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somestuff 's review for:
The XX Brain
by Lisa Mosconi
it’s not very good
passable summary of the lifespan of women (from childhood through puberty menopause and post menopause) and Very extensive writing on diet and HRT/MHT with some asides on supplements (separate from diet lol) exercise stress and sleep
explaining the biggest trials we have for diet and HRT as treatments for peri/menopause symptoms and how HRT effects cardio and cancer risk were the best parts of this book certainly the highlight
the first half of the book is overly focused on BMI given that there are Many studies that it really is not a strong indicator of health/unhealthiness and that genuinely diet + exercise don’t change it (or pre-diabetes insulin resistance for that matter diet yes exercise? no effect) for longer than a year but apart from this there was a lot of very good info included on diet in general and the idiocy of most diets beyond mediterranean diet
parts on stress were almost laughably bad bc of ‘tend and befriend’ bs stress response when the actual 3rd response to stress that has been shown to mainly be the stress response of women is freeze (fight flight or freeze) and the weird hunter/gatherer justification that is used as a crutch a few times in the book without any in depth analysis of how evolution affects women (especially given that anthropologists nearly uniformly agree that both men and women hunted and gathered) was irritating
actually historical information beyond like the last 80 years was quite bad in that we kno that life expectancy has been quite similar (maybe 5-10 years better after sanitation) but the main difference in average life expectancies were infant/early childhood mortality going down and childbirth for women bringing our average down slightly
and of course the title is annoyingly bioessentialist and the one paragraph in which dr mosconi mentions trans ppl was clearly not read by any person who has ever even spoken with a trans person lmao terminology shit calling trans men “women transitioning to the male gender” is like p dumb
also the sections on ooph and hysterectomy could actually apply even if it’s just a sentence acknowledging that we don’t have enough data (or any studies at all) to tell us how taking T or not female hormone RT could effect trans men’s rates of dementia/alzheimer’s after these gender affirming surgeries would have been enough lmao. especially considering a third of the book is about a kind of gender affirming care for peri/post menopausal women
Like If you actually wanted this book to be about XX brains and not cis women’s brains prolly should have had anyone who’s even met a trans person read the one paragraph on trans men you had for errors.
passable summary of the lifespan of women (from childhood through puberty menopause and post menopause) and Very extensive writing on diet and HRT/MHT with some asides on supplements (separate from diet lol) exercise stress and sleep
explaining the biggest trials we have for diet and HRT as treatments for peri/menopause symptoms and how HRT effects cardio and cancer risk were the best parts of this book certainly the highlight
the first half of the book is overly focused on BMI given that there are Many studies that it really is not a strong indicator of health/unhealthiness and that genuinely diet + exercise don’t change it (or pre-diabetes insulin resistance for that matter diet yes exercise? no effect) for longer than a year but apart from this there was a lot of very good info included on diet in general and the idiocy of most diets beyond mediterranean diet
parts on stress were almost laughably bad bc of ‘tend and befriend’ bs stress response when the actual 3rd response to stress that has been shown to mainly be the stress response of women is freeze (fight flight or freeze) and the weird hunter/gatherer justification that is used as a crutch a few times in the book without any in depth analysis of how evolution affects women (especially given that anthropologists nearly uniformly agree that both men and women hunted and gathered) was irritating
actually historical information beyond like the last 80 years was quite bad in that we kno that life expectancy has been quite similar (maybe 5-10 years better after sanitation) but the main difference in average life expectancies were infant/early childhood mortality going down and childbirth for women bringing our average down slightly
and of course the title is annoyingly bioessentialist and the one paragraph in which dr mosconi mentions trans ppl was clearly not read by any person who has ever even spoken with a trans person lmao terminology shit calling trans men “women transitioning to the male gender” is like p dumb
also the sections on ooph and hysterectomy could actually apply even if it’s just a sentence acknowledging that we don’t have enough data (or any studies at all) to tell us how taking T or not female hormone RT could effect trans men’s rates of dementia/alzheimer’s after these gender affirming surgeries would have been enough lmao. especially considering a third of the book is about a kind of gender affirming care for peri/post menopausal women
Like If you actually wanted this book to be about XX brains and not cis women’s brains prolly should have had anyone who’s even met a trans person read the one paragraph on trans men you had for errors.