The sexual development of an embryo does not depend on a single instruction, but on a chain of signals that must fire in the right order and the right place. When one link in that chain fails, develop...
Gender identity has a biological basis that science is only beginning to unravel. A new genetic study adds another piece to that puzzle: transgender women carry more rare variants in a family of genes...
Sometimes a person’s clinical picture can only be explained by accepting an uncomfortable idea: that two different genetic causes may be acting at once. That is what the authors of a case report...
Gender dysphoria remains a largely unexplored territory for neurobiology. One of the most promising avenues runs through oxytocin, a neuropeptide known for modulating social cognition and emotional pr...
Does the brain of a transgender person resemble more the sex assigned at birth, or the gender with which they identify? It is one of the central questions of the neuroscience of gender dysphoria, and ...
Klinefelter syndrome is a genetic condition in which a person is born with an extra X chromosome: a 47,XXY karyotype instead of the usual 46,XY. That extra copy usually goes hand in hand with an atten...
Differences in sex development (DSD) — also known as intersex traits — are a set of congenital conditions in which chromosomal, gonadal or anatomical development does not follow the typically male or ...
The human body does not treat testosterone and oestradiol as mere messengers of reproduction: these hormones travel throughout the organism and also communicate with the immune system. A group of rese...
For a long time, sex has been discussed as if it were a switch that can only be in two positions. The genetics of development, however, tells a more nuanced story. An international team coordinated by...
Could genetics have something to do with gender identity? For decades it was an almost taboo question, but science has been gathering clues for years. A recent study published in Scientific Reports (a...
A new review study published in 2026 in the journal Journal of Pediatric Urology (Elsevier) analyzes the relationship between congenital adrenal hyperplasia and gender dysphoria. Congenital adrenal hy...
An epigenome-wide association study (EWAS) published in Frontiers in Neuroscience by the group of Rosa Fernández, Eduardo Pásaro and Antonio Guillamón shows that people with gender incongruence presen...