Category: sex and gender issues

Coleman Hughes interviews Carole Hooven

November 12, 2025 • 9:30 am

Here’s a 1.5-hour interview of biologist Carole Hooven by the Free Press’s Coleman Hughes. As you may know, Hooven got her Ph.D. at Harvard, started work as a teaching fellow in biological anthropology, and subsequently wrote the excellent book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us (2021).  She was apparently a superb and popular teacher, nabbing a lot of teaching awards. But then the downfall: she got into trouble after she went on a Fox program and spoke the truth, asserting that there are two biological sexes—carefully adding the caveat that pronouns should be respected and that people with non-standard genders should be treated equally. (You can see the 4-minute Fox interview here.)

But of course the assertion that there are two biological sexes, although true, gets you labeled a “transphobe” (even with the proper caveats), and the DEI people in Carole’s department eventually made it impossible for her to work there, so she left.  Harvard should be ashamed of this, and the school has done nothing to rectify its misbehavior. Subsequently, others have been demonized or called “transphobes” for defending the two-biological-sex fact. The demonizers, which include people like Steve Novella and the co-Presidents of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, should also be ashamed of their misbehavior, but they are seeking props for putting ideology over biological truth.

Carole begins by recounting her checkered—or should I say “diverse”—career, describing what happened at Harvard, and then explains the gametocentric definition of sex rejected by gender ideologues.  The rest of the interview, with both discussants showing their characteristic eloquence, is a biology lesson, a lesson on sex determination, what can go wrong with the “normal” forms of development, and how evolution has produced differences in the morphology and behavior of the two sexes.  Testosterone naturally makes an appearance.  You can see why Carole won so many teaching awards.

The YouTube notes are these:

In elite circles, it has become strangely difficult to say out loud what every biology department taught as recently as 10 years ago: that sex is binary, that testosterone matters, and that average differences do not mean categorical rules. That’s why I wanted to sit down with Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist who spent 20 years at Harvard teaching hormones, behavior, and evolutionary psychology before she was pushed out for stating precisely that.

In our conversation, Hooven traces how she got here: from her early fieldwork studying chimp aggression in Uganda, to her best-selling book on testosterone, to the moment a single Fox News clip triggered a campus-wide effort to paint her as “dangerous.” She explains what research actually says—about rough-and-tumble play, aggression, libido, and the long-run effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones—and how activists and journalists systematically mislead the public.

Hooven isn’t angry or ideological; she is empirically careful. She draws a distinction almost nobody in public debate seems capable of holding anymore: Sex itself is binary, but sex-associated traits form overlapping distributions. Confusing those two ideas is what produces so much intellectual chaos and so much institutional cowardice.

This episode challenges the comforting myths: that these debates are “just semantics,” that biology can be legislated away, and that open scientific inquiry can coexist with fear of one’s students. What Hooven makes clear is that the science hasn’t changed, only the cost of talking about it.

Once again: Why there are two sexes and no more

November 6, 2025 • 9:50 am

In a recent post on his site “Reality’s Last Stand,” Colin Wright reprints an article he published a few months ago in Archives of Sexual behavior, outlining why there are exactly two sexes and dismantling five common arguments that biological sexes actually comprise either more than two types or a spectrum. Click below to read it or find the free pdf here.

If you’re already familiar with the rebuttals of the more-than-two-sexes arguments, you may want to skip this, but it’s a very short piece and worth refreshing yourself. And it was, of course, peer-reviewed.

I’ll give a few excerpts, listing the five arguments supposedly fatal to the only-two-biological sex view and making a few of my own comments. Wright’s excerpts are indented, and my own commentary is flush left.

He begins with what we all know is true: the two-sex definition (really a “recognition of reality”), based on differences in gamete size, was the accepted view until recently, when gender transformation became common, making people want to redefine biology to conform to their own views or identity.

In recent years, however, this previously uncontroversial fact has been challenged in popular discourse (Fuentes, 2023; Kralick, 2018; Viloria & Nieto, 2020) and now increasingly in scholarly scientific publications (Ainsworth, 2015; Fuentes, 2025; McLaughlin et al., 2023; Velocci, 2024), seemingly driven by cultural and political debates surrounding the concept of “gender identity” and transgender rights. Popular outlets now routinely publish articles asserting that there are more than two sexes or that sex is a nonbinary “spectrum” conceived as a continuum or as a multivariate cluster of traits. Scholarly articles have amplified this framing by characterizing the sex binary as overly simplistic, outdated, and even oppressive, urging its replacement with broader and putatively more nuanced models (Ainsworth, 2015).

Here I synthesize evolutionary and developmental evidence to demonstrate that sex is binary (i.e., there are only two sexes) in all anisogamous species and that males and females are defined universally by the type of gamete they have the biological function to produce—not by karyotypes, secondary sexual characteristics, or other correlates.

“Anisogamous” species are those having different sizes of gametes, and comprise all animals and vascular plants. That of course includes humans. And again, although the sperm vs. egg dichotomy is called a “definition” of biological sex, it recally should be called a concept because, like biological species, it simply recognizes an existing dichotomy and does not impose arbitrary human views onto nature.

Wright goes on to define biological sex, which has evolved several times independently. But isn’t it curious that each time it does—no matter what determines sex—there are only two classes that result? That’s an insight that has led to the creation of good theories for why the sexes are always two.  Here’s what Wright sees as the most common attempts to refute the sex dichotomy, and why they fail. Bold headlines are my characterizations.

a.) There are more than two “sexes” in organisms that have gametes of equal size (“isogamous species”), including some fungi and slime molds

. . . . sexes in anisogamous taxa are defined by gametic dimorphism—the production of small gametes (sperm) versus large gametes (ova). Some anisogamous species may also possess mating-type systems layered on top of male and female functions, but isogamous species, by definition, lack sexes.

Claims of hundreds or thousands of sexes thus refer to many mating types in isogamous systems, not to sexes. Where reproduction is anisogamous, the number of sexes remains two—male and female—defined by gamete type (Lehtonen, 2021).

This may seem like a slippery definitional ploy, but in fact biological sexes were recognized as being of only two types in anisogamous species, not isogamous species. Still, if someone insists on saying that there are many sees in isogamous species, I am not going to argue with them too vehemently. The claim of more than two sexes, of course, is invariably used to apply to animals and plants, especially humans. And there we see only two mating types.

b.) If you define sex by chromosome types, there could be more than two sexes. (Note, though, that many species with two sexes do not have them determined by chromosomes: in turtles sex can be determined by temperature, and in some fish by social hierarchies. ) In humans, for example, the typical XX (female) and XY (male karyotype) are supplemented by rare karuyotypes like XO, XYY, XXY, and others.

Colin:

The fundamental flaw is conflating how sex is determined with how it is defined (Capel, 2017; Griffiths, 2021; Hilton & Wright, 2023). In developmental biology, sex determination refers to the mechanisms that trigger and regulate sexual development. These mechanisms vary widely across taxa (Bachtrog, 2014). Examples include chromosomal (e.g., SRY gene on Y chromosome in mammals), temperature-dependent (e.g., higher temperatures produce males in many reptiles), haplodiploidy (e.g., unfertilized haploid eggs yield males in most Hymenoptera insects), or environmental (e.g., chemical cues in Bonellia viridis).

Yet, regardless of the mechanism by which sex is determined, an individual’s sex—male or female—is universally defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) their reproductive system has the biological function to produce (Goymann et al., 2023). Sex chromosome aneuploidies therefore represent variations within the two sexes, not additional sexes.

c.) Sex is a spectrum because individuals have a continuity of male and female traits, as exemplified by individuals having DSDs (differences/disorders of sex development.  As I’ve noted before, the frequency of “intersex” individuals, which supposedly cause the spectrum, is quite low: about 1/5600 individuals—close to the probability that if you toss a nickel in the air, it will land on its edge. Yet we don’t see people flipping coins saying, “Call it: heads, tails, or edge.”

. . .The primary evidence invoked to support the spectrum model is the existence of disorders/differences in sex development (DSDs) (Sax, 2002), including forms of genital or gonadal atypicality, often presented visually along a continuum from “typical female” to “typical male.”

However, the existence of such conditions does not undermine the binary nature of sex, because the sex binary does not entail that every individual can be unambiguously categorized as male or female. Rather, the claim is that in anisogamous organisms there are only two gamete types, sperm and ova, and thus only two sexes. Sexual ambiguity is not a third or intermediate sex because developmental variation does not correspond to producing new gamete types.

These next two objections are those I see most often in the literature, and they both have the problem that they don’t set out criteria for defining or recognizing someone as male or female.

d.) In reality, sex is a “polythetic” category, which Colin defines as “one in which members share overlapping characteristics, with no single feature necessary or sufficient for membership. Inclusion is based on “family resemblance”. This is the objection raised, for example, by people like Steve Novella and Agustín Fuentes.

Proponents of a polythetic sex model draw on this idea to portray sex as multivariate (rather than univariate, as in a simple “spectrum”). On this view, “sex” is an aggregate of traits—chromosomes, gonads, gametes, hormones, neuroanatomy, secondary sex characteristics, and other sexually dimorphic traits—and individuals are assigned degrees of maleness or femaleness according to how their overall profile aligns with what is considered male-typical or female-typical (Dreger, 2000; Fausto-Sterling, 2000).

However, male and female are not polythetic categories. They are reproductive classes defined by a single criterion: The type of gamete (sperm or ova) an organism’s reproductive system has the biological function tomproduce. All other traits—karyotype, genital morphology, hormone profiles, neurological and somatic dimorphisms—are typically causes, proxies, or consequences of that functional distinction. Treating those correlates as jointly definitional blurs the determinants and downstream effects of sex with sex itself.

e.) You can be a member of different sexes depending on which trait you’re looking at (chromosomes, genitalia, hormones, and so on).

As articulated by McLaughlin et al. (2023), sex is framed as “a constructed category operating at multiple biological levels,” with four focal levels: genetic, endocrine, morphological, and behavioral. This framing conflates the determinants and correlates of sex with sex itself (Bachtrog, 2014; Capel, 2017). Genes and gene networks initiate and regulate sexual differentiation; hormones mediate downstream development and phenotypic dimorphisms; morphology and many behaviors are influenced by an organism’s sex. Yet none of these traits defines sex. Sex is an organism-level reproductive class anchored to the type of gamete that organism has the biological function to produce. Treating upstream regulators (e.g., SRY activity, hormonal milieu) or downstream outcomes (e.g., dimorphic morphology, behavior) as coequal “levels” of sex is a level-of-analysis error.

And the kickerm which shows the fact that critics really do recognize two sexes (and use them in their own scientific papers!):

Moreover, the multilevel account inherits the same circularity as the polythetic model. Traits are labeled “male-typical” or “female-typical” only because they correlate with organisms already identified as male or female—an identification that, in anisogamous species, is made ultimately by reference to gametes. Once that reference is removed, the typology loses its interpretive footing. As a descriptive framework to integrate genetic, endocrine, and morphological findings in clinical differential diagnosis, the multilevel schema has pragmatic value; as a definition of sex, it is incoherent.

Why is this important biologically? Colin explains:

The scientific value of clear and precise definitions is enormous (Dawkins, 2025). A gamete-based definition prevents error propagation across comparative biology, physiology, ecology, and medicine. It preserves the interpretability of sex-linked phenomena—sexual selection, dimorphism, and life-history trade-offs—and maintains conceptual discipline by keeping determination mechanisms (e.g., SRY pathways, ZW systems, temperature-dependent determination, social cues) in their proper explanatory lane. It also secures cross-taxon coherence: Whether a species is gonochoric or hermaphroditic, and whether determination is chromosomal, environmental, or social, “male” and “female” remain meaningfully comparable because those terms are anchored to reproductive function rather than to a bundle of traits that shift widely from taxa to taxa.

I like to summarize this by saying that the biological sex definition/concept is both universal and explanatory. No other concept of sex, for example, can explain sexual selection and the differences in behavior and phenotype that appear in animals.

It’s important to recognize that the recent reframing of the two sexes as needing revision did not result from any new discoveries about biology. All the things about sex determination and differentiation have been known for a long time. What has changed is not biology but ideology. It is perfectly clear that arguing that there are more than two sexes is derived from the desire to give solace to those who don’t feel or identify as male or female,  But there’s no need to  change your view of nature to bring such solace. As Wright says:

The societal and ethical stakes are also significant. Accurate biology is distinct from questions of dignity, rights, and how we treat one another. Policy disputes should not be adjudicated by redefining—or defining away—the reproductive realities that make sex a useful scientific concept in the first place. When categories are blurred for nonscientific reasons, we invite downstream harms: muddled clinical protocols, compromised epidemiology, eroding and/or conflicting legal protections, and diminished public trust in science.

It is not transphobic to recognize the two sexes that biologists have known for decades, but, unfortunately, we are dealing with ideologues who are largely impervious to both facts and reason, and so the five points above are aimed largely at those who don’t know a lot about the way biologists conceive of sex.

Colin Wright on trans data epistomology: a new “way of knowing” that prioritizes ideology over truth

November 4, 2025 • 11:00 am

One of the recurrent themes on this site—and in the new anthology The War on Science, including the paper byLuana and Maroja and me—is the erosion of scientific standards by ideology.  Now a new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Big Data & Society (first title below), analyzed by Colin Wright on his website (second title), shows more than anything the explicit antiscientific aims of some ideologues. And those aims include clear guidance to prioritize ideology and politics over truth. Nowhere else have i seen this aim stated more blatantly.

In this case, the ideology promoted to distort or efface truth is “trans data epistomology”: a way to deal with data on trans issues. (As you know, empirical data, because they sometimes counteract accepted trans ideologies, have been controversial, leading to withholding of data that has real effects on human beings.)

I hasten to add that the distortion of data and prioritizing of politics over truth can be and has been applied to any group that does “science” with a political agenda—not just minority groups but entire organizations like scientific journals, medical schools, and professional organizations.  I emphasize this because trans matters are the hottest of political hot potatoes, but what this paper exemplifies is not at all unique to trans issues, and calling it out is not “transphobic”. In this time of extreme political division, science has become a tool not for finding truth, but for advancing your cause, no matter what the cause may be. Damn the truth, and full steam ahead.

The authors of this paper (again, it’s peer-reviewed) conducted 13 interviews of activists involved in “trans community care” and, from the 16 people involved in these interviews, the authors derived four pillars of what they call “trans data epistemology”, which turns out to involve, as Colin notes, ways you can use data to advance your cause.

Click the title below to read the paper:

Here’s part of the abstract; I’ve bolded the four pillars, but pay attention to the third one: “community well-being is more important than ‘accurate’ data”.  The last one, “data makes us visible to institutions,” apparently means “reframing your data in a way that serves your needs.”

 Drawing on literature from trans theory, data activism, critical data studies, philosophy, and critical social theory we offer a narrative of trans people as creators of knowledge, data-based and otherwise, undergirded by four pillars of a trans data epistemology: categories are provisional and productive, data can be a tool of community care, community well-being is more important than “accurate” data, and data makes us visible to institutions.

This is from the paper’s section on “pillar 3”: prioritizing ideology over truth:

Community well-being is more important than “accurate” data

Trans communities are experiencing an emergency. Well, it was already an emergency, but this is an epidemic. This is a crisis. This is, stop what you’re doing. We have to help now, today. And sometimes these pieces of data really can be a very strong call to action. (George)
In this pillar, we examine how participants prioritized actionable data for the trans community. Our participants reflected an understanding of data as rhetoric, as merely “one mode of conveying information” (Haarman, 2021: 35), not the only mode. When data is simply one of many ways of conveying information, it does not need to be viewed as the canonical source of truth. Our participants repeatedly emphasized that actionable and useful data for community care was the utmost priority over true, accurate, or verifiable data. We do not mean to undermine the meticulous data work of our participants but to emphasize the desired outcome of community well-being of their data work. This aspect of trans data epistemology is consonant with the idea that data is for community care.

This is an academic way of saying that there are other ways of knowing besides the data itself, and data doesn’t have to be the “canonical source of truth.” In fact, when the data conflict with “community care,” you give priority to the latter.  For things like “affirmative care” in gender medicine, this has obvious implications. One example is the withholding of data that counteract accepted ideology, like recent data showing that untreated gender dysphoria does not increase the suicide rate, or that affirmative care does not bolster mental health.

I’ll leave you to read the paper itself and Colin’s analysis below (I’ll quote him a bit), but want to add one part of the paper that’s becoming increasingly commonplace: “author positionality”—statements in which authors reveal aspects of their personal life, including their activities and ideologies. Here’s the positionality statement of the second author from the University of Washington (the first author works at MIT):

Amelia Lee Doğan: I came to this project after its development as a trans person interested in activism and data. My experience include working part-time for a university LGBTQ+ office for several years and researching other activists communities’ data and technical needs. I had no direct contact with any of the interview participants but their words and work truly made me cry at how other trans people are making this world a little better for us. Especially, as a trans young person of color, it was an honor to get to hear our elders talk about how they have fought and continue to fight and care for us.

Stevens’s statement is pretty much the same, except for the crying part. But is it any wonder that authors so deeply dedicated to a specific ideological aim are willing to allow distortion of data to achieve that aim?

On his site Reality’s Last Stand, Colin gives a succinct and, in my view, an accurate summary of the paper and its problems. Click below to read it:

I’ll give a few quotes, but if you like Colin’s analysis and work you should subscribe to his site.

Over the past few decades, universities have churned out a steady stream of papers so detached from reality that they often read like parodies. Many of them have been highlghted right here on Reality’s Last Stand: the infamous “feminist glaciology” paper that sought to “decolonize” ice; the surreal paper where two “hydrosexual” researchers married brine shrimp and made love to a lake; and the deeply disturbing pieces on “queering babies” and questioning childhood sexual innocence. Those were insane. Others—like those calling to “Indigenize” and “decolonize” medicine by rejecting the scientific method—are not just ridiculous, but genuinely dangerous.

Now, a new peer-reviewed article in Big Data & Society breaks new ground by openly arguing that lying with data is not only acceptable but morally required when it comes to transgender issues.

The paper, titled “Trans Data Epistemologies: Transgender Ways of Knowing with Data,” was written by Nikko Stevens, an assistant professor of statistical and data sciences at Smith College, and Amelia Lee Doğan, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington and research affiliate with MIT’s Data + Feminism Lab. What makes this paper truly remarkable is how the authors openly admit that “truth” in their work takes a back seat to politics. “Actionable and useful data for community care,” they write, is “the utmost priority over true, accurate, or verifiable data.”

They are so ideologically blinkered that they’re not even hiding the fact that they’re committing research misconduct. They’re openly celebrating it in a peer-reviewed journal. The very existence of “data activism” as an academic field shows just how thoroughly higher education has been captured by ideology.

. . .The paper presents this approach as a “trans data epistemology,” supposedly a new “way of knowing” based on “trans experiences.” The authors argue that “mainstream Western epistemology”—the normal way of doing science—has historically favored the perspectives of the dominant group—white, cisgender, heterosexual men.” Because there’s “no universal knowledge system,” they claim, “epistemologies based solely on the perspectives of one group are necessarily limited and incomplete.” Every group must therefore have its own truth, and the truth according to marginalized groups trumps all others.

In other words, they believe truth itself depends on identity. Instead of minimizing bias, as real scientists strive to do, these authors maximize it.

Colin goes through the four pillars of the new epistemology, which remind me of the indigenous “ways of knowing” capturing New Zealand. Colin views the new epistemology as “an assault on the scientific method itself, and it erodes public trust in the very institutions built to safeguard truth.”  Note that this assault comes from the left flank of politics.

There’s a lot more, but I’ll just give Colin’s conclusion and, below that, one of my favorite quotes about science.

Colin:

Underlying all of this is the belief that scientific standards are oppressive. The authors proudly conclude that their “trans data epistemology stands apart from hegemonic values about data, in which data is a mimetic representation of reality [and] a way to discern truths about the world through big data insights.” The idea that “represent[ing] reality” with data is “hegemonic” is absurd.

It’s hard to overstate how blatantly this paper rejects the basic principles that make science possible. Principles that have slowly evolved over centuries to reduce bias and uncover truth. That this paper survived the gauntlet of peer-review at Big Data & Society—supposedly a top journal in the field by impact—shows just how far the academic world has fallen.

And Richard Feynman, on the Challenger disaster:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

The only silver lining to this dreadful paper is that hardly anybody will read it, as it’s buried in a rather obscure journal. On the other hand, people need to know stuff like this so they can see how real, objective science is going down the drain, washed away by the shower of ideology. And “regular” people are starting to realize this because some ideological nonsense, like the view that there is a spectrum of biological sex in humans, has made it into the public ear.

Shame on this journal, and shame on the peer reviews who denigrate truth in favor of politics.

The erosion of medical journals

October 28, 2025 • 11:30 am

Of all the papers in the special issue of the Journal of Controversial Ideas on censorship in science, the one below is perhaps the most important, as the censorship being imposed can cause permanent damage to humans. I’ve described this censorship before: it involves papers on or critiques of extreme claims of gender ideologues, especially those touting the benefits of what’s called “affirmative care” (adolescent dysphoria—> doctor on board prescribes puberty blockers almost immediately—> hormones, surgery, and gender transition). The recent history of the field, documented in the first paper below, involves repeated attempts to allow questionable claims to stand in the literature. Two examples of this are the unsupported claim that affirmative care prevents suicide, and the release of the paper by Johanna Olson-Kennedy et al, which was held back because the results (puberty blockers did not improve mental health) were not in line with what author thought gender activists wanted to see.  The paper by Cohn below (click to read), summarizes many of these forms of censorship or distortion.

Here’s the abstract:

The integrity of the gender medicine research literature has been compromised, not only by censorship of correct articles, but also by censorship of critiques of articles with unsupported (for instance exaggerated), misleading or erroneous statements. Many such statements concern the evidence base, which can be evaluated rigorously using a key component of evidence-based medicine, systematic reviews of the evidence. These reviews currently find there is limited to very little confidence that estimates of benefit from (and sometimes harm from) medical gender intervention, that is, puberty blockers, hormones and/or surgeries, are likely to match true outcomes. Several medical societies and articles in medical journals have been claiming otherwise, misrepresenting the evidence base as a whole and/or relying upon unsupported or non-representative individual study findings or conclusions. For example, high likelihood of benefit and low risk of adverse outcomes from medical gender interventions are often claimed, while less invasive alternative treatment options are either omitted or mischaracterized. Other unsupported, erroneous or misleading statements occur when studies minimize or omit mention of significant limitations, or report findings or conclusions not supported by their own data; these are then sometimes quoted by others as well. In addition, correctly reported studies are sometimes misrepresented. Critiques which attempt to rectify such statements are frequently rejected. Some examples are presented here. Such rejections have stifled scientific debate, interfering with the continual scrutiny and cross checks needed to maintain accuracy in the research literature. Currently, erroneous and unsupported statements circulate and repeat between journals and medical society guidelines and statements, misinforming researchers, clinicians, patients and the general public.

If you want a three-page summary of the paper above, which you really should read in toto if you’re interested in gender medicine, read the article below (click headline to read) gives a terse summary.

I can’t summarize the first paper in detail, and you really should read it for yourself. I can, however, give a few quotes from Linehan’s summary on his Substack, which is a bit choppy (quotes indented below). Linehan begins by citing the paper above:

‘Censorship of Essential Debate in Gender Medicine Research’ has the dullest possible title for what it reveals. In yet another example of trans ideology destroying everything it touches, the most prestigious journals in medicine are refusing to publish corrections to papers that contain demonstrably false claims about gender medicine.

The author, J. Cohn, didn’t set out to write about censorship. She tried to correct errors in published papers. When that didn’t work, she described what happened. She found that multiple systematic reviews (the gold standard in evidence-based medicine) have found low or very low-certainty evidence for the benefits of medical gender interventions. This includes puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery. ‘Low certainty’ means there’s limited confidence the estimated effects will match what actually happens to patients.

The Cass Review, published in 2024, found the evidence for paediatric interventions “remarkably weak.” Several other systematic reviews found the same for patients under 21 and under 26.

None have found that these interventions reduce suicide risk.

Meanwhile, major medical journals keep publishing papers claiming the opposite.

Papers in JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Pediatrics have variously claimed that gender-affirming medical interventions are:

  • “Widely recognised as essential, evidence based, and often lifesaving”
  • Known to “clearly improve health outcomes”
  • Associated with “demonstrated health and well-being benefits”
  • Linked to regret rates “less than 1%” or “exceedingly rare”

The regret claim is particularly bold given that the studies cited have major flaws. The often-quoted Bustos review included 27 studies, of which 23 had moderate-to-high risk of bias. All included studies suffered from premature follow-up, significant loss to follow-up, or both.

And one more bit:

Medical guidelines are supposed to work like this: researchers conduct systematic reviews of all available evidence, assess its quality, and make recommendations that match the strength of that evidence. Strong evidence gets strong recommendations. Weak evidence gets weak recommendations or no recommendation at all.

That’s not what happened here.

The American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement recommending gender-affirming care wasn’t based on systematic reviews. A subsequent analysis found its cited references “repeatedly said the very opposite of what AAP attributed to them.”

The Endocrine Society guidelines make strong recommendations based on evidence they themselves rate as low or very low certainty. They don’t explain why.

WPATH commissioned systematic reviews, then interfered with them. After publication, they dropped all but one minimum age recommendation (for phalloplasty) under pressure from the Biden administration and the AAP.

This whole field is rife with a form of advocacy so extreme that researchers not only hesitate to publish results that go against the preferred ideological narrative, but also repeatedly distort studies that criticize affirmative care.

This is not the way science is supposed to be done, but it’s what happens when ideology begins to erode the norms of science. This of course is not new: it’s what happened with the Lysenko affair in Soviet Russia (documented in our paper, Jussim et al.), when ideological distortion (and outright cheating) ultimately killed millions of people.  Nobody’s claiming that kind of toll for gender medicine, but there is still a palpable human cost to sloppy research.

h/t: Joolz

Videos: Dawkins on sex differences; Neil deGrasse Tyson on sport and sex

October 13, 2025 • 9:30 am

The first article in the new anthology The War on Science (compiled, edited, and with an introduction by Lawrence Krauss) is a piece by Richard Dawkins called “Scientific truth stands above human feelings and politics.”  It’s basically a two-part essay on how ideology has distorted science, with the first part being about Trofim Lysenko’s distortion of Russian genetics under Stalin, and the second bit being about sex and gender, concentrating on the biological nature of sex. In the UnHerd interview below, Richard dilates on the part about sex and gender, but concentrating on the evolutionary biology of sex.  As I’ve said, the book has been attacked by miscreants—many of whom hadn’t read it, but damned it nonetheless because some of the authors were deemed politically unpalatable and because the topic was how the left has damaged science. (“We should”, say these miscreants, “have written only about the damage that Trump and his minions have done to science.”)

Dawkins is one of the people who has brought opprobrium down on the book, because, after all, he’s an “old white man”, a member of the most oppressive group at all. But his age, sex, and race are irrelevant to his essay, which is one of the very best in the anthology.  In his characteristically clear and eloquent writing, he explains what he calls the “universal biological definition of sex” (“UBD”): the now-familiar claim that biological sex is based on relative gamete size. This definition leads ineluctably to the view that sex is binary: there are two and only two forms of gametes in a given species. He underlines something that I’ve also emphasized: the UBD is not only ubiquitous, applying in binary form in all animals and vascular plants, but is also explanatory: the sex binary is the only concept of sex that can explain, usually via sexual selection, a number of phenomena that puzzled biologists before Darwin proposed this form of selection in 1871.

In the UnHerd video discussion with Freddie Sayers shown below, Richard runs through 14 of these phenomena, making an airtight case for the utility of the UBD.  He also takes up issues raised by the Miscreants to try to show that sex is a spectrum: the sequential switching of sex by clownfish and wrasses (they’re still male or female), the presence of intersex individuals, whose frequency is very low and no damaging to a binary view, and the fact that male seahorses can get “pregnant,” holding fertilized eggs in a pouch until they hatch (notice I say “male seahorses”, for these individual still produce only small, mobile gametes).

Because advocates of the “spectrum of sex” view are ideologues, who hold their position simply because they think the sex spectrum buttresses transsexual and nonbinary individuals, Richard’s talk here, or his essay in the book, won’t convince these opponents. (By the way, these people never tell us how we can define the sexes given that “sex is complicated.)  But if you’re open minded, have a listen, or better yet, buy the book, as the essay has a lot more than does the interview below. The universal and explanatory advantages of the UBD make it far superior to any other concept of biological sex.

h/t: Luke

In the short (4-minute) clip below from The Rubin Report, astrophysicist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson takes another point of view. Interviewed by Michael Shermer, Tyson gets all worked up on the topic of sports, finding it deeply weird that we split males and females when it comes to athletic competition. Two women, broadcaster Sage Steele and former swimmer Riley Gaines, weigh in on Tyson’s confusion.

Finally, below is the full interview of Tyson by Shermer. It’s on sex and race, and I’ve started it when they begin discussing sex (31:15).  You can see that Tyson apparently thinks from his astrophysical background that nature is structured against binaries, which he sees to consider an argument for the continuum of sex. He seems to deny, in fact, that there’s any value in discussing biological sex, and that gender is what’s important. (Remember Tyson’s famous “today I feel 80% female and 20% male” statement?)  As far as sports is concerned, Tyson suggest dividing sports up in to “hormone categories”, so people compete against others having with similar hormone ratios. (That’s problematic for several reasons, not the least being that people who take hormone supplements, like trans-identified males, may still have a strength advantage over biological women having a similar hormone titer, because the advantage is already there at puberty,  before most takes testosterone).

Then, pressed by Shermer, Tyson says that maybe we should use a combination of body weight and hormone titer. It’s a mess, which becomes simplified if you have three categories: “bioloigcal [natal] female,” “biological [natal] male,” and “other”. Alternatively, you might stipulate that anyone who is not clearly a biological female compete in the men’s class. (That too has problems, like a higher risk of injury for trans-identified females in competitive sports.)

At any rate, this discussion is really an add-on to the Dawkins video above, so listen if you have the time.

Richard Dawkins stirs up things again in the Torygraph

September 27, 2025 • 9:15 am

I have to say this about Richard: he is fearless.  Of course he’s in a position to say what he wants and not lose much, though he is sensitive to erosion of his reputation, but that won’t stop him from speaking out. And one thing he will not apologize for is the claim shown in the Torygraph headline below, a headline guaranteed to raise the hackles of millions of gender activists. (By “women”, of course, he means “biological women”, not people who self-identify as women.)

Click the headline to read; you will go to a free archived version:

The quote comes from the book I discussed recently: the anthology The War on Science that I discussed yesterday. Richard’s contribution, which opens the volume, is particularly good.  We authors have gotten a lot of flak because we should have written about ideological erosion of science by Trump and the Right, instead of about incursions from the Left. We should have left the Left alone, say the blockheads.  So be it.  An excerpt from the Torygraph piece:

The slogan “trans women are women” is scientifically false and harms the rights of women, Richard Dawkins has said.

In a new book, the evolutionary biologist warns that scientific truth must prevail over “personal feelings” and argues that academic institutions must defend facts above emotion.

In The War on Science, Dawkins joins several scientists and philosophers contending that academic freedom and truth in universities was being stifled by diversity, equity and inclusion policies that promoted falsehoods under the banner of social justice.

“I draw the line at the belligerent slogan ‘trans women are women’ because it is scientifically false,” he said. “When taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women.

“It logically entails the right to enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons and so on.

“So powerful has this postmodern counter-factualism become, that newspapers refer to ‘her penis’ as a matter of unremarked routine.”

. . . . “Both politics and personal feelings don’t impinge scientific truths and that needs to be clearly understood. I feel very strongly about the subversion of scientific truth,” he said.

“I think part of what’s happened is the move of academia towards postmodernism, which is pernicious, and probably does account for the current vogue for the nonsense lie that sex is a spectrum.

“I think part of what’s happened is the move of academia towards postmodernism, which is pernicious, and probably does account for the current vogue for the nonsense lie that sex is a spectrum.

. . . . “JK Rowling can look after herself, but you look at the way they hounded Kathleen Stock out of Sussex University, and it’s always women who suffer.”

At London Pride demonstration in 2023, Sarah Jane Barker, previously Alan Barker, told a crowd, “If you see a Terf punch them in the f—— face.”

Dawkins said: “I don’t think I’m unduly guilty of sexist stereotyping if I say such language is more typical of the sex that ‘Sarah Jane’ claims to have left that the other she aspires to join.”

The last statement is both judicious and true. Among trans people, it is largely the trans-identified men who perpetuate hatred and violence.  And that, of course, comes from men being more aggressive and domineering. \

There’s more, including quotes from Sally Satel, but you have the link above.

Carole Hooven in Tablet on binary sex

September 26, 2025 • 9:30 am

Dr. Hooven (“Carole” to me) has a new piece in Tablet (click headline below to read for free) explaining why all sensible biologists see sex as a binary defined by two (and only two) types of gametes. Perhaps you’ll already be familiar with some of her arguments in the article below (click to read), as I’ve written extensively on the topic. But she adds some good angles in the piece, which she ties together by reporting how she was forced to leave Harvard because her department couldn’t abide her teaching that sex was binary (see her story here).

The impetus for the Tablet piece begins with Agustín Fuentes’s recent book Sex is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary, a book that is ideologically rather than scientifically based (see my own short review here and another critical review here). It’s simply a bad and misleading book. And, like so many other people denying the binary nature of sex, Fuentes is motivated not by any new scientific developments effacing the binary, by rather by ideology: if he and others are able to say biological sex is not a binary but a spectrum, it supposedly gives succor to those who don’t identify themselves as “male” or “female”. This motivation becomes clear in Fuentes’s last chapter. (Please note that the concept of “transsexual” implicitly assumes a sex binary, as there are only two ways to transition.)

Carole was inspired to write her piece, however, by a positive review of Fuentes’s book in Lancet, written by Sarah Richardson—a Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard, as well as director of the Harvard GenderSci Lab. She was a colleague of Hooven but they have clearly parted intellectual ways. (See my take on Richardson’s piece here,). Richardson’s review, also attacking the binary, is not only ideological, but also mean-spirited, attacking the motives of those who tout the sex binary. (See below.) My report on Richardson’s misguided piece gives a screenshot of her review as well as some of Carole’s tweets that gave rise to her Tablet piece.

As Carole says in her new piece, Richardson prefers to attack the binary people (we can call ourselves “anisogamists”) on ideological rather than scientific grounds.  We are, Richardson avers, motivated by a desire to erase trans and nonbinary people. That is dumb; none of us want to do that!

A quote from Hooven in Tablet:

Richardson not only thinks the “gametic” definition of sex is wrong; she also insists that its adherents have sinister political motives:

Although the gametic definition makes reference to biological systems, it is sophistry, not science. Those who promote this definition favour the assertion that sex inheres in gamete (sperm and egg) production because, in part, it facilitates their political aims by fuelling unhinged panic in some quarters about transgender threats to traditional gender roles. … Like scientific bigots of yore … the recent favour bestowed on [this] definition of sex … appeals selectively to science to naturalise and rationalise inequality and exclusion.

Richardson goes on to praise Fuentes for recognizing scientists’ “responsibility to respond to harmful deployments of inaccurate, overly simplistic, and reductionist science by those attempting to naturalise and depoliticise their hateful views.”

This is intellectually dishonest in the sense that many anisogamists, including me, favor trans rights (though they are limited in a few respects, involving things like sports participation and prisons). It’s even more dishonest in that previously Richardson herself had promoted the sex binary. To wit: a tweet from philosopher Tomás Bogrdus, followed by the first of four critical tweets by Hooven:

Since there have been no important advances in sex concepts based on science in the last 12 years, we can hypothesize that Richardson changed her views on the binary to conform to the Zeitgeist: in this case to the rapid increase of people who see themselves as nonbinary, and whose self-identification must be considered sacred.

Now Carole is extremely nice and her Tablet piece, while pointing out the misguided rancor of Richardson, is itself perfectly polite, sticking to the facts.  One thing I like about it is how she introduces the binary, not simply by asserting the universality of only one distinction between males and females (gamete type) or of the utility of a binary concept (see Dawkins’s piece here for that), but through the act of sexual reproduction itself. This then naturally segues into the gamete binary. The bolding in Carole’s excerpt below is mine.

The question of how to define sex is not a new one, but the answer has taken on new urgency, given its implications for areas such as law, public safety, healthcare and sports. Despite the urgency, the correct answer has been understood since the late 19th century.

It might be helpful to think about the act of sex, perhaps in nonhuman species like chickadees or chacma Baboons. In sexually reproducing organisms (the overwhelming majority of animal species), while sex often satisfies a deep drive and is generally enjoyable, enjoyment is not the primary purpose of sex; it is instead a strong motivator, natural selection’s solution to get animals to engage in an often-risky behavior that requires a significant expenditure of energy. The primary purpose of sex is to produce offspring that combine the genetic material of their parents, so that those offspring can go on to pass on their DNA to future generations, and so on.

Moreover, sexual reproduction in animals can only occur when two distinct types of gametes (specialized sex cells containing DNA) fuse: the small mobile ones (sperm) and the large immobile ones (eggs). We call animals that produce sperm “male” and those that produce eggs “female.” That’s about it. The bottom line is that there are two gamete types and thus two sexes. There are no other sexes, no other reproductive categories.

Among mainstream evolutionary biologists, there is simply no disagreement on these basic points: The “gametic view” is the established orthodoxy of our field. It applies across sexually reproducing animals and accommodates all the complexity and variation within the sexes. It holds in nonreproductively viable animals—like postmenopausal me—that don’t produce gametes; it holds in male seahorses that get pregnant; in clownfish who change from male to female (first producing sperm and then eggs); in females who identify as male (trans men) and take male levels of testosterone and have a deep voice and a thick, bushy beard.

There are no additional or intermediate gametes. There are only sperm and eggs. Therefore, there are only two sexes, even if some people (or other animals) don’t fit obviously or neatly into one sex or the other. Traits associated with sex—like chromosomes, hormones, brain, feelings, or behavior—are not binary; nor do they define sex. However, there are two, and only two, sexes.

Hooven herself segues into the implications for science education, and mentions Harvard’s “kick in the pants” by the Trump Administration:

What happens on campus and in scientific journals carries tremendous influence beyond the academy. So when those institutions promote this kind of pseudo-debate and name-calling over consensus science, knowledge is subordinated to political goals. When a prestigious university signals that a scientifically grounded view is socially radioactive, that framing leaks into the wider culture—into media, politics, and policy. Soon, an orthodox fact becomes unsayable in polite company, making it harder to have good-faith public debates and contributing to political extremism.

. . . Harvard has made some meaningful and positive changes that are designed to increase viewpoint diversity, including the abolition of mandatory DEI statements in hiring and the adoption of an institutional neutrality policy, which prohibits the administration (from department chairs to the president) from issuing public statements on issues not directly relevant to the core mission of the university. More recently, under pressure from the federal government, DEI offices have been rebranded, statements about the importance of viewpoint diversity have been issued, and committees established to investigate and report on other problems with campus culture (most concerning bias on campus in the wake of Oct. 7). While these changes are positive, they should not have been necessary, nor should extreme external duress have been required to prompt them.

It’s unfortunate that Harvard’s kick in the pants had to come from the federal government. The punishments levied, including a freeze on more than $2 billion of research grants, may be illegal and vastly out of proportion and will likely do more harm than good. So while Harvard is right to fight back, it would be wrong not to use this as an opportunity to make substantive changes.

Apparently Tablet approached Carole to turn her Twitter posts into this article.

You can read the rest for yourself, but she told me to pay special attention to the video in the second link below. I’ve put the video below to save your having to click (the link is in a discussion of Richardson’s position at Harvard):

[Richardson] is also the head of Harvard’s GenderSci Lab, whose work aims to “counter bias and hype in sex difference research, elevate the importance of context, contingency, and variation in the study of gender and sex in biology … and engage the implications of biological claims about gender and sexual diversity for law and public policy relevant to the lives of gender and sexual minorities.“

The YouTube notes on the video describe it this way (you can read more about Lett here):

Sarah Richardson, PhD, Director of the GenderSci Lab at Harvard University and Elle Lett, PhD, discuss what there is to be hopeful about in the science of gender and science in early 2025 at an Intersectionality Research Salon.

Note that Lett praises Richardson for helping “craft the world we want to see. . . through science.”  And Richardson makes no bones about using her work to put out “messages” that, to me, are apparently “progressive” messages. One senses not a motivation to seek the truth, but to buttress those seen as oppressed.

You can of course use science to better the world in a direction that you want. Innovations in medicine, like mRNA vaccines, is one example. But what you can’t do, and what Richardson and Fuentes are trying to do, is to bend science out of shape, pretending that it conforms to and buttresses a particular ideology. (This is what I call “the reverse naturalistic fallacy”.)

Not only do Fuentes and Richardson twist the science, but their harmful activities extend to mischaracterizing their opponents as bigoted transphobes. That, they must surely know, is wrong.  But when you can’t attack your opponents’ facts, you can always attack their motives.

Now it hasn’t escaped my notice that I myself characterize Richardson’s and Fuentes’s motives, but they’ve been pretty transparent about them. And besides, we have the facts on our side, facts I’ve adduced many times. Sex is binary.