more than twenty years, the findings showed the design creations and preferences of males and females differ in consistent and statistically highly significant ways, both in early and late childhood and adulthood.
Examples? Whilst males used straight lines, few colours, and 3D forms, females would employ rounded shapes, a plethora of colours, and 2D forms creating two almost wholly distinct-‘hunter’-and-‘gatherer’-worlds.
This manifested clearly in the shapes and forms of paintings, buildings, furniture, graphics, and website design. The differences in design creations are mirrored, with men and women showing a strong preference for the designs created by those of their sex. The persistence of these differences strongly suggests that males and females are hardwired. From an evolutionary psychological standpoint, hardwired over numerous millennia and sociology acting in the long-term!
The implications? The world of ‘gatherer aesthetics’ would be lost if Trans women were to take over the domain of womanhood, just as the world of ‘hunter aesthetics’ would be lost if Trans men were to dominate the world of men.
We will move on to the remaining three senses before examining some statistics.
Touch
Those with smaller fingers (typically females) have a finer sense of touch (or tactile acuity, according to a 2009 study published in the Journal of Neuroscience ((see https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091215173017.htm). Perhaps, women were also healers in base camp, diagnosing problems with their hands?
Smell
Women tend to outperform men on tests for identifying scents. One factor reported in 2014, was the discovery that female brains had, on average, 43% more cells and almost 50% more neurons in their olfactory centres (the part dedicated to smelling and odours) than male brains. One reason advanced is those physically attractive men with symmetrical body builds emit an odour that is more attractive to women. Others might be to discern whether food and liquid are fresh or whether a fire is about to flare up at base camp!
Taste
Women are known to have a better sense of taste than men with 35% of women and only 15% of men calling themselves ‘supertasters’ — those able to identify flavours such as bitter, sweet, and sour more strongly than others. The underlying factors were identified in 1994 when Bartoshuk et al reported on the greater volume of taste areas (fungiform papillae) and taste buds on female than male tongues. It is suspected this protected offspring both during and after pregnancy as women of childbearing age and pregnant women taste flavours more intensely than younger or older females.
As if these differences are not dramatic enough, there is also the brain to consider, with significant differences in male and female brains. As early as 26 weeks, female brains start developing a thicker corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects the left and right hemispheres. This could be the subject of another article!
Meanwhile, recognizing the significant differences between the sexes can overcome many conflicts.
© 2023 Lady Carla Davis www.NourishingBasics.com