Sex and Gender : Understanding Entanglement, Transforming Practice

This open access book originates from the 36th Ernst Strüngmann Forum, where in 2023 scholars from a wide range of disciplines came together to advance understanding of gender, sex, and their entanglement. Although these interdisciplinary discussions revealed no single approach to the conceptualization or operationalization of sex/gender entanglement, they did uncover a high degree of convergence. Driving this project was the pressing need for constructive, interdisciplinary dialogue, as clearly articulated arguments grounded in rigorous, principled scholarship are required to promote sound application in research, policy, medicine, and public health.
At the Forum, open debate is a given, but science does not operate in isolation from the political and social forces around it. This became starkly evident in 2025, when newly instituted policy interventions and measures impacted research and knowledge production in many areas of science, interfering not only with the first edition of this volume but, more broadly, affecting the lives of many individuals.
The second edition seeks to redirect attention back to sound science. Together with updates throughout and a restored chapter on brain transcriptomics, this edition advances rigorous, interdisciplinary scholarship on sex/gender entanglement and illuminates viable paths forward.

L. Zachary DuBois earned his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2012 and held postdoctoral research positions at Northwestern University and University of Massachusetts of Boston. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon, where he also directs the Stress, Adaptation, and Resilience Lab and is a key member of the University of Oregon Biomarker cluster.
His research focuses on resilience, social determinants of health, embodied stigma and inequality, and in expanding and adding nuance to current conceptualizations of gender and sex. His research applies community-based, intersectional, mixed-methods approaches centering the lived experience and health of transgender and gender diverse people. His research has pioneered work furthering our understanding of experiences of stigma and gender minority stress and mapping these onto the body as embodied stressors through integration of minimally invasive biomarker measures. He is also actively involved in collaborative applied research addressing health inequities among transgender and nonbinary youth and LGBTQIA+ people more broadly.

Anelis Kaiser Trujillo holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Basel (Switzerland) with additional postgraduate training in Gender Studies. After a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Bern, she was appointed to professorships at the TU Berlin and the University of Freiburg, where she served as Professor of Gender Studies in STEM from 2017 to 2023. After continuing her work at the Center Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, University of Innsbruck, she now combines work in clinical science with a Lecture position at the University of Basel.
Her research addresses sex/gender differences and similarities in neurocognitive processes, the development of alternative sex/gender models, and the creation of intersectional measurement tools for sex/gender in scientific research. She has also explored the neurobiological mechanisms underlying language in the brain. In 2010, she co-founded the international network NeuroGenderings with Isabelle Dussauge to promote interdisciplinary research on sex/gender in the brain sciences.

Margaret M. (Peg) McCarthy received a PhD from the Institute of Animal Behavior at Rutgers University, Newark NJ, completed postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University in New York NY, and was a National Research Council Fellow at NIH-NIAAA before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1993 in Baltimore, Maryland. Rising steadily through the ranks, she was a Professor in the Department of Physiology before becoming the Chair of the Department of Pharmacology in 2011 in which capacity she served until 2024.
McCarthy has a long-standing interest in the cellular mechanisms establishing sex differences in the brain. She uses a combined behavioral and mechanistic approach in the laboratory rat to understand both normal brain development and how these processes might go selectively awry in males versus females. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts and has been cited close to 30,000 times.
After stepping down as the Chair of the Department of Pharmacology, McCarthy became the inaugural Director of the University of Maryland–Medicine Institute for Neuroscience Discovery (UM–MIND). She is a Reviewing Editor for Journal of Neuroscience and a fellow with AAAS and ACNP, former President of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences, and current President of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2024.