The present gender agenda ideology is that there are no fundamental differences between the sexes, that sex is a social construction. That line was not taken by earlier generations of feminist such as Australia's second wave feminist, Germaine Greer. She was not into postmodernism and cultural relativity, and she has got into trouble with the lobby for anti-trans statements, some involving four-letter words: https://glaad.org/gap/germaine-greer/. In any case, the fundamental inconsistency here is that physical surgery is needed to complete the transition. But if sex is a social construction surely all that is needed is sociology from the local university cesspool, not cold, hard steel of the surgeon's tool kit?
That being said, science keeps uncovering physical sex differences, that really matter. For example, one recent discovery is that males and females make use of different biological systems to deal with pain. Men's bodies release natural painkillers from the brain, but women do not. Thus, men tend to respond better to opioid drugs like morphine, but women not as much. This has been hypothesised as being significant since women have a greater tendency to become addicted to opioids, than men. This is thought to be because women need higher doses to be effective, leading to addiction. It is not that the drug does not work at all, but the dose must be relatively greater.
It has been suggested that men and women therefore will need different pain regimes, so one drug does not fit all. This is significant to conservatives as it shows a real physical difference that has important social relevance. It is another blow to the gender agenda. Sex is not a social construction.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/10/241016120023.htm
"In a new study evaluating meditation for chronic lower back pain, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have discovered that men and women utilize different biological systems to relieve pain. While men relieve pain by releasing endogenous opioids, the body's natural painkillers, women rely instead on other, non-opioid based pathways.
Synthetic opioid drugs, such as morphine and fentanyl, are the most powerful class of painkilling drugs available. Women are known to respond poorly to opioid therapies, which use synthetic opioid molecules to bind to the same receptors as naturally-occurring endogenous opioids. This aspect of opioid drugs helps explain why they are so powerful as painkillers, but also why they carry a significant risk of dependence and addiction.
"Dependence develops because people start taking more opioids when their original dosage stops working," said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., professor of anesthesiology and Endowed Professor in Empathy and Compassion Research at UC San Diego Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion. "Although speculative, our findings suggest that maybe one reason that females are more likely to become addicted to opioids is that they're biologically less responsive to them and need to take more to experience any pain relief."
The study combined data from two clinical trials involving a total of 98 participants, including both healthy individuals and those diagnosed with chronic lower back pain. Participants underwent a meditation training program, then practiced meditation while receiving either placebo or a high-dose of naloxone, a drug that stops both synthetic and endogenous opioids from working. At the same time, they experienced a very painful but harmless heat stimulus to the back of the leg. The researchers measured and compared how much pain relief was experienced from meditation when the opioid system was blocked versus when it was intact.
The study found:
- Blocking the opioid system with naloxone inhibited meditation-based pain relief in men, suggesting that men rely on endogenous opioids to reduce pain.
- Naloxone increased meditation-based pain relief in women, suggesting that women rely on non-opioid mechanisms to reduce pain.
- In both men and women, people with chronic pain experienced more pain relief from meditation than healthy participants.
"These results underscore the need for more sex-specific pain therapies, because many of the treatments we use don't work nearly as well for women as they do for men," said Zeidan.
The researchers conclude that by tailoring pain treatment to an individual's sex, it may be possible to improve patient outcomes and reduce the reliance on and misuse of opioids.
"There are clear disparities in how pain is managed between men and women, but we haven't seen a clear biological difference in the use of their endogenous systems before now," said Zeidan. "This study provides the first clear evidence that sex-based differences in pain processing are real and need to be taken more seriously when developing and prescribing treatment for pain."