Biologist wrongly demonized by Harvard University

 By Mathew Goldstein

Carole Hooven was a lecturer in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. She’s also the author of the popular book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. Her story, which she describes in her article, Why I left Harvard, is one of multiple instances of various public institutions systematically promoting an intolerant, narrow, censorious, overly politicized, opinion conforming demanding, climate. In this particular example, personal attacks were deployed against Hooven by various individuals who had the authority to speak on behalf of Harvard. 

The goal of these attacks is to indiscriminately suppress any conclusion, regardless of how epistemologically valid that conclusion is, that conflicts with conclusions promoted under the misleading banner of “DEI”. Conflicting conclusions that are epistemological valid pose a bigger threat to critical social justice ideology by virtue of being epistemological valid, thus provoking a stronger counter reaction. Critical social justice promotes a fundamentally illiberal framework that prioritizes the ideology over epistemological validity and over merit.

What Hooven says that makes her a target of vitriol is absolutely true: there are just two biological sexes, defined by whether a body is set up to produce large, immobile gametes (females) or small mobile gametes (males). People who are hermaphrodites are almost invariably sterile, and they, along with intersex individuals, comprise about 0.018% of the population. There are no intermediate gametes and thus there is no third sex across the entire animal and plant kingdoms. The English language word that most accurately characterizes this probability distribution is “binary”. This is not a matter of controversy among sensible biologists. 

In contrast, the sociocultural and mental construct known as “gender” is more of a continuum. The gender probability distribution is difficult to characterize or draw because different people self-identify with many different genders that sometimes may change year to year or even day to day. Most biological males and females match their gender with their biological sex so that the probability distribution resembles a bimodal distribution.

Some of the innocent people being tarred this way, such as Carole Hooven, are secular liberals. Some of the people demonizing innocent people are also secular liberals. The problem is not who is targeting who, although it needs to be said that the intramural aspect of this conflict between liberals is not good for liberalism. The problem is the wielding of a simplistic, dubious, and narrow conception of “social justice” with a religiously ideological and self-righteously intolerant zeal as a cudgel to excuse an ugly demonization of innocent people for the purposes of punishing those who do not self-censor and intimidating other people into selective silence. DEI initiatives can be valuable insofar as they overcome obstacles that were created from bigoted discrimination. But insofar as DEI initiatives instead focus on denigrating and abandoning merit as a tactic to promote equality of outcomes, a.k.a. equity, promoting identity based reverse discrimination, a.k.a. antiracism, defining individuals as oppressors or oppressed by their group memberships,  a.k.a. intersectionality, and the like, while also insisting that everyone pledge allegiance to, and endorse, these conclusions to qualify for admission or employment, it becomes more of a problem than an asset.

To attempt to justify this the left cites the right. The left and right are both committed to this tactic of playing off of each. They both adopt unreasonable ideology driven positions and then claim anyone who does not adopt the same unreasonable position is abetting the other side. This is a fallacious and cynical game of burdening innocent reasonable people with responsibility for the unreasonableness of others that should be rejected. So to avoid any misunderstanding, those of us who say biological sex has a binary probability distribution will also say that transgender medical technology is justified because there is evidence that it benefits some people and therefore should be legal (with restrictions when needed to reduce the risk of harm, particularly for young people). Equal opportunity is a bedrock ethical principle (unlike equality of outcome). Immutable traits that define who we are should not be grounds for denying equality of opportunity. 

Male puberty alters sports related physical capabilities, to some extent irreversibly, and this has genuine, practical implications for sports that are sex segregated. It is unfair to female athletes to allow transgender women to participate wholesale in female segregated sports. Transgender women with sexually functionally penises pose a potential real world risk to other women in some contexts (for example, shared prison cells). Insofar as the left refuses to acknowledge this, the left is wrong. Sometimes the people who are the most insane are on the left.

Two related videos and related link FIRE sues to stop California from forcing professors to teach DEI (I agree with the plaintiffs and hope they win).