Your Balls or Your Life? The Effect of Castration on Longevity
Castrating male sheep delays epigenetic aging, possibly by the reduction or removal of androgen hormones
Sex and age
(There is — to the best of my knowledge — no quality data on people who have undergone sex reassignment surgery. This surgery is a fairly recent development, so perhaps it’s too early to tell.)
The reasons for this sex difference in human lifespan are many. And many of those are tentative.
Men are generally more likely to engage in risky behaviors, from drinking and smoking to warmongering. That’ll bring down the average for sure.
When these differences in behavior are smaller, so does the difference in lifespan. But it doesn’t go down to zero. Women continue to outlive men (and the list of the longest living people is absolutely dominated by women). So there has to be more going on.
We know that across the animal kingdom bigger animals tend to die earlier within species (it’s the opposite between species: larger species tend to live longer). Since men are — on average — physically larger than women, the same might be true for us humans. (This also holds within the sexes. For…
