The research team, led by Mina Amzirkov of the University of Belgrade together with colleagues in Vienna and Kikinda, focused on two necropolises: Mokrin and Ostojićevo, both located near the town of Kikinda in the Banat region of northern Serbia. The Maros culture, which flourished across parts of present-day Hungary, Romania, and northern Serbia between roughly 2700 and 1500 cal. BC and peaked around 2000 BC, is famous among archaeologists for its highly normative funerary ritual. Adults were buried as individual inhumations in a flexed position, lying on either the left or right side, with bodies and grave pits aligned along a north-south axis. Decades of study of adult skeletons established the code: males were placed on their left side with the head to the north, producing a north-south orientation, while females were placed on their right side with the head to the south, producing a south-north orientation. In both cases the face was turned toward the east.

What remained unknown until now was whether children followed the same prescriptions. That question has been extraordinarily difficult to answer because estimating the biological sex of immature skeletons from bone morphology is notoriously unreliable. The sexual characteristics that anthropologists rely on in adult remains — features of the pelvis, the skull, and other bones — simply have not developed in children. Combined with a historical lack of scholarly interest in the youngest members of past communities, this methodological barrier meant that the gender roles of Bronze Age boys and girls remained essentially a blank page, filled mostly by assumption rather than evidence.

The breakthrough came from a technique that has rapidly become the gold standard for archaeological sex estimation: peptide-based sex identification from dental enamel. The method targets amelogenin, an enamel protein encoded by genes on both the X and Y chromosomes. Sexually dimorphic fragments of this protein survive in tooth enamel for millennia and can be detected by ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry. The presence of both Amelogenin X and Y peptides indicates a genetic male; the presence of X without Y indicates a genetic female. Because tooth enamel forms in early childhood and is the hardest tissue in the human body, the method works even on poorly preserved juvenile remains where skeletal morphology fails entirely — and it requires only minimally invasive sampling.

Applying this technique, the team determined the biological sex of 77 non-adult individuals aged from around 9 to 12 months up to 18 to 22 years, buried at the two cemeteries. For 76 of them, sex was established through enamel peptide analysis; for one individual, previously published ancient DNA results were used. The researchers then compared each child’s biologically determined sex with two key elements of the Maros funerary norm: the orientation of the body along the north-south or south-north axis, and the side on which the body was placed. The statistical analysis, using Fisher’s exact test and Cramer’s V as a measure of association strength, produced striking results.

At Mokrin, a necropolis first excavated in the 1960s that yielded 312 graves and was in use between roughly 2100 and 1800 BC, the association between biological sex and body orientation was overwhelmingly strong, with a Cramer’s V of 0.80 and a p-value below 0.001. The association with body position was moderate but still statistically significant, with a Cramer’s V of 0.56 — a figure partly explained by the many skeletons whose position could not be determined due to poor preservation. At Ostojićevo, a smaller but even clearer dataset of 16 to 17 individuals from the site’s Early Bronze Age horizon, the correlations approached perfection: Cramer’s V reached 1.0 for both orientation and position, with no males placed on the right side and no females on the left. In plain terms, boys were buried like adult men — oriented north-south, on their left side — and girls were buried like adult women — oriented south-north, on their right side.

The exceptions are as revealing as the rule. Fewer than 10 percent of the children deviated from the norm. At Mokrin, six graves stood out: in graves 25, 103, and 236, peptide analysis showed that boys had been buried according to the female norm with their heads to the south, and the same pattern appeared in grave 220, where sex had been determined by ancient DNA. Conversely, graves 216 and 238 contained girls buried in the male orientation with their heads to the north — yet in those two cases, the body position matched the peptide-determined sex perfectly. The authors consider several explanations. Poor skeletal preservation visible in the field photographs of some graves may have led excavators to record the orientation incorrectly. In other cases, the deviations may represent genuinely socially meaningful exceptions. Notably, none of the exceptional burials contained gender-typical grave goods, and the children’s graves in general were less well equipped than those of adults.

The Serbian findings align closely with earlier work elsewhere in Central Europe. At the Early Bronze Age cemetery of Franzhausen I in Lower Austria, peptide-based sex identification of 75 children aged between 0 and 12 years showed that 62 of 63 individuals with determinable archaeological gender classification matched their biological sex — a concordance of 98.4 percent, with a single exception of a 4-to-5-year-old female buried in male position. A companion study of adults at Franzhausen I and the nearby cemetery of Gemeinlebarn F found that most apparent mismatches between osteological sex and burial treatment stemmed from errors in morphological sex estimation or documentation rather than genuine gender variance. Together, these studies suggest that the strong alignment between biological sex and gendered burial treatment was a widespread feature of Early Bronze Age societies in the region.

The results feed directly into a lively theoretical debate about the nature of gender in European prehistory. Some scholars have argued that the Neolithic was characterized by a fluid, situational “contextual gender,” with rigid binary identities emerging only in the Bronze Age; others counter that prehistoric gender was always diverse and context-dependent, varying across time, space, age, and social circumstance. A large-scale study of 1,252 individuals from Central European burials found that while the binary model accounted for roughly 90 percent of cases, a small minority showed non-binary or contradictory sex-gender combinations, which the authors interpreted as a socially acknowledged minority rather than mere error. The Maros data add a crucial new dimension to this discussion by demonstrating that, in at least one well-documented cultural sphere, binary gender was not an adult achievement but a social fact recognized from early childhood.

There are also poignant gaps in the picture. No burials of children under two years were identified at Mokrin, and while settlement evidence suggests infants were sometimes interred within settlements, the documented number falls far short of demographic expectations — hinting at alternative practices, possibly including water or sky burials, that have left little archaeological trace. Children’s graves were also typically shallower than adult ones, making them more vulnerable to destruction by agriculture and soil processes, which explains the poor preservation that long obscured this research. What survives, however, is unambiguous: a shared mortuary code, replicated across multiple communities of the Maros cultural sphere, in which females were symbolically aligned with the right side and the south, males with the left side and the north. In death as in life, Bronze Age children were already boys and girls in the eyes of their community — a codified, material expression of gender that endured for centuries along the banks of the Tisa River.

Subject of Research: Gendered funerary practices of children in the Bronze Age Maros culture of northern Serbia, determined through peptide-based sex identification of dental enamel

Article Title: Growing into gender: Funerary practice of boys and girls in the Bronze Age Maros culture (2100 − 1700 BC)

Article References: Amzirkov, M., Porčić, M., Rebay-Salisbury, K., Kanz, F., Wolf, M., Gavrilović, M. K., & Stefanović, S. (2026). Growing into gender: Funerary practice of boys and girls in the Bronze Age Maros culture (2100 − 1700 BC). Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 18(11), Article 216. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-026-02578-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12520-026-02578-3

Keywords: Bronze Age, Maros culture, gender archaeology, children, burial practices, amelogenin peptides, dental enamel, Mokrin, Ostojićevo, Serbia, mass spectrometry, biological sex

The editors of this Special Issue, including Science Senior Editor Yevgenia Nusinovich and colleagues, emphasize that the current scientific consensus is shifting rapidly. It is becoming increasingly clear that women’s health cannot be isolated to the reproductive years or the mechanics of pregnancy. Instead, sex-specific biological mechanisms influence health outcomes from early childhood through late adulthood. This broader perspective acknowledges that the female body operates under distinct hormonal, immune, and metabolic constraints that require dedicated investigation. By moving beyond the traditional focus on reproduction, researchers are beginning to map a more accurate and comprehensive landscape of female biology, one that recognizes the profound impact of sex on disease progression, treatment response, and overall well-being.

One of the most pressing areas of inquiry highlighted in the issue is the disproportionate burden of pain disorders experienced by women. It has long been recognized that millions of women, particularly younger demographics, suffer from functional pain disorders at roughly twice the rate of men, with some conditions showing even greater disparities. Persistent pain is especially debilitating when it affects the pelvis, where disorders involving the gut, bladder, and reproductive organs, such as irritable bowel syndrome, endometriosis, and vulvodynia, can produce unpredictable and severe symptoms. Archana Venkataraman and colleagues synthesize recent advances in understanding these conditions, focusing on the intricate roles of sex hormones, immune-neural interactions, the gut microbiome, and endogenous analgesic pathways. Their analysis suggests that fluctuations in ovarian hormones beginning at puberty are a major contributor to these sex-specific pain experiences, yet major gaps remain between the widespread burden of pain among women and the scientific efforts to understand and treat it effectively.

The authors of this Review express a sense of urgency regarding the lack of concrete answers for women suffering from chronic pain. They note that women are desperately waiting for scientific clarity that might help eliminate the common dismissive approach of labeling their illnesses as “all in your head.” Furthermore, there is a critical need to shorten the long wait between the onset of symptoms and the provision of diagnosis and treatment. The goal is to ultimately provide mechanism-based strategies for disease treatment that address the root biological causes rather than merely managing symptoms. This shift in focus from symptom management to mechanistic understanding represents a significant step forward in the field of women’s health research, aiming to validate patient experiences with rigorous scientific evidence.

Another critical area of focus is menopause, a transition that has historically been underfunded and understudied despite its enormous impact on half of the human population and nearly forty percent of a woman’s lifespan. Larua Gravelsins and colleagues argue in a second Review that menopause research needs a major rethink, shifting from a one-size-fits-all view of the transition to a precision-medicine approach. This new framework accounts for differences in symptoms, timing, genetics, and hormone treatments, recognizing that menopause is not a uniform experience. The authors suggest that this shift could help address the persistent gaps in understanding menopause and menopause hormone therapy, providing more tailored and effective care for women navigating this complex biological change.

Gravelsins and colleagues contend that diminishing menopause to “just aging” is a disservice to women. They emphasize that menopause is a full-body, hormonally driven change that, like other endogenous hormonal transitions, affects individuals differently based on their individual biology and life experience. By adopting a precision-medicine approach, researchers can better understand the diverse manifestations of menopause and develop targeted interventions. This perspective challenges the traditional view of menopause as a simple decline in function, instead framing it as a complex physiological transition that requires nuanced scientific attention and personalized medical care.

In a third Review, Dan Corral and Yasmine Belkaid highlight the emerging research surrounding the immune system’s role in preparing a mother’s body for pregnancy. Pregnancy triggers one of the most extensive periods of physiological remodeling in adult life, requiring coordinated changes across nearly every maternal organ. While these changes have traditionally been attributed largely to hormones, new research shows that the immune system actively directs this remodeling, reprogramming maternal tissues in ways that may influence health well beyond pregnancy. This discovery underscores the importance of the immune system in shaping the maternal environment and highlights the need for further investigation into the mechanisms underlying this transformation, which have historically been understudied.

The final Review by Dena Dubal and colleagues examines how XX and XY chromosomes influence aging and diseases, including neurological, immune, cancer, and cardiometabolic disorders. According to the authors, the collective findings from these studies emphasize the importance of integrating sex chromosome biology into precision medicine. This has important implications for future therapeutics and clinical trial design, suggesting that sex-specific genetic factors play a crucial role in disease development and progression. By understanding how sex chromosomes influence health and disease, researchers can develop more effective and targeted treatments that account for the biological differences between men and women.

In a Perspective, Michael Stout and Francesca Duncan discuss how the ovaries influence health after menopause. The postmenopausal ovary has long been viewed as a largely dormant organ once its reproductive function ends, but growing evidence suggests it remains biologically active for decades after menopause. Determining the ovary’s postmenopausal functions, and whether removing it after menopause affects long-term health, will require further research. This perspective challenges the traditional view of the ovary as a purely reproductive organ and highlights its potential role in maintaining overall health and well-being in postmenopausal women.

This Special Issue of Science represents a pivotal moment in the field of women’s health research. By highlighting the critical gaps in current knowledge and advocating for a more comprehensive and inclusive approach to scientific investigation, these articles aim to drive significant changes in how women’s health is studied and treated. The emphasis on sex-dependent biological differences, precision medicine, and the long-term impacts of hormonal transitions underscores the need for continued investment and innovation in this field. As researchers continue to uncover the complex mechanisms underlying women’s health, the potential for improved outcomes and more effective treatments becomes increasingly clear, paving the way for a future where women’s health is understood and addressed with the same rigor and attention as men’s health.

Subject of Research: Sex-specific biological mechanisms and precision medicine in women's health

Article Title: Special Issue: Women’s health

Article References: Special Issue: Women’s health. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: women's health, sex differences, precision medicine, menopause, pain disorders, immune system, reproductive biology, clinical research, hormonal transitions, biological sex, Special, Issue

The research, led by Georgia Kontogianni and Panagiotis Kouzis as co-first authors, with Georgios Kararigas and Themis Alissafi as co-senior authors, brings together teams from the Biomedical Research Foundation Academy of Athens, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, the University of Tirana, the University of Tours, the University of Crete, FORTH and the University of Nicosia. The group focused on regulatory T cells, or Tregs, the specialized CD4-positive lymphocyte population that acts as the immune system’s built-in restraint. Tregs patrol the periphery and suppress excessive activation of self-reactive lymphocytes, maintaining what immunologists call peripheral tolerance. Previous work had shown that Tregs are directly affected by checkpoint inhibitors, which target inhibitory signaling pathways that Tregs themselves rely upon, and that during immune-related adverse events these cells undergo extensive inflammatory and metabolic reprogramming, acquiring traits that echo the effector cells they are supposed to restrain. What remained unknown was whether this reprogramming follows the same trajectory in men and women.

The rationale for asking this question is grounded in decades of immunological observation. Women mount stronger humoral and cellular immune responses to infection and vaccination, are far more susceptible to many autoimmune diseases, including lupus, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and multiple sclerosis, and show sex-dependent differences in Treg biology and inflammatory signaling. Estrogen, androgen and X-linked genetic factors all feed into immune gene regulation. If biological sex shapes the baseline behavior of Tregs, it seemed plausible that it would also dictate how those cells respond when checkpoint blockade or spontaneous autoimmunity pushes the immune system toward self-attack. Testing that idea at scale required a bioinformatics approach rather than a single-cohort experiment, because the relevant patient populations are scattered across clinical studies.

The team therefore performed a sex-based integrative transcriptomic analysis of bulk RNA sequencing datasets generated from peripheral blood Tregs. The datasets came from patients with advanced melanoma and additional solid tumors treated with anti-PD-1 immunotherapy, from individuals living with chronic autoimmune diseases, and from healthy controls. By separating the data into male and female cohorts, the researchers could run differential gene expression, pathway enrichment and network-level analyses independently for each sex, mapping the inflammatory, metabolic and tolerance-associated transcriptional programs that accompany each condition. This design allowed a direct comparison not only between disease and health, but between the sexes and between two distinct contexts of tolerance breakdown: drug-induced toxicity and spontaneous autoimmunity.

The results reveal a layered picture. During spontaneous autoimmune disease, female-derived Tregs exhibited markedly broader transcriptional remodeling than their male counterparts. The female cells showed extensive enrichment of biological processes spanning immune regulation, inflammatory signaling, metabolism and oxidative stress, suggesting that in women, loss of tolerance engages a wide swath of the Treg transcriptional machinery simultaneously. Male-derived Tregs, by contrast, displayed comparatively restricted remodeling, involving a narrower set of immune-related and metabolic pathways. In other words, the depth and breadth of the regulatory cell’s response to autoimmunity is not the same in both sexes, a finding that helps explain why autoimmune susceptibility and severity so often diverge between men and women.

Immune-related adverse events, however, told a different story. Checkpoint inhibitor-associated toxicity produced a distinct pattern of sex-dependent transcriptional organization in Tregs, one that did not simply mirror what the researchers observed in autoimmunity. Although the two conditions share many underlying biological processes, since both represent failures of peripheral tolerance, the degree, directionality and network-level organization of the transcriptional responses differed substantially between the sexes and between disease settings. The same cells, facing the same fundamental problem of lost tolerance, appear to solve or succumb to it along different molecular routes depending on both the sex of the patient and the inflammatory context in which tolerance was disrupted. This argues against a single, uniform program of Treg failure and in favor of disease-specific, sex-shaped trajectories of reprogramming.

The technical implication is significant for how immunologists interpret single-cell and bulk transcriptomic studies. If male and female Tregs organize their responses differently at the pathway and network level, then pooling the sexes, as many studies historically have done, may obscure biologically meaningful signals or generate misleading averages. The authors emphasize that biological sex does not impose one common regulatory program on Tregs; rather, it shapes disease-specific transcriptional trajectories according to the inflammatory environment. That distinction matters for biomarker development, because a transcriptional signature predictive of severe colitis in a male patient treated with anti-PD-1 therapy may not hold for a female patient, and vice versa. Incorporating sex as a biological variable from the earliest stages of study design, rather than as an afterthought in the analysis, emerges as a practical necessity for personalized immunology.

The clinical stakes are considerable. Immune-related adverse events remain a leading cause of treatment interruption and morbidity in oncology, and clinicians currently lack reliable tools to predict which patients will develop severe toxicities. If Treg reprogramming trajectories diverge by sex, sex-stratified biomarkers could improve risk stratification before and during checkpoint inhibitor therapy, potentially guiding earlier intervention with immunosuppression or closer monitoring. Beyond oncology, the findings offer a molecular framework for a long-standing epidemiological puzzle: why women dominate the incidence of many autoimmune diseases while men, once affected, sometimes follow different disease courses. The observation that female Tregs undergo broader remodeling during autoimmunity provides a transcriptional correlate of that epidemiology, and a starting point for mechanistic work into the hormonal and genetic drivers behind it.

For now, the study stands as a reminder that the immune system is not a one-size-fits-all machine. The researchers, supported in part by a European Research Council grant under Horizon 2020 and by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation, and conducted within the framework of the COST Action ENOTTA, have shown that the cells tasked with keeping immunity in check remodel themselves along paths dictated by both biology and context. As checkpoint inhibitors continue to expand across tumor types and treatment lines, understanding how sex shapes the fragile balance between tumor rejection and tissue destruction may prove essential to making these powerful therapies safer for everyone.

Subject of Research: Sex-dependent transcriptional reprogramming of regulatory T cells in immune-related adverse events and autoimmunity

Article Title: Biological sex defines regulatory T-cell reprogramming trajectories in immune-related adverse events and autoimmunity

Article References: Kontogianni, G., Kouzis, P., Gogas, H., Rumano, M., Mulleman, D., Verginis, P., Kararigas, G., & Alissafi, T. (2026). Biological sex defines regulatory T-cell reprogramming trajectories in immune-related adverse events and autoimmunity. Biology of Sex Differences. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13293-026-00980-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13293-026-00980-z

Keywords: regulatory T cells, immune checkpoint inhibitors, immune-related adverse events, autoimmunity, biological sex, peripheral tolerance, transcriptomics, anti-PD-1 therapy, sexual dimorphism, personalized immunology, Biological, defines

The article, the product of a consensus workshop at an international meeting of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences in May 2019 and a subsequent expert meeting in Ottawa sponsored by the Institute of Gender and Health of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, brings together a strikingly interdisciplinary authorship. Neuroscientists, physiologists, historians of science, internists, nephrologists, nurses, social workers, epidemiologists, and implementation scientists, led by co-first authors Gillian Einstein of the University of Toronto and Louise Pilote of McGill University, along with senior author Cara Tannenbaum of the Université de Montréal, collectively propose a name and a vision for what they call Sex and Gender Science. They describe it as a transdisciplinary, integrative, bio-social-medical field that combines diverse methods to investigate how sex and gender dynamically interact to shape disease outcomes, illness experiences, and the very conduct of science itself.

The conceptual core of the proposal rests on the claim that sex and gender are interactional and deeply interwoven. Within sex, the authors situate hormonal, genetic, physiological, and morphological processes and characteristics, from chromosomal complements and gonadal steroid fluctuations to organ-level physiology and morphology. Within gender, they include roles, relations, norms, institutional imperatives, and identities, along with their downstream consequences for behavior, environment, access to resources, and exposure to stress. Crucially, the authors argue, these domains are not merely additive; they operate on each other. Gendered expectations influence hormonal and physiological responses, while biological traits shape how institutions and individuals respond to a person. In this framing, gender literally gets under the skin, while sex expresses itself inescapably through social worlds.

Concrete clinical examples illustrate the stakes. Acute coronary syndrome presents differently across patients in ways that reflect both vascular biology and gendered patterns of symptom recognition, care-seeking, and triage in emergency departments. In Alzheimer’s disease, two-thirds of affected individuals are women, and research discussed in the article points to interactions between reproductive histories, such as surgical menopause, stress physiology involving corticotropin-releasing factor, and gendered lifecourse exposures, rather than a single biological cause. In nephrology, sex differences in kidney physiology intersect with gendered differences in access to dialysis, transplantation, and medication adherence. Even occupational health reflects the interplay, as shown by analyses of personal protective equipment designed around male body norms during the COVID-19 pandemic, where ill-fitting gear compromised the safety of women in frontline roles. The authors also cite emerging concerns about automatic gender recognition technologies and gendered patterns of cannabis use disorder as domains where simplistic binary assumptions fail patients and obscure mechanisms.

Methodologically, Sex and Gender Science is defined by its refusal to choose between reductionist and constructionist approaches. The authors assume complexity, question established stereotypes and binaries, and support evolving methods that can capture interactional effects over time. That means experimental work in animal models attentive to sex as a biological variable can be paired with qualitative and quantitative human studies of gendered environments; intersectional epidemiology can be integrated with endocrine and genetic measurement; and implementation science can test whether sex- and gender-informed findings actually change clinical practice. The transdisciplinary ambition is deliberate: rather than creating another silo, the field aims to weave together the humanities, social sciences, and biomedical sciences, drawing on decades of feminist scholarship, gender studies, and basic biology that have until now developed along separate tracks.

The historical context for this synthesis is instructive. Biomedical research long treated male bodies as the default experimental subject, from clinical trials to preclinical animal studies, on the grounds that hormonal cycles made female subjects inconveniently variable. Landmark policy changes in the United States, Canada, and Europe over the past three decades required the inclusion of women in clinical research and the accounting for sex as a biological variable in grant applications. Simultaneously, scholars in gender and health demonstrated that social positions assigned by gender produce measurable health inequities, from differential exposure to violence and occupational hazards to differences in healthcare access and treatment. What was missing, the authors argue, was a systematic framework linking these two streams, so that researchers could ask not simply whether men and women differ, but how biological and social variables interact to produce particular outcomes in particular individuals.

The consensus process behind the article gives its claims unusual weight. By convening basic scientists who study sexually dimorphic neural circuits and stress pathways alongside clinicians, historians, and social scientists, the meeting produced a shared vocabulary and a shared commitment. The resulting highlights, as stated by the authors, include forging new ways of knowing about wellness, health, and disease; assuming complexity and questioning binaries; providing a more comprehensive picture of human health when sex and gender are studied together; and starting from the particularity of individuals with the ultimate goal of improving the well-being of all. That final point is significant politically as well as scientifically: the field explicitly encompasses transgender and gender-diverse populations, recognizing that gender identity itself interacts with biology in ways that mainstream medicine has historically ignored or pathologized.

For clinical practice, the implications are immediate. Diagnostic criteria, drug dosing, device design, and screening schedules built on averages derived from unrepresentative populations can be reexamined through the interactional lens that Sex and Gender Science provides. A patient is never just a sex and never just a gender; each person embodies a unique configuration of hormonal milieu, genetic background, organ physiology, gendered labor and caregiving burdens, institutional exposure, and identity. Precision medicine that ignores either domain is, on this argument, not precise at all. The authors point to the growth of national organizations, such as the Canadian Organization for Sex and Gender, and to curriculum reform in medical schools as evidence that institutional infrastructure is beginning to catch up with the science.

The article also acknowledges open questions and future directions. Measuring gender as rigorously as sex is measured remains an active methodological challenge, with validated instruments still evolving. Distinguishing interaction effects from confounding in observational data requires statistical sophistication and large, diverse cohorts. And the field must navigate political controversies surrounding sex and gender discourse without retreating from empirical evidence. The authors frame these challenges as generative rather than paralyzing, arguing that the very friction of integrating methods across disciplines produces better science, sharper questions, and more honest uncertainty. They call for funding structures, training programs, and publication venues that reward transdisciplinary work rather than penalizing it in favor of narrow, single-domain studies.

If Sex and Gender Science succeeds on its own terms, the payoff could be a medicine that finally matches the complexity of the patients it serves: one in which a heart attack, a dementia diagnosis, a kidney transplant, or a workplace injury is understood through the full entanglement of chromosomes, hormones, organs, identities, relationships, and institutions that shaped it. The article’s message to researchers is blunt in its simplicity. It is not either sex or gender; it is both, together. After decades of separation, the biological and the social are being brought back into a single scientific frame, and the authors argue that the health of everyone stands to gain from what this emerging field discovers next.

Subject of Research: Sex and Gender Science, an emerging transdisciplinary field integrating biological sex and social gender in health research

Article Title: Sex & Gender Science: integrating the social with the biological

Article References: Einstein, G., Pilote, L., De Vries, G., Richardson, S., Forger, N., Perović, M., Ahmed, S., Bauer, G., Graham, I. D., Greaves, L., Klinge, I., Logie, C. H., McKay, D., McMurtry, M. S., Oliffe, J. L., & Tannenbaum, C. (2026). Sex & Gender Science: integrating the social with the biological. Biology of Sex Differences. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13293-026-00977-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13293-026-00977-8

Keywords: sex and gender science, biological sex, gender and health, transdisciplinary research, Biology of Sex Differences, health inequities, sex differences, gender identity, precision medicine, Alzheimer's disease, cardiovascular disease, Canadian Institutes of Health Research