Harvard Lecturer Attacked for Saying There Are Two Sexes
“To ignore or downplay the reality of sex and sex-based differences is to perversely handicap our understanding and our ability to increase human health and thriving,” Harvard lecturer Carole Hooven said in a recent interview.
Dr. Carole Hooven is a lecturer who teaches about hormones and the differences between the two sexes at Harvard, where she’s worked since 2006.
According to her website, Hooven “has received numerous teaching awards, and her Hormones and Behavior class was named one of the Harvard Crimson’s “top ten tried and true.” In addition to that, she recently released a book titled “Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us,” which she’s been promoting in various interviews and podcasts.
Last week, Hooven was quoted in a piece written by podcaster Katie Herzog on how professors were increasingly being called on to apologize for using the “he” and “she” pronouns as well as gendered terms like and “breastfeed” and “pregnant woman” – sometimes by students who allegedly burst into tears upon hearing the terms.
Hooven, Herzog noted, was bothered a great deal by such stories. Here’s what Hooven told her:
“Today’s students will go on to hold professional positions that give them a great deal of power over others’ bodies and minds. These young people are our future doctors, educators, researchers, statisticians, psychologists. To ignore or downplay the reality of sex and sex-based differences is to perversely handicap our understanding and our ability to increase human health and thriving.”
Hooven’s views have earned her some attention from former NY Times opinion writer Bari Weiss, who has been an increasingly outspoken voice in the transgender rights debate. She interviewed Hooven for her Thursday podcast, where they talked about her new book:
Today's episode of @thehonestlypod is about the totally uncontroversial subject of biological sex + the power of T.
If you don't know Carole Hooven (@hoovlet) yet, you're in for a treat: https://t.co/ck9rCmcS83— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) July 29, 2021
Hooven also appeared on Fox News last week where she was asked to discuss her quote in Herzog’s article as well as to expand on her opinion. Hooven told host Brian Kilmeade that “the facts are that there are in fact two sexes — there are male and female — and those sexes are designated by the kind of gametes we produce.” She also talked about how it absolutely should be okay to use the gendered terms and pronouns that were triggering college students.
Watch:
Pleased to have appeared on @foxandfriends to talk about the importance of resisting the pressure to distort the science of sex. @kittypurrzog @bariweiss https://t.co/EThTIKf5Lk
— Carole Hooven (@hoovlet) July 29, 2021
Her appearance on Fox News greatly upset a Harvard colleague of hers named Laura Simone Lewis, who describes herself as the “Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force” for the human evolutionary biology department they both work in. After boasting of her creds, Lewis went on a mini-rant on Twitter talking about how offensive and “transphobic” Hooven’s comments, which were based on science, supposedly were:
As the Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force for my dept @HarvardHEB, I am appalled and frustrated by the transphobic and harmful remarks made by a member of my dept in this interview with Fox and Friends: https://t.co/kiBwkaqLGM#medtwitter
— Laura Simone Lewis (@LauraSimoneLew) July 30, 2021
Inclusive language like “pregnant people” demonstrates respect for EVERYONE who has the ability to get pregnant, not just cis women. It is vital to teach med students gender inclusive language, as they will certainly interact with people that identify outside the gender binary
— Laura Simone Lewis (@LauraSimoneLew) July 30, 2021
Current HEB scholars & those considering joining us: please know there are many of us in the dept who honor & celebrate everyone across/outside the gender spectrum. We clearly have so much more work to do, but we are trying hard to make our dept a better/safer place for all🏳️⚧️💜
— Laura Simone Lewis (@LauraSimoneLew) July 30, 2021
Hooven got wind of Lewis’ tweets and tried to start a dialogue with her:
I appreciate your concerns. Could you let me (and the Twitterverse) know exactly what I said that you consider transphobic or harmful to undergrads? I think you know that I care deeply about all of my students, and I also care about science. How about a discussion? @HarvardHEB https://t.co/29TkGD4vM2
— Carole Hooven (@hoovlet) July 30, 2021
While Lewis did agree to have an in-person discussion with Hooven, she also proceeded to play the victim card by retweeting tweets like this one:
Also, it’s absolutely awful for her to quote tweet this, fully knowing her followers would back her up by attacking Laura (a grad student!), and then disengage saying, “oh let’s take this offline.” If you actually care about student wellbeing you *do not* do this.
— Heather Dingwall (@dingwallaby) July 30, 2021
In addition to that, Lewis tried to diminish Hooven’s accomplishments and credibility on the subject by posting an “important note” on how she was “not tenured” and was a lecturer, not a professor:
Thank you so much for your support, i wholeheartdedly agree. But an important note: she’s not tenured. She’s not even a professor. She’s a lecturer in our dept….
— Laura Simone Lewis (@LauraSimoneLew) July 31, 2021
If we’re going to play the “titles” = “credibility” game here, I would say “lecturer” is quite a few steps above “PhD candidate,” which is what’s listed on Lewis’ Harvard bio, just for the record.
In any event, the good news here is that they’ve agreed to have a one on one conversation on the issue. While minds are unlikely to be changed, this development is much better than how these things usually turn out when someone is put on blast for being unafraid to share views that don’t line up perfectly with the left-wing dogma that is so pervasive in higher ed institutions across America.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
“upset a Harvard colleague of hers named Laura Simone Lewis, who describes herself as the “Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force” for the human evolutionary biology department they both work in”
Lewis is analogous to a “political commissar.” These were people which the Soviet system embedded into all institutions, esp. the military, to make sure that the “correct” thinking took place.
“Everything in the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state.”
Yet people like Lewis call us the fascists.
Good analogy. For an example see Ivan Putin, character from Clancy’s Hunt for Red October,
https://jackryan.fandom.com/wiki/Ivan_Putin
“Putin was a political officer whose job it was to ensure that individuals in the military remained loyal to the Soviet Union [substitute “leftist thinking”]. After the new Typhon class nuclear missile submarine Red October was built, Putin was assigned to the ship as its political officer.
“One of his hobbies was snooping though other people’s quarters for anything that might be considered subversive.”
Yes, but the Soviets at least had the good sense to make the political commissar subordinate to the commanding officer. They tried a dual chain of command but scrapped it because it was unwieldy in a rapidly developing tactical situation. Commanders who knew that their every decision was going to be evaluated for ideological purity also tended to be timid because they didn’t want to end up in a gulag for making the correct or at least effective operational decision.
Fortunately for us, the Chinese haven’t learned this lesson.
https://news.usni.org/2020/07/03/political-commissars-on-chinese-warships-play-crucial-role-in-interactions-with-foreign-vessels
“…Zi Yang, co-author of “Party on the Bridge: Political Commissars in the Chinese Navy,” said President Xi Jin-ping “has tipped the balance a little more to the commissar” over the military commander in operations of a submarine, surface vessel or aircraft squadron to ensure adherence to party loyalty across the military.
One way of ensuring that shift is to ensure that political commissars are trained and skilled in the operations of the class of vessel or aircraft squadron they are assigned to. They “learn how to take command,” as one had to do during a confrontation with the Vietnamese after the ship’s commander fell ill.
What is often overlooked in examining Chinese military operations and its strategy is Xi’s emphasis on party-building during day-to-day operations.
“It’s time to understand” how decisions are made in the dual-command Chinese military structure. A commander and a commissar are aboard every vessel, Zi said. Benson added, “command and control are integrated as one; there is shared authority.”
Benson said the commander and the commissar have “distinct responsibilities” when it comes to serving aboard a warship. Among the commissar’s duties are personnel, including evaluating the commander, maintaining military and political discipline, checking on morale, conducting psychological operations and serving as a co-equal with the skipper.
Decisions are reached through an on-board party committee with at least two other members participating.
In short, the committee “decides to confront or not” or “whether to surface of not” for submarines underwater, Zi said, but “they first try to sort out matters in a personal manner.” Benson added, “it’s all about managing risk, and the commissar is in on that.”
This system can reduce unnecessary errors in operations, but it also is time-consuming in a rapidly developing emergency. Benson said “it’s up to the military commander to execute the military part of the operation.”
But in the end, even after handling an emergency, Zi said the commander’s decisions would be evaluated by the commissar…”
Unfortunately, it won’t be enough to offset our own USN’s ingrained dysfunction.
https://lawliberty.org/wokeness-at-noon/
But here’s a question for those of you who may have fallen for the CRT mongers’ argument that banning CRT from the classroom violates teachers’ first amendment rights to teach what they want (I’m looking at you, Milhouse). This is argument is laughable at the K-12 level.
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/does-academic-freedom-shield-teachers-as-states-take-aim-at-critical-race-theory/2021/06
But arguably at the university/college level Laura Simone Lewis has the right to teach CRT. A theory that teaches no one else has the right to commit the heresies of “wrongspeak” and “crimethink” and that those are punishable offenses (seriously; “misgendering is a crime).
This, BTW, is another reason I enjoy watching #BLM go after Sen. Whitehouse (Dumb@$$-RI). While #BLM are scouring the earth looking for heretics who deviate from their religious orthodoxy on race, Sen. Whitehouse is doing exactly the same on the religious doctrine of climate change.
https://www.independentsentinel.com/senator-whitehouse-wants-global-warming-deniers-in-prison/
.
Then they’re smarter than the IDF, where the CO is subordinate to his legal “advisor”, just as each minister and the government as a whole are subordinate to their “legal advisors”.
Where? You don’t go on to ask any questions.
Who has claimed that K-12 teachers, when engaged in teaching on behalf of the state, have such a right?
The fundamental difference between primary and secondary teachers and tertiary teachers is that primary and secondary school students naturally presume that their teacher is speaking for the school; therefore they must speak only what the school tells them to. Tertiary students are presumed to be mature enough to understand that teachers are speaking only for themselves, and can therefore the teachers may say whatever they like.
I thought the question was obvious. Can a professor assert a First Amendment right to teach a theory (specifically CRT) that espouses the tenet that there is no such thing as a First Amendment right to free speech? When a professor asserts a First Amendment right to teach CRT, they are asserting a First Amendment right to compel speech. Compelled speech has up until now been considered a violation of the First Amendment.
After all, if colleges and universities require students to take courses in CRT they will not pass the course unless they regurgitate all the obvious lies that CRT is based upon.
If that was your question, it’s far from obvious. And the answer, of course, is yes, a professor has the right to teach any damn foolish thing ze wants to. At a government institution the first amendment protects it, and at a private institution academic freedom does the same job.
XX, XY find me anything else in nature, not in your empty skull.
You do get some weird stuff out there that isn’t straight xx or yy for sex. Even in humans. But why in the world would we remake society for a teeny tiny group?
It is a mix and match of just two…x and y. Miss an x and go XO and you get Turners. Go XXY and you get Klinefelter’s…but still just X and Y. Nature can be harsh to those that live in a make believe world. Psychiatric issues may originate in genetics but genetics does not originate for psychiatrics.
There are XY females.
A narrow distribution correlated with genes.
Genetic anomalies that would be weeded out over time due to being unable to reproduce.
Let’s not fuck about here. The fact is males are males and females are females but if you fuck about and let males compete as females then the end result is that fulla I’m the weightlifting out competing women so they can no longer compete at the highest level.
Fewer than 100 reported cases with an estimated incidence of 1/100,000, aka Swyer’s syndrome. Non-functional “streak” gonads that have to be removed because of increased incidence of malignant transformation. Medical treatment is hormone replacement or puberty won’t happen.
They’re black swans. While the battle doesn’t always go to the strong nor the race to the swift, it’s how you bet.
Well, there is XY-mentally ill, and XX-mentally ill.
So really, we have four.
From those who believe in ” science “
I had to laugh when the other day Pelosi said, “we believe in SCIENCE, SCIENCE, SCIENCE” when justifying her new mask mandate in the House chamber.
If only it were funny.
She’s a scary psychopath. And she’s just getting rolling. She has designs on the White House, by way of dying Biden and homewrecker Harris.
We conservatives may not be right about every issue – but the other side thinks men can have babies. Case closed.
Mentally ill people believe men can have babies. So their mental health cases are open.
The fact that this emanates from an erstwhile Institution of higher learning such as Harvard says it all.
The inmates are running the asylum.
If you have children you must take them out of government schools now!
Home school of private school. The Obama’s “village” desires to raise your child their way and pollute your child’s mind and remove you from the equation…
The rarefied air in ivory towers and other privileged spaces is a first-order forcing of special, peculiar, and divergent consciousness, beliefs, and behaviors. Many will enter. Few will leave intact, and it does spread through indoctrination and force.
Don’t discount Harvard’s amazing success it is real mission: indoctrinate the nation into slavery.
They’re doing a great job of it.
You underestimate your enemies to your own detriment.
“When we started this country, we were not a capitalist nation.”
-Alexandra Cortez
“Demonic powers are in no way impressed by our intellect or other abilities. What impresses them is the strength of the Spirit of God and the weapons he provides. And these have divine power to destroy the works of the devil and cause us to stand firm in the evil day (2 Corinthians 10:4; 1 John 3:8; Ephesians 6:13).” “And God wants us to stand our ground and not yield an inch. More than that, God wants us to take back ground that Satan has seized and free others he has enslaved through fear (Hebrews 2:14–15). “
Commandment number 11 has now replaced all the original 10. This commandment is “Thou Shalt Not Speak The Truth.”
“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Orwell
Is there any college left that isn’t a joke?
Yes there is. It is listed in the guiness book of world records page 1611. It’s the page right after grizzly bear records.
Lots of grizzly bear records, but, I’m sad to report none ever went platinum. Never even made to the Billboard charts.
Grr…
Love your sense of humor.
It’s what helps Keene going in these unpredictable times. I also enjoy coming out with stuff like this in person. My appearance does not suggest any sense of humor, much less a nutty one.
You just do it for the free beers.
In the Chernobyl documentary, it was the political officers that demanded disastrous lies and policy. I presumed the documentary was at least truthful to the point that such people existed. We know the policies did.
Women have been short-changed by the medical profession for many decades. For example, drugs, including dosing regimens, would be tested in men and dosages calculated based on the physiological responses of men. Women were simply assumed to be small men. This works for some things, and it does keep women of child-bearing age out of a lot of medical experiments. However, the ripple effects of the female endocrine system are real, and sometimes they are important.
The current demand to add men to the women’s classification will do more to erase and disadvantage real information about women that the simple ignorance of past decades. Shame on these pernicious bureaucrats, who offer nothing of value.
‘Attacking a graduate Student’….you mean an adult who is legally able to sign a contract, give consent for medical procedures, join the military, sign a mortgage, purchase a car, lease an apartment ECT?
Are we to infer that those without PHD are not true adults, should be barred from the grown up table and need to be cloistered and protected from the real adults?
Even those with PhDs are not true adults – mentally, anyway.
Some for sure. My point was the application of academic rank outside the institution. Here we have people arguing that the level of someone’s academic credential is relevant to a general debate on Twitter.
The inference is that only those with PhD have merit or power and those without must be protected and ignored.
IOW the credentialed elite are staking their claim to generalized power/status outside their academic field.
There is the real world and there is pretend. They exist side by side. You have to be able to switch back and forth between the two with lightning speed and if you are a nanosecond too slow you will get hammered. And all the while you have to keep talking and acting like nothing is going on. Some people are really good at it.
Read the paragraph on doublethink in 1984. Nothing is new.
Doublethink gives me a headache.
The idea is to give the doublethinker-proponents a headache. A big one.
This is incredible! Liberals and reality are complete strangers!
Liberalism is an ideology of divergence that is typically generational, tribal, sectarian, and politically congruent or expedient, which is mischaracterized in principle and practice as tolerant or open-minded. Progressivism is an ideology of unqualified monotonic change: one step forward, two steps backward. Conservativism is an ideology of moderation. Principles matter.
Genderphobia.
Sex is male and female. Gender is sex-correlated physical and mental (e.g. sexual orientation) attributes. Trans refers to a state (e.g. homosexual) or process (e..g neo) of divergence from normal [distribution]. So, normalize (e.g. lions, lionesses, and the cubs playing in gay revelry), tolerate (i.e. majority of behaviors that have no redeeming value to society and humanity), or reject (e.g. reproductive rites)?
From Jew privilege to White privilege, to the baby “burden”, diversity [dogma] (i.e. color or class-based judgment) and inequity under a Rainbow banner of inclusive exclusion or political congruence (“=”).
Can they abort the baby, cannibalize her profitable parts, sequester her carbon pollutants, and have her, too? Lose your Pro-Choice religion that denies women and men’s dignity and agency, and reduce human life to a property, a wicked solution.
“From Jew privilege to White privilege, to the baby “burden””
Speaking of babies, they still have a lot of bath water but not a baby to be seen anywhere.
Yes, a tepid bath in which both feminists and masculinists indulge their narcissistic ambitions.
This little troll is not her colleague. She’s a nobody who at least has someone paying tuition there. She just sought an opportunity to grab a crappy diversity title and thinks it entitles her to power over others. This is such a consistently disgusting trend among the woke propagandists.
“Two great sexes animate the world” – Milton
Boy chases girl chases boy, then comes baby. #MeToo
In the animal kingdom, a pride parade: lions, lionesses, and their [unPlanned] cubs playing in gay revelry.
I’m so old, I remember when “happy and gay” was redundant.
I remember when I used to don my gay apparel.
Fa la la la la, la la la la
“Gay” can still mean “happy”. And I’d bet you are not old enough to remember a time when it didn’t also mean “homosexual”; that usage dates back to the 1930s. You’re certainly not old enough to remember a time before it meant “sexually loose”; that goes back to the late 19th century, and was still in use in 1930.
I’m old enough to remember when Milhouse was a person. Now it’s a gay little windmill.
But there *are* two. And only two.
Thousands of years from now when they dig up our remains to make room for public housing to house the last migrants from Mexico they will identify the skeletons simply as male or female. All graveyards and cemeteries will be relocated to Mexico as no one will be living there.
But there are three genders: MR, MS, and MI (mentally ill)
MI is also Michigan… wait a minute…
That’s why they’re called michiganers…
.
Intersex people can’t be pregnant.
“Gender nonconforming people”, by definition, have a specific gender, either male or female, to which they don’t conform.
If they don’t like their biological gender, then we should refer to them as IT.
“These young people are our future doctors, educators, researchers, statisticians, psychologists”
God help America.
God will help America when America helps itself:
“And God wants us to stand our ground and not yield an inch. More than that, God wants us to take back ground that Satan has seized and free others he has enslaved through fear (Hebrews 2:14–15). “
We did it with electing Trump. Keep it going.
I am tired of the sinful immoral queer and transvestites fixations agenda being pushed on people. It is neither natural nor normal. Queer people do not push forth the species, and that is failure in the natural world. We have been forced to accept it as normal. We have it pushed on us every day. If it’s so natural and normal, why is it news? If they want to be queer or a transvestite fixation then fine it’s not my place to judge. I don’t like how I should be forced to accept something I don’t believe in. Then act like something is wrong with me for not accepting it. But when these queers start attacking what I believe and use the power of government and media to shut me down and marginalize what I believe, they cross the line! They then become combatants and will be treated as such. The PC culture be damned!
Great, so LGBT people have the right to use any bathroom they want, but non-LGBT people don’t have the right to privacy or to use a bathroom designated for their gender. Yeah, that is not hypocritical or anything…
There is no provision for “its” in the Constitution! You are who you are at birth. Stop this insane madness and stay with gender specific as identified at birth! There are only two sexes with specific and different chromosomes!
The problem is that the sane people have been labeled insane and the insane are labeled sane. Whatever something is called today, most likely the opposite is true.
Scientifically, there are, have been and always will be, only two sexes – man and woman. And sex is an immutable biological fact – if a person is born one sex, they will remain that sex until they die, regardless of how much they ignore the fact, try to live as if they aren’t, or medically mutilate their bodies and assault their body chemistry. Once XX or XY, it is forever.
It is stupid, false and scientifically dishonest to claim otherwise.
True, there are genetic anomalies and mistakes where a very, very small percentage of people are born NOT either XX or XY, but they are not the subject of the issue.
Anomalies, yes. The transgender spectrum (e.g. homosexual) does not seem to be a progressive condition. As individuals, there is no cause for concern. As couplets, they follow their own choices. However, there is no cause to normalize behaviors and choices that have no redeeming value to humanity or society. Similarly, other than the socially liberal behaviors, known to be sources of pathogenic blooms and other collateral damage, there is not cause to reject them, and, other than some politically congruent handmade tales, and a few individuals observing and reacting to a gender dissonance (e.g. feminine males, masculine females), they weren’t. Trans-social (e.g. cross-dressers) males, not withstanding.
Perhaps we can celebrate with a pride parade: lions, lionesses, and their [unPlanned] cubs playing in gay revelry.
Can one still note that dogs come in male and female?
What about chickens and other livestock: is a bull a cow if it thinks it is? The nation’s farmers are waiting for the answer to this vital question!
(Yes, I know: the ‘correct’ answer is: why are you still eating meat, eggs and milk?)
Is the line truly that even though most other animals on this planet come in two sexes, humans are unique because we have so many more?
Pi can’t compete with the ever growing LGBTQ+++
Re-reading my comment, I burst into uncontrollable tears at the sight of the word “chicks.”
Sniff.
What I meant to write here was your irrationality is transcendent. +++
“Diversity and Inclusion Task Force”–How much money could a college or university save if it ditched such a thing? Bur–
Men can become women.
Men can become pregnant.
Women can become men.
Tearing up another man’s rectum and getting fecal residue into his bloodstream is LOVE!
Dizzie Lizzie Big-Chief-Pimple-on-Her-Tongue Warren is an Indian.
Pigs can fly.
The only one of these statements that is ture is that pigs can fly: you can put a pig on an airplane.
I was going to say she is wrong: (1) Masculine, (2) Feminine, and (3) Neuter, but Neuter is what you get when you remove sexual organs to try and change sex and technically, Neuter is sexless.
Ofgodssake. People don’t HAVE “genders”. And if you can breastfeed, ipso
facto that means that you are female (that’s a “sex”, not a “gender”).
THINGS have genders. There are THREE genders: masculine, feminine and neuter (male-like, female-like, and neutral.)
Save for some plants, lower-order animals, and very rare birth defectives, living beings that reproduce are male or female.
It is impossible for anyone to turn a man into a women or a women into a man. All doctors can to is create a better disguise for trans people.
Trans people refuse to recognize reality and are by definition mentally I’ll. Instead of pandering to trans people with surgery we should find a cure for their mental illness.
I wonder if there is a sharp limit. With no definition, maybe there are 128 fashions of chicks and chaps. 256?
Then the intersections of 256 reduces to a single individual, 512 to, well, if there’s 1, there’s only one.
That majority of one we hear about.
Re-reading my comment, I burst into uncontrollable tears at the sight of the word “chicks.”
Sniff.