Testosterone, SRY and Parkinson's
We have absolutely no right to be experimenting on girls and women
I had a thought this evening that made me jump. We know from the pancreas and diabetes research that, despite the extreme similarity in both structure and function of the male versus the female pancreas, the organ is in fact, sexually dimorphic. It’s critically important to understand that mere similarity in form and function does NOT mean the organs are the same.
We know that men and boys have naturally high levels of testosterone, and that this causes dramatic cosmetic differences between men and women. So we should expect that an internal organ would also look different based on whether it has been exposed to testosterone, just like a face exposed to testosterone looks different from a face that has not been exposed to testosterone. Yet, we don’t see that, and the reason is that male genetics - a second irreconcileable difference between male and female - creates a convergence. The result? The male pancreas functions better with testosterone, which evolution expected to be there. The female pancreas? Not so much. Testosterone makes it function worse. That’s at the same dose after controlling for things like overall body size. Male and female are not equivalent.