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Comment by aeturnum | Hacker News Reader

I see the "but I thought sex was a construct" folks are showing up at the bottom of the thread. I suspect the gender radicals would be quite happy with this study if they just replaced male and female with AMAB and AFAB[1].

I actually think followup studies on gender minorities could be really interesting here - do people taking testosterone get sick like AMAB people who aren't taking hormones? Do AMAB people taking estrogen have better outcomes?

[1] Assigned male at birth and assigned female at birth, respectively.

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Gender is a social construct. Sex is a matter of biology. Those aren't the same thing.

I agree they aren't the same thing, but I would say that both sex and gender are impacted by biology so I'm not sure that's a useful dividing line. It's true that male and female are two stable sexual categories, but the details of how you identify sex (and how each sex responds to treatments) ends up being very bimodal[1]. So the social categories of male sex and female sex overlay complicated, individual biological systems.

[1] https://twitter.com/ScienceVet2/status/1035246030500061184

Wether, it's a useful dividing line has more to do with what question one is trying to answer via the line. Different questions are likely to use different concerns yielding different definitions.

You're playing with semantics.

semantics are important, they're how we communicate meaning

The meanings of words, yes.

Right, and guess which one transgender people care about.

The transphobic people who inevitably show up in threads like this don't seem to recognize the difference, though.

Transgender people care strictly about gender.

Transsexuals care strictly about sex.

With that out of the way, let us continue ...

I don't see why we even need a name for gender, men and women can fulfill each others gender roles just fine without being trans so it isn't like gender is important. Why not just use man/woman for sex and just ignore gender completely? Wouldn't that be better?

This is a pretty acrimonious split within modern feminism, with a faction believing that the modern trans movement is reifying gender norms as something concrete and valid instead of arbitrary oppressive constraints on individual expression and behavior.

That (does estrogen/testosterone intake correlate w/ outcome) is a very interesting question, and I'd be very surprised if anybody studied that.

The transgender community is not usually considered in medical studies. (It's hard to get reliable data just on long-term effects of the various immediately trans-related treatments). And even if it were, it's so disparate socio-economically from the rest of the population that it's very hard to control for that factor. Add to that the fact that being transgender is a fairly rare condition - 1:11,000 is the usual assumption, 3:1000 is the most generous one I've seen - these particular studies aren't that common.

A proxy for that question is "how do subjects pre/peri/post menopause react to this, with and without hormone therapy (a.k.a contraceptives)". There's mild evidence of hormonal status and COVID response being correlated: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.30.20164921v...

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