I’m stepping far outside my area of expertise here so please treat this as good faith, uneducated questions.
My understanding is that most of this research is about chronic pain rather than acute pain. I know AFAB people experience chronic pain at like 3x the rates of AMAB people, and that especially immune-moderated pain diseases are much harder to manage in AFAB. I also recognize this is an area of active research and much is yet to be confirmed, but I wonder if acute pain pathways are the same as chronic pain pathways? My limited understanding is that acute pain from tissue damage, etc. is still understood to be nervous system activation for both sexes.
Is it also accurate that these pathways and their activations are largely sex-hormone related? I wonder if that means we could survey trans folks on their experiences of pain before and after transition, both ways.
Thank you for your comment, this has spurred me to do some reading!
Also just as I read about this on pubmed because I find this to be very interesting, I find myself angry at how much of this incredibly valuable research has/will be defended by various right wing governments as “woke”. One of these papers by the International Association for the Study of Pain discusses how various hormones may conditionally amplify or suppress pain depending on various factors, rather than a blanket “estrogen amplifies pain” and I just think that’s really fascinating. The body is so complex.
This is an aggregate article I found from IASP that links to some of the studies I found: https://www.iasp-pain.org/resources/fact-sheets/biological-mechanisms-underlying-sex-differences-in-pain/
Really interesting stuff. I suffered from some chronic pain for what felt like forever this past year and so I had done some “basic” reading, but I didn’t bother to go much further beyond what I needed/wanted at the time. This is cool.