Carole Hooven, author of The Story of Testosterone (2021), was living the dream as a mainstream evolutionary biologist. Not only did she lecture at Harvard but, before starting her doctorate in 1999, she spent eight months in Uganda, researching “sex differences in the behavior of wild chimpanzees.”

The core belief of her branch of higher ed is that everything human can be reduced to animal impulses. And she certainly wasn’t the one to challenge it.

Yet the Cancel Culture mob came for her anyway. Hooven sums what happened in her article on the affair at Tablet last month:

I did not censor my views about evolutionary biology in teaching, writing (particularly my book T: The Story of Testosterone) or public speaking. However, stating that there are two sexes on Fox & Friends in 2021 evidently crossed a line. Shortly after that, I was made so uncomfortable on campus and in my department that I felt I had no choice but to leave the job I loved. “There Are Only Two Gametes,” September 24, 2025

She now works as an unpaid assistant in cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s lab.

What happened?

The goalposts moved. And Hooven did not.

Her discipline’s core belief — however otherwise false and limiting — depends, as do all beliefs, on accepting an underlying physical reality.

But the academy has gone to war against reality in this area. A headline in the Washington Post sums up their new position: “Trump says there are only two sexes. Experts and science say it’s not binary.” Somehow associating those two gametes with Donald Trump annihilates the sex binary reality for humans.

Scoff if you want. But even Hooven’s own boss, the world famous Steven Pinker, got Cancelled. The new elite are quite clear: Reality must bend; they don’t.

Hooven was prompted to write the Tablet article by an unexpectedly witchy assessment of her approach at The Lancet by a woman with whom she thought she had a good working relationship:

Although Professor Richardson and I profoundly disagree about the nature of sex, I once invited her to give a guest lecture in my class, and we’ve had many cordial interactions over the years. So I was surprised by what she wrote in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. I was not surprised that Richardson lavished praise on the new book Sex Is a Spectrum, by Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes. However, I was taken aback at her attack on the character and motives of those who hold that sex is binary and that organisms are classified as male or female depending on their capacity to produce, respectively, sperm or eggs.

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

But perhaps Hooven should not have been so surprised. Richardson’s own motivations sound clearly political. It would be natural for her to read such motives into everyone else’s behavior.

Indeed, Hooven understands the essential features of the new landscape clearly enough:

Where are these new narratives about sex coming from? Places like Harvard and scientific journals like The Lancet—i.e., institutions that purport to outsiders to represent the consensus of leading scientific authorities in their fields. However, in the case of the nature of sex, and in other areas, what these institutions seem to increasingly represent is not the consensus of scientific experts but the opinions of political activists that are then mapped back onto “science” in order to burnish their authority. “Only Two Gametes,”

And the results of their new “science”?

Meanwhile, at The Atlantic, Helen Lewis has the story on the ongoing collapse of the teen transition movement, fueled explicitly by these “new narratives”:

After England restricted the use of puberty blockers in 2020, the government asked an expert psychologist, Louis Appleby, to investigate whether the suicide rate for patients at the country’s youth gender clinic rose dramatically as a result. It did not: In fact, he did not find any increase in suicides at all, despite the lurid claims made online. “The way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide,” Appleby reported. “One risk is that young people and their families will be terrified by predictions of suicide as inevitable without puberty blockers.”

When red-state bans are discussed, you will also hear liberals say that conservative fears about the medical-transition pathway are overwrought—because all children get extensive, personalized assessments before being prescribed blockers or hormones. This, too, is untrue. Although the official standards of care recommend thorough assessment over several months, many American clinics say they will prescribe blockers on a first visit.

“The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine,” June 29, 2025

Misinformation, promoted at top levels, is only the beginning of the harm.

How the evolutionary biologists contributed to their own downfall

Canceling truth — in the spiritual sense — was a bad idea. If humans are merely evolved animals, the pursuit of truth is a mere survival strategy. And some people — entire systems, in fact — can thrive on falsehood. Where child gender medicine is concerned, that is precisely what the new elite at Harvard and The Lancet are doing.

Their current system is starting to collapse. But nothing stops them from building new ones. They just need to keep Cancelling an ever-diminishing number of people like Hooven.

Except for one thing. Enough people may still believe that the human being is not just an animal and there is such a thing as truth. If so, in the deepening crisis, it is far too soon to call a winner.