Biological Sex Claims Sarah Richardson Biological Sex Claims Sarah Richardson

A History of Sex, Gender, and Medical Expertise in the New England Journal of Medicine

This week, members of the GenderSci Lab published a new piece in the New England Journal of Medicine. Authored by the Lab’s historians of medicine and science, Ben Maldonado, Jamie Marsella, Abbie Higgins, and Sarah Richardson, this piece traces how authors in the Journal articulated harmful ideas of innate sex difference.

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New article in Cell: Calling for Rigor and Precision in the Study of Sex-Related Variables

Our piece in this Cell special issue considers how, in the context of policies mandating the consideration of sex (such as the NIH’s Sex as a Biological Variable policy), basic scientists can operationalize, analyze, and interpret sex-related variation in ways that achieve conceptual and statistical rigor, as well as precision in how such knowledge is applied in the clinic and beyond. 

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Biological Sex Claims Sarah Richardson Biological Sex Claims Sarah Richardson

New article: “Making a ‘Sex-Difference Fact’”

This week, the GenderSci Lab has a new paper out in Social Studies of Science, “Making a ‘Sex-Difference Fact’: Ambien Dosing at the Interface of Policy, Regulation, Women’s Health, and Biology (open access).” The paper analyzes the first drug ever to be issued with an FDA mandated differential dose for men and women on the drug’s label.

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Bostock, the HHS Rule, and Legal Reliance on Biological Claims about Sex: An Analysis from the GenderSci Lab

Last week was big news for LGBTQ+ rights in the US. Two major pieces of law came out just days apart, changing the landscape of sex-based anti-discrimination law and the way sex is understood in federal law. In this post, we briefly outline these new legislative policies, consider the implications for LGBTQ+ rights in the US, and think about how this changes legal reliance on biological claims about sex.

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Theory Matters: Sex, Gender, and Alzheimer’s Disease

The SWHR task force operationalizes ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ as research variables with sweeping explanatory potential in biomedicine. The manner in which they do so reveals a theoretical gulf between a widely practiced genre of bioscience knowledge production in women’s health research and critical feminist approaches to science, medicine, and the body.

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