Gender and Pain

Have you ever considered how your identity could influence how you feel pain? How your pain is perceived by others? Or how much of your pain experience is understood by the scientific and clinical communities?

Is it safe to assume that most of you haven’t?

Amongst many other contributing factors, our sex and gender may have a profound impact on pain and our pain experience. While we may have a better understanding of sex differences in pain perception, how gender ties into this is not fully understood. However, researchers are now beginning to understand that gender does impact our pain experience, and may play a significant role in how pain is differentially assessed and treated between men and women. This phenomenon has been deemed the ‘gender pain gap’: a gap in our understanding of women’s health issues which has lead to the inappropriate pharmaceutical treatment of men and women, and not taking women's health seriously.

The Gender Unicorn by TSER.

Determining the Sex of a Baby (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #12)

“And do you know… what it is?” they ask.

They mean the sex of our unborn baby, of course.

There isn’t much you can find out about who your unborn baby is, but you can know their sex. Or can you?

Often misnamed as “gender”, sex primarily relates to the organs a person presents with, but we already know that it’s more complex than that.

Chromosomes via Wikipedia Commons.

For a long time, we believed that sex was determined by a single chromosomal pair: XX or XY, but recent research has shown that the expressions of a bunch load of other genes is important too. For example, genes known as “enhancers” regulate the expression of genes that drive the development of physical sex characteristics. This means you can develop testes if you have an extra copy of the enhancers, even if you have two X chromosomes, or develop ovaries if you’re missing them, even if you are XY. The enhancers were found amongst the set of DNA formally known as “junk DNA”. These findings imply that observed biological sex and genetic sex may actually be different in some cases.