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Carole Hooven vs. transgender people

Carole Hooven is an American anthropologist and sex segregationist whose work focuses on maintaining a sex binary. Hooven also focuses on making people “comfortable in their own bodies,” a frequent dogwhistle used by critics of trans healthcare.

Hooven frequently defends and collaborates with other gender critical public figures, including spouse Alex Byrne, a philosopher and anti-trans activist.

Background

Carole K. Hooven was born February 18, 1966. Hooven earned a bachelor’s degree from Antioch College in 1988 and a doctorate in 2004.

Hooven married Alex Byrne and has one child, Griffin.

Hooven co-authored the 2013 book Meta-Emotion: How Families Communicate Emotionally.

Anti-transgender activism

Hooven is the author of the 2021 book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us.

Hooven gave a blurb for the 2023 anti-trans book Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader:

Edited collections of academic essays are often hit-and-miss. A good collection has 50% decent essays; an excellent collection, which is rare, has 80%. I have now finished reading all of the essays in Sex and Gender, edited by Sullivan and Todd. There are 14 essays and an editors’ introduction. Every single one of the contributions is excellent. It is an unusual collection of absolutely first-rate work covering science, social sciences, and humanities. The sex/gender debate is very heated, to say the least. This book shines a great deal of light on the issues. The essays are all clearly written, and will appeal to the general reader as well as to the specialist.

In 2023, Hooven was scheduled to speak at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) annual joint conference on a panel titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.” Planned panelists were:

Below is an excerpt from their description of the panel:

While it has become increasingly common in anthropology and public life to substitute ‘sex’ with ‘gender’, there are multiple domains of research in which biological sex remains irreplaceably relevant to anthropological analysis. Contesting the transition from sex to gender in anthropological scholarship deserves much more critical consideration than it has hitherto received in major diciplinary fora like AAA / CASCA. This diverse international panel brings together scholars from socio-cultural anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology who describe why in their work gender is not helpful and only sex will do. This is particularly the case when the work is concerned with equity and the deep analysis of power, and which has as an aim the achievement of genuine inclusivity. With research foci from hominin evolution to contemporary artificial intelligence, from the anthropology of education to the debates within contemporary feminism about surrogacy, panelists make the case that while not all anthropologists need to talk about sex, baby, some absolutely do.

[…] Sex identification—whether an individual was male or female – using the skeleton is one of the most fundamental components in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology. Anthropologists have improved their ability to determine sex since their initial studies on skeletal remains, which depended on subjective assessment of skeletal robusticity to say whether someone was male or female. An understanding of physical differences in the pelvis related to childbirth, hormonal impacts on bones, and extensive comparative studies have provided anthropologists with an array of traits, such as those in the Phenice Method, to determine sex using just bones. The use of DNA to identify sex in skeletons by their 23rd chromosomes enables anthropologists to say whether infants are male or female for use in both criminal abuse cases and archaeological cases, such as in recognizing infanticide practices. Anthropologists’ ability to determine whether a skeleton is male or female is not dependent on time or culture; the same traits can be used to make a sex estimate in a forensic case in Canada, or to estimate sex in a Paleoindian dated around 11,500 years ago in Brazil. As anthropologists study more remains from more cultures and time periods, sex identification has improved, because sex differences are biologically determined. In forensics, however, anthropologists should be (and are) working on ways to ensure that skeletal finds are identified by both biological sex and their gender identity, which is essential due to the current rise in transitioning individuals and their overrepresentation as crime victims.

Following outcry, the panel was canceled by AAA and CASCA, who released a joint statement titled “No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology.”

In response, Heterodox Academy convened the panel on November 8, 2023.

Media

Hooven frequently appears on gender critical and anti-transgender shows to defend sex segregation and criticize refinement of value-neutral language in science.

Additional appearances include:

Hooven’s work has been featured in outlets including the Wall Street Journal,  New Statesman, Time Magazine, Slate Magazine, the Boston Globe,  the New York Post, Stylist Magazine, the Australian, BBC, Talk Radio Europe, the Daily Telegraph, the Evening Standard, the Harvard Gazette, Oxford Academic, and Nature.

In 2022 Dartmouth political science professor Henry C. Clark arranged an event with Hooven, Jesse Singal, and Katie Herzog. After the event was cancelled, the event was moved to New York. An additional event with Singal was later arranged at MIT by Hooven’s spouse Alex Byrne.

References

Xu, Meimei (August 12, 2021). Biology Lecturer’s Comments on Biological Sex Draw Backlash. Harvard Crimson https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/8/11/biology-lecturer-gender-comments-backlash/

Coyne, Jerry (November 11, 2022). The cancellation of Carole Hooven. Why Evolution Is True https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/11/11/the-cancellation-of-carole-hooven/

Byrne, Alex (November 1, 2018). Is Sex Binary? Arc Digital https://medium.com/arc-digital/is-sex-binary-16bec97d161e

Herzog, Katie (2021). Med schools are now denying biological sex. Common Sense. Retrieved September 1, 2022 from https://www.commonsense.news/p/med-schools-are-now-denying-biological

Harvard lecturer takes heat for defending existence of biological sex on ‘Fox & Friends’. (2021). Fox News. Retrieved September 1, 2022 from https://www.foxnews.com/us/harvard-lecturer-blasted-by-colleague-for-defending-existence-of-biological-sex

Levine, J. (2021). Harvard lecturer blasted by colleague for defending existence of biological sex. New York Post. Retrieved September 1, 2022 from https://nypost.com/2021/07/31/harvard-lecturer-blasted-for-defending-existence-of-biological-sex/

Hooven, C.K. Academic Freedom Is Social Justice: Sex, Gender, and Cancel Culture on Campus. Arch Sex Behav (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-022-02467-5

Resources

Carole Hooven (carolehooven.com)

Harvard University Department of Human Evolutionary Biology (heb.fas.harvard.edu)

  • Carole Hooven
  • heb.fas.harvard.edu/people/carole-hooven [archive]

X/Twitter (x.com)

Reddit (reddit.com)

LinkedIn (linkedin.com)

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