Carole Hooven is an American anthropologist and sex segregationist whose work focuses on sexual differentiation. She 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.

Background

Carole K. Hooven was born February 18, 1966. Hooven earned a bachelors degree in psychology from Antioch College in 1988. She earned a doctorate in biological anthropology in 2004.

Hooven married Alex Byrne (born 1960) and has one son, Griffin. Byrne has also weighed in on current understandings of sexual dimorphism as they relate to trans rights.

She co-authored the 2013 book Meta-Emotion: How Families Communicate Emotionally. She is the author of the 2021 book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us.

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:

Her work has been featured in outlets including the Wall Street Journal,  New StatesmanTime MagazineSlate Magazine, the Boston Globe,  the New York PostStylist Magazine, the AustralianBBC, Talk Radio Europe, the Daily Telegraph, the Evening Standard, the Harvard GazetteOxford 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

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

Resources

Carole Hooven (carolehooven.com)

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

Twitter (twitter.com)

Reddit (reddit.com)

LinkedIn (linkedin.com)