SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Girls who share a womb with boys tend to make less money than those with twin sisters
Female twins who shared a womb with a brother tend to get less education, earn less money, and have fewer children than girls who shared a womb with another girl, according to an analysis of hundreds of thousands of births over more than a decade. Researchers suspect the cause is testosterone exposure during fetal development, though the exact mechanism remains a mystery.
"I think it's a really interesting look at how this really complicated system might impact females," says Talia Melber, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana who wasn't involved in the study. Still, she cautions, a lot more work needs to be done to establish a causal link.
Fraternal twins, in which each of two eggs is fertilized by a different sperm cell, occur in about four of every 1000 births. About half of those result in male-female twin pairs. Typically, about 8 to 9 weeks into gestation, a male fetus begins to produce massive amounts of testosterone, which helps jump-start the development of male reproductive organs and brain architecture; female fetuses receive only modest amounts of the sex hormone. In male-female twins, though, small amounts of the male fetus's testosterone can seep into the female twin's separate amniotic sac. Scientists have known about this phenomenon for decades, and have been arguing for just as long over what effects, if any, it has on women later in life.
[...] Controlling for factors such as birth weight and maternal education, women who had a male twin were 15.2% less likely to graduate from high school, 3.9% less likely to finish college, and 11.7% less likely to be married—compared with women with a twin sister. They also had 5.8% fewer children and earned 8.6% less money, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Evidence that prenatal testosterone transfer from male twins reduces the fertility and socioeconomic success of their female co-twins (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1812786116) (DX)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @10:48AM (1 child)
Because if it's less than 200,000 cases in the world at a given point in time then no one will care
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 19 2019, @05:34PM
Oh, it could add up. The interesting part is the article goes to great length to only discuss prenatal exposure; yet its "widely known" that something like 50% of all trans eventually suicide, so FtoM trans seem to also colloquially also experience the overall "exposing females to unnatural levels of testosterone screws them up", not just prenatally. Or there may be no correlation for adults, perhaps mentally ill people tend to suicide in a general sense, so trans women are mentally ill leading to their demise regardless of testosterone. It could be medically useful beyond extreme levels of suicide; perhaps FtoM trans would be medically advised to aim for a more soy-boy look than a masculine look by minimizing injections if they want to graduate school or whatever.
For a guy who lifts weights I don't know enough about steroid use to comment on the sufferings of female roiders. Broscience and gym gossip seems to indicate absolutely nothing bad happens with steroid use until abusers get to levels that are ridiculously high and over the top, then the users tend to get really sick and messed up quickly in an acute sense. I don't have much data on sane levels of use, possibly because nothing bad happens to sane users. Then again at the broscience gossip level I don't think the general public could mathematically notice if female roid weight lifters experienced 3% lower college graduation rates or whatever small numbers listed.