• Question: Why's a females body different to a male's body?

    Asked by nicolepoynter to Cesar, Emily, Jamie, Kate, Philippa on 15 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Jamie Gallagher

      Jamie Gallagher answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      they are geared up for differnt purposes. It is all goverened by reproduction and sexual selection. In all animals only one of the genders is capable of carrying babies to term. Be that male or female. This is quite a taxing thing for the body so I guess nature in its wizdom decided not to build both capable of doing it. There are many many differences and many similarities.

    • Photo: Emily Robinson

      Emily Robinson answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      That is not true for all species though! Some are hermaphrodites which have the sex organs for both male and female reproduction. For example most plants are hermaphrodites… and things like slugs too! Quite often it is in species that don’t come across others of the species that often too, so it is important to get the most out of the encounter. Then there are some species that start off as one gender and turn into the other like the clown fish and all amazing things like that! So humans are qutie boring in that sense!

    • Photo: Kate Clancy

      Kate Clancy answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Exactly, Emily! This is one of my favorite things to teach in my Biology of Human Behavior class. Everyone thinks sex is so static, that you are born male or female and that’s it. But many other species can change sexes in their lives. There are even some humans that do it, and I mean without medical intervention! That disease is called 5-alpha reductase deficiency, where a person is born with female-appearing external organs, but at puberty the flush of hormones overwhelms the system, and their organs change to male organs! This happens to be found at a higher concentration in the Dominican Republic relative to the rest of the world.

      Also, about one in every hundred humans are born with undifferentiated sexual organs, meaning it is not clear when you look at their genitals if they are male or female. It used to be that doctors encouraged parents to “choose” a sex for their child and to have the baby have surgery. These days more people are letting these children “wait and see” to figure out how they want to identify.

      But to answer your question more directly: in the beginning there are very few differences aside from barely-different average weights, and the sex organs. The problem is that we can’t tell whether the other differences that happen as a person grows up are all biology, or partly due to culture. The ones we are pretty certain are just biological are puberty, secondary sexual characteristics, and the sex organs themselves. But some of the behavioral differences that we used to think were all biological are now being questioned.

      There are two books you may want to have a look at: Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine, and Brainstorm by Rebecca Jordan-Young. The first one in particular is written for a broad audience, but both are really wonderful books. See if your library has them!

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