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NEUROENDOCRINOLOGY

Examining how our brain determines gender identity

Nature Reviews Endocrinology volume 18, page 267 (2022)Cite this article

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In the 1980s and 1990s, Dick Swaab’s group in Amsterdam, Netherlands, had a working hypothesis that human sex differences in behaviours and brain function are largely programmed into the brain by exposure to sex steroids and other factors before birth, resulting in permanent structural brain changes. Finding the evidence to support this hypothesis would have a profound effect on understanding ourselves and on society.

In 1990, Swaab’s first student from China, Jiang-Ning Zhou (who later became my PhD mentor in China), joined his research group. Zhou used vasoactive intestine polypeptide (VIP) staining to study the human biological clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, in post-mortem human hypothalamus sections obtained by the Netherlands Brain Bank. He was struck by the strong VIP staining of the central nucleus in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc) within these sections. Much to his amazement, the BSTc seemed to be larger in men than in women.

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References

Original articles

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Brain Science and Brain Medicine, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hang Zhou, China

    Ai-Min Bao

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  1. Ai-Min Bao
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Correspondence to Ai-Min Bao.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Bao, AM. Examining how our brain determines gender identity. Nat Rev Endocrinol 18, 267 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41574-022-00643-0

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