Development and disorders of biological sex

Today prof. Dr. Holterhus from the CAU (Christian Albrechts University Kiel) visited us, in order to give us a presentation on the topic “development and disorders of biological sex”. He laid his focus on intersexuality and what function the hormones and chromosomes take in connection with it. It was really interesting to see how the gender roles for example come about, considering it from the biological point of view and not from the psychological one, like we did before. It was also surprising for most of us to learn how the biological sex was formed by hormonal influences and the fact that before the impact of those hormones on the embryo, everybody is female, was quite new to a lot of us.

Another really interesting aspect was the difference between the brain cells of heterosexual/homosexual men and women and transsexual women which showed us that the feelings of transsexuals being imprisoned in the wrong body could be occurred through the differences of those brain cells, even though this is just a study and no official proof.

In the end he said that on our topic it´s important to always consider both sides the biological and also psychological one.

We think that all of us were able to learn a lot more about the biological side of our topic “sex & gender” and we also got some useful information that we can now use to answer some of our questions we discovered at the beginning of our seminar. All in all, it was a great and really interesting presentation.