Who Gets to Decide What Is True?
This is a personal reflection, not a professional position or clinical guidance.
When a scientific framework gets challenged, the conversation that follows tends to stay inside the tradition that produced it. Other researchers respond. Papers are published. The debate is conducted in the language of the original claim — mechanisms, pathways, evidence thresholds — and the question of whether that tradition was the right one to be generating authoritative knowledge in the first place rarely gets asked.
I want to ask it.
Whose bodies built the evidence
The foundational research on autonomic nervous system function — what we think we know about stress response, nervous system regulation, how the body responds to safety and threat — was built predominantly on male bodies. Until 2016, the NIH did not require biomedical studies to include female animals or account for sex as a biological variable. In neuroscience specifically, studies using only male subjects outnumbered those using only female subjects 5.5 to 1. We know there are real sex differences in autonomic function. We are only beginning to understand them, because for decades the research was not designed to see them.
This is not a footnote. It means the frameworks we have been using to understand how human nervous systems work were generated from a narrow slice of human experience — and presented with the full confidence of established science.
When those frameworks are challenged, the challenge tends to come from within the same tradition. More researchers. More papers. More debate conducted in the same language, by and large among the same kinds of bodies in the same kinds of institutions. What stays outside the frame is a question the tradition was never designed to ask: what did we miss because of who was doing the asking?
What was already known
Indigenous and First Nations peoples, and Black and brown communities, have been working with the body — with nervous systems, with regulation, with the relationship between safety and the capacity to connect — for generations. Not as a precursor to the science that would later explain it. As knowledge. Practised, transmitted, refined across time in ways that did not require anatomical language to be real.
That bodies carry history. That connection to community and Country is not metaphorical support but actual medicine. That rhythm, ceremony, relational presence — that these are how humans move through distress. Resmaa Menakem traces this explicitly in My Grandmother's Hands: somatic wisdom held in lineages and communities, practised long before it arrived in clinical language.
What Western science did was observe some of what these traditions already knew, translate it into neurobiological terms, and in doing so grant it a particular kind of authority. The translation made it legible to clinical and academic institutions. It also made it brittle — dependent now on specific anatomical claims being correct. When those claims are challenged, the clinical framework wobbles. The older knowing doesn't wobble. It was never dependent on the translation.
I find myself asking what it means that the knowing needed to be translated at all. That it needed to arrive in anatomical language, authored by particular kinds of people in particular kinds of institutions, before it was taken seriously as evidence of how human bodies work.
That is a question about epistemology — about who gets to decide what counts as knowledge, and what it costs when the answer has been, for a very long time, predominantly: people who look a particular way, working in a particular tradition, studying particular bodies.
What actually holds
I am not making the argument that rigorous inquiry doesn't matter. It does. So does asking who it has been rigorous about.
I am making the argument that the tradition doing the inquiring has shaped what gets inquired into, whose experience generates the evidence, and whose knowing gets called science and whose gets called something else. And that when a framework built inside that tradition turns out to have overstated its certainty, the response that stays entirely inside the same tradition is not the only possible response.
There is knowledge that has held across generations, in bodies and communities that were never centred in the research tradition. The body's capacity to settle, mobilise, and connect. The role of relational presence. The way safety — real safety, felt in the body, held in community — changes what becomes possible. These things are not recent discoveries.
What is worth holding onto, I think, is not any particular framework's explanation for why they are true. It is that they are true. Practised, witnessed, known — across traditions and lineages that predate the clinical language by a very long time.
The science will keep debating the mechanism. The knowing will keep being practised regardless.
References
Beery, A.K., & Zucker, I. (2011). Sex bias in neuroscience and biomedical research. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(3), 565–572. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2010.07.002
Gee, G., Dudgeon, P., Schultz, C., Hart, A., & Kelly, K. (2014). Social and emotional wellbeing and mental health: An Aboriginal perspective. In P. Dudgeon, H. Milroy, & R. Walker (Eds.), Working Together: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mental Health and Wellbeing Principles and Practice (2nd ed.). Commonwealth of Australia.
Menakem, R. (2017). My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press.
National Institutes of Health. (2015). Consideration of sex as a biological variable in NIH-funded research (Notice NOT-OD-15-102). https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/not-od-15-102.html
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Important Information
This post is a personal reflection on epistemology and research bias, not a clinical position statement or professional guidance. References to NIH policy on sex as a biological variable in biomedical research reflect documented, published findings. The 5.5:1 ratio of male-only to female-only neuroscience studies reflects the findings of Beery & Zucker (2011), published prior to the 2016 NIH policy change. The acknowledgement of Indigenous, First Nations, and ancestral knowledge is offered in genuine recognition of whose knowing this was first — it is not a claim to speak for specific cultural traditions, communities, or spiritual frameworks, and it is not appropriation of specific practices. Nothing in this post constitutes clinical advice or a recommendation for or against any therapeutic approach. Readers are encouraged to follow the sources cited and form their own view.
