The female part is actually a bit more surprising. Its easy to imagine a dataset not skewed towards black people. ~15% of the population in North America, probably less in Europe, and way less in Asia. But female? Thats ~52% globally.
To any women who happen to be reading this: if you can, please help fix this! Participate in studies, share your data when appropriate. If you see how a process can be improved to be more inclusive then please let it be known. Any (reasonable) male knows this is an issue and wants to see it fixed but it's not clear what should be done.
Biological sex, hormone levels, etc.
Sex assigned at birth is in many situations important medical information; the vast majority of trans people are very conscious of their health in this sense and happy to share that with their doctor.
Which is not gender identity. As a result of being trans there may be things like hormone levels that are different than what you'd expect based on biological sex, which is why I say hormone levels are important, but how you identify is in fact irrelevant.
Regardless of that, you seem to agree that:
- Sex assigned at birth is important medical information
- Information about gender affirming treatments is important medical information
So I don't think there's much to worry about there.
I don't understand what your issue with it is, it's just another point of data.
I don't want to be treated like a cis woman in a medical context, but I sure do want to be treated like a trans woman.
Right… their gender they identify as.
So sex, and then also the gender they identify as.
You can’t hide behind an “etc”. Expand that out and the conclusion is you really do need to know who is trans and who is cisgender when doing treatment.
You simply can’t reduce it to birth sex assignment and that’s it, if you do, you will, as you say, end up with wrong and potentially harmful treatment, or lack of treatment.
Or current genitalia for that matter. It's just a matter of the genitalia signifying other biological realities for 99.9% of people. For sure more info like average hormone levels or ranges over time would be more helpful.
But, if we must over generalize, “gender identity” really is the most useful proxy, in fact, and it also happily happens to be quite inclusive too.
Of course this conversation started from a transphobic viewpoint, which doesn’t actually care about any of these distinctions anyways, regardless of the merit, it’s just someone being triggered about someone respecting someone else’s gender identity.
The NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 was supposed to bring women back into medical research. The reality was that women were always included, HOWEVER in 1977,(1) because of the outcomes from thalidomide (causing birth defects), "women of childbearing potential" were excluded from the phase 1, and early phase 2 trials (the highest risk trials). They're still generally generally excluded, even after the passage of the act. This was/is to protect the women, and potential children.
According to Edward E. Bartlett in his meta data analysis from 2001, men have been routinely under-represented in NIH data (even before adjusting for men's mortality rates) between 1966-1990. (2)
There's also routinely twice as much spent every year on women's health studies vs men's by the NIH. (3)
It makes sense to me, but I'm biased. Logically, since men lead in 9 of the top 10 causes for death, that shows there's something missing in the equation of research. (4 - It's not a straight forward table, you can view the total deaths, and causes and compare the two for men, and women)
With that being said, it doesn't tell us about the quality of the funding or research topics, maybe the money is going towards pointless goals, or unproductive researchers.
Are there gaps in research? Most definitely, like women who are pregnant. This is put in place to avoid harm but that doesn't help them when they fall into them. Are there more? Definitely. I'm not educated enough in the nuances to go into them.
If you have information that counters what I've posted, please share it, I would love know where these folks are blind so I can take a look at my bias.
(1) https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2021/04/16/pregnant-clini... (2) https://journals.lww.com/epidem/fulltext/2001/09000/did_medi... (3) https://jameslnuzzo.substack.com/p/nih-funding-of-mens-and-w... < I spot checked a couple of the figures, and those lined up. I'm assuming the rest is accurate (4) https://www.cdc.gov/womens-health/lcod/index.html#:~:text=Ov...
What about Africa?
For all I know there are millions of models with extremely poor accuracy based on African datasets. Wouldnt really change anything about the above though. I wouldnt expect that though and it would definitely be interesting.