Some of our favorite Quick Questions to answer are the ones where the premise of the question
is flawed.
Like, take this one: Why don’t women have adam’s apples?
The answer is: I don’t … I can’t answer that, ‘cause women do have adam’s apples!
Technically, the adam’s apple is known as the laryngeal prominence, and it’s actually
just a big piece of cartilage that covers your larynx, or voice box.
Everyone has one, because you need it to protect your larynx and everything you keep inside
there to make yourself heard, particularly your vocal folds -- often mistakenly called
vocal cords.
This protection is important enough that there are actually nine different pieces of cartilage
that work together to protect your larynx.
The one that forms the laryngeal prominence is the biggest and uppermost piece, called
the thyroid cartilage.
Cartilage is just a kind of stiff, flexible connective tissue -- it doesn’t have any
nerves or blood vessels in it -- and the prominence is where two plates of cartilage meet and
fuse together, forming a little peak.
As children, everyone’s laryngeal prominence is the same size.
But when you reach puberty, your larynx and all of the cartilage around it grows considerably,
giving you your grown-up voice.
But the way in which the cartilage grows is different depending on your sex.
For biological females, the two plates develop to form a more obtuse angle, of about 120
degrees.
This makes it rest flatter in the throat.
But in males, the plates form a 90 degree angle, which makes the prominence even more
prominent.
And because the rapid growth of the larynx and all its fixins is driven by testosterone,
males’ voice boxes and thyroid cartilage typically grow more than females’, which
can not only give them deeper voices, it can also put a bigger lump in their throat.
So an enlarged, angled adam’s apple is considered a male secondary sex characteristic -- a specific
variation of a feature that everyone actually has.
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