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Benjamin Ryan is an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. He is a contributor for The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News, The Free Press, and The New York Sun. He has also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic and The Nation, among many others. Follow him on X: @benryanwriter. Visit his website: benryan.net. Subscribe to his Substack: Hazard Ratio

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist, a Manhattan Institute fellow, and the CEO and editor-in-chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His work focuses on the science and public policy of sex and gender. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, The Washington Examiner, and other leading news outlets and scientific journals.

This article was originally published on ’s Substack: Hazard Ratio

During the 24 days between news breaking of Jason Arday’s alleged academic misconduct and serial lying and his death on Aug. 14, a blast radius extended across Cambridge University. In an apparent effort to respond to the mounting public outcry over Dr. Arday’s alleged plagiarism and academic fraud while containing the damage to the august institution’s reputation, Cambridge on Aug. 5 announced an investigation into Dr. Arday’s appointment.

In a statement on the expanding crisis for the university then issued Aug. 12, Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice said she shared the “concerns” about Dr. Arday’s appointment. But she insisted that his case was an “aberration.”

Or was it—at least where the quality of his scholarship was concerned?

The PhD thesis of a student in Cambridge’s Faculty of Education—in which Dr. Arday held a professorial chair, in the sociology of education, until he resigned hours after the investigation announcement—has been put under what British and Canadian academics have told us is a remarkably long embargo, shielding it from public view until 2031.

Crucially, among the panelists who reviewed the thesis was Dr. Arday himself.

The thesis, which we have obtained and which we review below, raises important questions about whether the Faculty of Education, including Dr. Arday’s own contributions, let down the basic standards of higher education.

The lengthy embargo raises further questions about what Cambridge, which is among the most elite universities in the world, and the paper’s author might have to hide where her scholarship is concerned.

Written by Damilola Folayan, the thesis is entitled Of, but not in: A poetic exploration of how Black women students respond to the coloniality of Oxbridge—referring to the portmanteau of Oxford and Cambridge. It garnered her a coveted Cambridge PhD in 2025. Following what’s known as an autoethnographic style, it is in essence an epic poetry-slam interpretation of the plight of Dr. Folayan and three other black women at Oxbridge and their experiences navigating, with considerable ambivalence, these historically, and still overwhelmingly, white elite institutions.

The sprawling thesis unabashedly thumbs its nose at the rigors and demands of academia even as it demands in return an elite PhD and all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.

The landing page for Dr. Folayan’s thesis was taken down on Aug. 14, just before news of Dr. Arday’s death broke. This followed our first submission via email of questions, earlier that day, to Cambridge and Dr. Folayan about her thesis. The landing page was put back online at some point in the subsequent weeks.

Dr. Folayan, who did not return requests for comment, submitted her thesis on Nov. 26, 2024, and it was published July 10, 2025. A source who monitored the thesis over this period informed us that the university placed the thesis under an initial one-year embargo. The particular type of embargo the thesis received, called embargoed access, permits the author to release copies upon request at their own discretion.

Various academics familiar with the British system told us it is not uncommon for a university to keep a PhD thesis initially under wraps like this, while, for example, its author seeks to publish it in book form.

But what happened next was more exceptional—and even an apparent violation of university policy—sources tell us.

At some point after July 27—the date when our source was able to freely download Dr. Folayan’s thesis, given it was not under embargo at that time—and before Aug. 9, the university placed a new, five-year embargo on the thesis. This shielded the document until July 10, 2031.

Various academics informed us that in rare cases, PhD theses may be put under lengthy embargos if they contain, for example, information that could violate an individual’s safety. But Dr. Folayan did not receive the type of stricter embargo that would be placed in those circumstances.

The embargo on Dr. Folayan’s thesis appears to violate Cambridge’s own rules for limits on such embargoes, which state: “The maximum embargo permitted is 6 years from the date of first deposit”—not from the date that the thesis was published, as is now the case for Dr. Folayan’s thesis. Given her deposit date, the university rules would appear to place the outer limit at Nov. 26, 2030, which is 226 days before the current expiration date on the embargo.

The records suggest that Dr. Folayan herself requested the embargo extension, given her thesis sits under “embargoed access.” Under this protocol, the thesis author completes an embargo extension form, which a university supervisor then signs (or if the supervisor disagrees, the degree committee weighs in). Or it could be that the university administration broke protocol and applied the embargo itself through this route.

Regardless, the length of the embargo raised eyebrows among our sources in British academia.

“I have never heard of a PhD being embargoed in the social sciences,” Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology at University College London, told us in an email exchange that took place before Dr. Arday’s death. “Most students are keen to share their work.” She said that if a PhD thesis is shielded for many years, “it is unclear how it could count as a contribution to knowledge.”

A Cambridge spokesperson on Aug. 14 stated, on the contrary: “It is common practice for PhD students to request an embargo on their theses. There are a number of reasons why such a request might be made and in each case a standard protocol is followed.” The spokesperson did not respond to follow-up questions about whether Dr. Folayan’s especially lengthy embargo violated university policy.

The Arday plagiarism scandal broke in the Substack of Nathan Cofnas, an American academic who is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium, on July 21—11 days after Dr. Folayan’s embargo lifted. Dr. Cofnas told one of us that he first alerted Cambridge to his investigation on July 16. Retraction Watch followed Dr. Cofnas’ article on July 27 with even more explosive reporting about Dr. Arday’s alleged academic misconduct and his apparently aggressive—and temporarily successful—efforts to leverage the legal system to intimidate those who questioned his scholarship and honesty and keep the damning story under wraps.

This means that the new, especially long embargo was placed on a PhD thesis—a piece of scholarship for which Dr. Arday sat on the review panel—after Dr. Arday’s alleged academic misconduct became a major public scandal.

The intense public focus on such offenses and the purported poor quality of Dr. Arday’s academic publications threatened to tarnish Cambridge’s historically sterling reputation. In particular, the Faculty of Education, in which Dr. Arday became the university’s youngest black professor in 2023, found itself under withering scrutiny.

Dr. Sullivan, who, according to her bio, studies “social and educational inequalities in the life course”—similar to the domains of Drs. Arday and Folayan—said that there were academics “doing good work” in Cambridge’s Faculty of Education at large. “I feel for them, because they will now be tainted by association with the Arday scandal,” she said—albeit before Dr. Arday’s death instantly changed the tenor of the public debate over his life and work.

But Dr. Sullivan offered a scathing and unsparing appraisal of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, saying that “the department as a whole is surprisingly weak, particularly given the advantages of the prestige and perks of Cambridge, which should make it possible for them to hire the very best.”

Hilary Cremin, who heads the Faculty of Education and who in a 2023 BBC interview said that Dr. Arday was “the best in the world” in the research he did, was under particularly scorching scrutiny in the weeks before Dr. Arday’s death. Critics accused Dr. Cremin of pandering to Dr. Arday and overlooking what they asserted was his weak publication record in favor of leveraging his race to paper over Cambridge’s notable lack of diversity where black scholars are concerned.

Dr. Sullivan said that Dr. Cremin “is not someone of the calibre you would expect to head a department at Cambridge.” She suggested that Dr. Cremin was a linchpin in appointing someone with an academic background as thin as Dr. Arday’s, saying, “One of the most important roles of a head of department is to sit on all senior appointment panels and ensure that weak hires are avoided. This is one reason that having an intellectually credible head is essential to a strong department.”

“I am concerned that students at Cambridge have been badly let down,” Dr. Sullivan said. “They deserve better.”

Dr. Folayan’s thesis: a poetic act of defiance

What is a PhD thesis supposed to accomplish? The answer can vary widely by discipline, but the basic expectation is that it is meant to represent a genuine contribution to or advancement of human knowledge. That knowledge doesn’t need to be timeless, like discovering the mass of a carbon atom. It can be narrowly focused. And research methods vary between disciplines. Formal experiments and statistical hypothesis testing are not appropriate or even possible in many fields. Social scientists, including anthropologists, sociologists and other qualitative researchers, often study highly subjective questions that can’t be answered with the tools and precision of the hard sciences.

Dr. Folayan’s thesis asks how black women students experience and respond to what she calls the “coloniality of Oxbridge,” which she describes as the persistence of colonial power, norms and racial hierarchy at Oxford and Cambridge. To answer that question, she relies on conversations she held with three black women who had attended or were attending Oxbridge, infuses their stories with her own experiences through so-called autoethnography, and ultimately spends 70,413 words analyzing the resulting material using so-called Critical Poetic Inquiry.

In other words, she sought a doctorate from one of the world’s greatest halls of higher learning by interviewing three people. Her contribution to human knowledge characterizes two social practices—leaving Oxbridge for London and gathering for potlucks—as forms of “marronage,” a term used to describe the practice of escaping enslavement.

This arguably undisciplined mode of inquiry is not unique to Dr. Folayan. It has spread widely across academia and is arguably one of the central dead weights that have brought down trust in higher education. Dr. Folayan’s thesis takes this already flawed method to an extreme by stirring poetry and political activism into the mix.

Dr. Arday’s own 2015 thesis, for which he was accused of plagiarizing another author, follows a similar approach. It is a lengthy exploration of the travails of just four student teachers in the physical-education discipline. (Specifically, Dr. Arday’s doctorate was in the teaching of P.E., not P.E. itself. Following an investigation Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded him his PhD, cleared him of the plagiarism charge in March. But Dr. Arday was also credibly accused of plagiarism and fraud in other papers he wrote while at other universities, according to The Times.) He otherwise employed autoethnography, which is a fancy word for writing about oneself, in his published work.

Methods should matter and require justification in every field. If a researcher makes claims about reality, there must be some disciplined means of determining whether those claims are true or plausible. Evidence and logic must, at least to some degree, guide one’s interpretation. Alternative explanations have to be considered. It must be clear how a researcher moved from their observations to their conclusions. And, at least in principle, they must stress test their argument by articulating the kind of evidence that would or could have caused them to arrive at a different conclusion. Without such constraints on interpretation, research can no longer be considered an investigation and instead becomes a mere subjective exercise—in expressing what the author already believes or desires to be true.

In short, absent rhetorical and epistemological standards, the academic project falls apart.

But that seems to be exactly what Dr. Folayan would rather. Which is quite convenient, since dispensing with any and all structure clears a much smoother path toward earning a PhD than a course that is bogged down by rigor and strict standards. The complete lack of constraint is what makes Dr. Folayan’s PhD thesis so astonishing. Her subject is remarkably narrow and would typically be considered extremely low-powered for any research project, let alone a PhD. And her thesis does not actually investigate the experiences of her participants in a way that meets even the lowest bar for academic rigor. Instead, the methods are structured in a way that permits her to interpret evidence through a predetermined ideological and political framework that, conveniently enough, pre-emptively shields it from challenges of falsification.

This thesis cannot be considered research in any meaningful, scholarly sense.

The Critical Poetic Inquiry, or CPI, method she uses is, in her words, “distinct from other forms of qualitative inquiry in that it prioritises justice.” What actually constitutes “justice” for the sake of research she leaves undefined. However, “justice” is a subjective moral and political pursuit. It is not a method for determining what is true, which is the ostensibly higher purpose of a PhD thesis. The slam-poetic nature of Dr. Folayan’s thesis causes her to describe her project with terms such as: “a lament, a war cry, a chant and a belly laugh” and “a joyful, painful rupture, a disruption, a deliberate transgression, a riff, and a drum beat… a prayer for all we have lost and for all that we can be.”

She describes her thesis as “a justice-centred project aimed at celebrating and memorialising the lives and experiences of Black women students of Oxbridge, past and present.” She also calls the project “an ode to the ebony women who maroon their way through the HEIs [Higher Education Institutions] they are traditionally shut out of or told to contort themselves to enter into.” Elsewhere it becomes a “love letter,” “poetry,” a “process of healing,” and an aspiring “performance.”

Dr. Folayan has served up a tribute to women such as herself, channeled through an amalgam of poetry and activism. She also inserts herself into the dataset through autoethnography, which in her case means mining her own journals and personal experiences at Cambridge as research material.

The three women she interviewed either volunteered via a social media open call or were acquaintances hand-selected by Folayan herself. Dr. Folayan also infused the interviews with personal bias by sharing her own experiences with the subjects in order to “affirm [the participants’] experiences” through their commonality.

Her methods provide an alternative to, she writes, the “taking up space” model in black feminism. Her alternative route is concerned with how black women at Oxbridge “create alternative spaces to help them remain part of the institutions.”

“Through this work,” Dr. Folayan writes, “I centre the experiences of Black women students who have chosen to be of, but not in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.” Elsewhere: “Through this research, I seek to synthesise a recent turn in the development of Black British Womanhood Studies marked by a refusal to play our counters in quiet and cry our tears in private.” She says she writes “because of the beautiful ebony butterflies who escape the oppressive terrains of UK HEIs and invent alternative modes of engaging with and existing in Oxbridge.” She also tells the reader: “This research is a love letter to the ebony beauties who have and are yet to navigate Oxbridge.”

She then offers this:

“In engaging in marronage, the Black women at the centre of this project contradict oppression and oppressive narratives of Black womanhood by forging alternate modes of decolonial existence that refuse to conform to the colonising onto-epistemic foundations of UK HE.”

What observation could even potentially determine whether this interpretation was accurate? What would distinguish “forging alternate modes of decolonial existence” from ordinary friendship, socializing, travel or seeking out people with shared cultural backgrounds? Dr. Folayan does not offer any answers or guidance. When you strip out all the academic jargon of “marronage,” “decolonial existence,” and “onto-epistemic foundations,” she’s simply saying: I feel out of place here.

Remarkably, Dr. Folayan even appears to sense the methodological shortcomings of her own work—and in so doing almost dares the reader to engage in exactly the sort of criticism we’re administering here. “Methodological conundrums have plagued this project since its inception,” she writes, in a moment of meta-analysis, of the genesis of her thesis. “Nothing quite seemed to fit this project and this project did not fit neatly into any methodological framework.” She reports having asked herself, “What is it I’m doing here?” and “Does this even constitute a PhD?”

Her supervisor, Tyler Denmead will, as of October 2026, earn the distinguished title of professor of education at Cambridge. Dr. Denmead, who is white, is the coauthor of the 2025 book Rethinking Critical Race Theory: Education Against Elimination in a Time of Genocide. He recently coauthored scholarly articles with titles that open with the words “White educability,” “White profitability,” and “Reckoning with white empathy.” His next book is at least tentatively entitled The White Rage Curriculum.

Dr. Denmead, who did not respond to requests for comment, apparently did not help Dr. Folayan develop a clearer and more rigorous research design. Instead, Dr. Folayan writes that he “urged me to keep writing poetry.”

The big picture: Dr. Folayan’s ascent through the ranks

According to her LinkedIn page (which was taken down at some point after Aug. 14), Dr. Folayan is a lecturer in equity, diversity and inclusion at Arden University and “a poet-researcher whose work sits at the intersection of social transformation and the sociology of education.” She asserts that she researches “race, gender, and institutional inequalities, with a particular interest in motherhood in higher education and fostering transformative change.”

In addition to receiving her PhD in education from Cambridge, in February 2025, she has worked at the universities of Sheffield, Leeds and Cambridge. She asserts on LinkedIn that she has worked on “projects including Generation Delta, Decolonising the Social Sciences and the Black Professors Project.” While earning her PhD, she also worked in HR and sustainability at Niyo Group, a Birmingham-based tech and training venture that describes itself as “a global technology company that empowers, educates and enables the most under-represented communities.”

Niyo sponsored her PhD, at least in part, and is thanked in the acknowledgements, as is Dr. Arday.

Dr. Folayan is also a poet, having received poetry commissions from the University of Sheffield, from which she received a masters of science in international social change and policy in 2019, and the Royal Academy of Arts, per LinkedIn. She earned her bachelor of science in sociology and education studies from Oxford Brookes University in 2018.

Her ultimate goal is to become a professor and “impact evaluation consultant.”

“Inspired poetry”

Curiously, Dr. Folayan’s “Inspired Poetry” approach does not routinely attempt to reproduce verbatim the words her participants uttered in her interviews. Instead, she funnels those words through a creative process that communicates the women’s “thoughts, patterns and feelings” and captures what she subjectively felt constituted their “essence.” She draws on other scholars’ research and her interview transcripts and then crafts poems around the elements she “felt were important.”

The poems born out of this process then become a new research text that can supposedly reveal even greater intellectual insights.

At no point during this exercise is there an independent check capable of determining whether anything true or useful had actually been discovered—or if it’s pure projection on her part.

But Dr. Folayan did indeed face an independent check: her thesis viva, as the PhD oral examinations are called in the U.K. The review panel included Dr. Arday. We don’t know what went on beyond those closed doors except that they granted her a PhD and validated this thesis as her final product.

And then the thesis was sealed in a vault guarded by the author herself—minus a little over two weeks earlier this summer when the embargo lapsed—for what is now set to be six years all told. Is this the sort of transparency Vice-Chancellor Prentice spoke of when she sought to reassure the Cambridge community about the investigation into Dr. Arday? Will Dr. Arday’s approval of this thesis be a part of that investigation? Or will the embargo thwart such an inquiry?

In her thesis, Dr. Folayan also notes her “somewhat noble motivations,” while revealing, remarkably for someone seeking a doctorate, that writing a thesis was not her preferred medium. She says she underwent the academic task “because of the requirements of the institution in which I hold space.” She states, “If I had it my way, this thesis would be a performance, and all my academic prose would be pauses and platitudes in poetry, but Cambridge does not afford me such privilege, so I opt for Critical Poetic Inquiry.”

Dr. Folayan herself seems incredulous that she’s getting away with writing activist poetry for her education PhD thesis, saying that “yes, this is a thesis, and somehow poetry is an acceptable form of academic inquiry and theorisation.”

She even explains that she was initially drawn to Critical Qualitative Inquiry (of which, according to her, Critical Poetic Inquiry is a subset) because it was a form of “activist research” that was, in part, “concerned with perceived academic rigour.” In other words, she did not prioritize actual academic rigor, just the perception of it in order to achieve her activist goals.

Dr. Folayan is brazenly candid about her rejection of such rigor. She opens with a so-called positionality statement—academic throat clearings that have become de rigueur in social-justice-oriented academia in which the author lists their various racial, gender, socioeconomic and sexual identities—quoting other scholars that her project “does not align with notions of ‘neutral’ research or ‘objective’ researchers.”

She rejects what she calls the “fantasy of objectivity,” and makes evident she believes the utter lack of objectivity resulting from her positionality actually makes her work more, not less, credible. This is because she rejects what she refers to as “Coloniality’s Epistemic Regime,” which is the “colonial power dynamics [that] permeate societies to repress epistemologies that exist outside of coloniality’s frame of reason and rationality.” This repression manifests as “marking criteria, rubrics and journal requirements that favour written knowledge over that which is communicated creatively (i.e. through painting or performance)” and also as “notions that knowledge must be scientifically tested and proven to meet coloniality’s contorted standards of fact.”

While it’s important and valid to acknowledge researcher bias in qualitative research, acknowledging such bias is not the same thing as controlling for it to help establish whether one’s interpretation is true.

Undergirding the thesis’s ideological framework is Dr. Folayan’s proudly defiant rejection of conventional scholarly standards and constraints. She shields her work from criticism by aligning herself with scholars who refuse “to privilege contemporary epistemic modes [of knowing] over Indigenous sciences and epistemes” and favors methodologies that are not “dictated by coloniality’s standards of knowledge production.” She claims the “ambiguity around this project’s status as an acceptable academic work” is a result of it being situated in a colonialist institution. She says her project is “conscious of the confines created by institutional expectations and academic assumptions yet refuses to adopt them.”

Perhaps her clearest effort to reject academic standards while having her academic cake and eating it too, so to speak, comes in her assertion: “Project and product thus remain unsegregated, and my method has not been determined by rigid academic definitions as being an acceptable form of research. My mode of research has been characterised by a refusal to give into the knowledge standards of coloniality which, as noted by Sriprakash et al. (2022), function to uphold White-dominance and hierarchical social orders.”

This thesis produces a paradox: Cambridge is awarding its highest academic credential to a project whose author openly presents accepted academic standards as oppressive constraints to be undermined and resisted. To paraphrase her thesis title, Dr. Folayan wants to be of Cambridge—receive her doctorate—but never adhere to this elite academic institution’s epistemic standards, even as she complains that she feels out of place in this very institution.

Dr. Folayan’s purported “contribution to knowledge” is the discovery of two previously unexplored forms of “marronage”: traveling to London to find community and holding potlucks. London becomes a “historic foothill of escape,” while potlucks are theorized to be an extension of “the maroon tradition of seeking protection in the landscapes of territories ruled by European powers.”

There is good reason to believe that black women at Oxbridge can feel isolated. Blacks comprise only an estimated 3 percent to 4 percent of the undergraduate students accepted at Cambridge and just under 1 percent of the academic staff (actual black professors are even rarer)—a disparity that Cambridge apparently sought to rectify by hiring Dr. Arday, his subpar qualifications notwithstanding. And it’s entirely likely that spending time with friends in London or eating familiar foods with likeminded individuals would make such women feel more at home. Those certainly seem like resonant emotional experiences, potentially worthy of documentation in some forum. But Dr. Folayan devotes tens of thousands of words in a PhD thesis saying that she feels out of place at Cambridge and likes leaving campus to find her place elsewhere and enjoy comfort food.

Simply attaching the vocabulary of slavery to the most ordinary of human interactions does not constitute an argument, analysis, or a new empirical discovery.

As an institution, Cambridge appears to have been incapable of distinguishing between scholarship and a literary act of self indulgence. And astonishingly, the university has sanctioned an exceptionally long embargo that has permitted the contents of this thesis to remain out of view into the next decade.

If there is to be a true reckoning at Cambridge to understand what internal rot Dr. Arday’s interrupted tenure signified, breaking the embargo and taking a hard look at this thesis might be a good place to start.

But that might prove inconvenient to the vice-chancellor’s preordained conclusion that the Arday affair is a mere isolated incident.

This article was originally published on ’s Substack. Subscribe below.

Hazard Ratio: Benjamin Ryan

Independent health and science journalist Benjamin Ryan's Substack focuses on pediatric gender medicine in particular.

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About the Author

Taylor Trandahl spent years running high-profile digital marketing campaigns in Hollywood before joining conservative media nonprofit PragerU in 2020. There he helped launch and grow Amala Ekpunobi’s YouTube channel to over 2.5 million subscribers as creative producer. He now serves as Executive Producer for her independent media and comments on culture, faith, and current events on YouTube, X, and Instagram.

I live in Nashville, where half a million people recently signed a petition to stop a data center from being built near the zoo. People are worried that it will jeopardize the safety of the animals, waste water, drive up electricity prices, and cause a host of other problems.

All of that sounded really bad, so I decided to look into these claims. But the more I did, the more the opposition began to look like panic rather than reasoned argument. And I’ve started to think the same may be true of the broader data-center debate unfolding across the country, where 7 out of 10 Americans now oppose having a data center built in their area.

It’s not hard to understand why. Almost everything I had heard about data centers framed them negatively.

I had never heard, for instance, that in the small town of Quincy, Washington, tax revenue from data centers helped pay for a new high school, sports complex, hospital, library, police station, and fire department. Data centers created enough jobs to employ 10 percent of the town’s population and helped reduce its poverty rate from 30 percent in 2012 to 6.2 percent in 2024.

I had never heard that teachers in Richland Parish, Louisiana, received $50,000 bonuses thanks to increased tax revenue driven by data centers.

I didn’t know that Loudoun County, Virginia—the “data center capital of the world”—had created 15,000 jobs, increased school budgets by tens of millions of dollars, and poured resources into police and fire departments, libraries, parks, community centers, roads, bridges, child-protection services, and mental-health services—all while cutting property taxes every year for the past decade.

In Ellendale, North Dakota, annual sales-tax collections were about $400,000 before the data-center buildout. In the first seven months of 2026 alone, the town took in $3.5 million. That windfall allowed the small town of 1,100 people to repave its streets, renovate its senior center, and fund public safety, while local restaurants, gas stations, and hotels saw revenues rise by as much as 30 percent. Property values also increased tenfold, while residents’ electric bills fell by an average of $250 per household thanks to the state’s revenue-sharing law.

I didn’t know that for every one of the several hundred jobs created to operate a data center, another six to seven jobs are created elsewhere in the economy—meaning that the data centers employing 900 people in Quincy are responsible for five or six thousand additional jobs around the country.

I also didn’t appreciate that “data center” is actually a bit of a misnomer. The term makes them sound like ominous warehouses where evil tech companies store our information so they can spy on and control us. In reality, data centers are part of the physical backbone of the modern economy. The videos you stream, the photos you save in the cloud, the apps on your phone, and the systems that keep hospitals, banks, and small businesses running all depend on them.

Just last week, pharmaceutical company Moderna’s stock price surged after it announced progress on what has been described as a literal “cancer vaccine”—an incredible medical breakthrough made possible in part by AI technology powered by data centers.

At this point, you’re probably thinking this is starting to sound like a propaganda piece for data centers. What about the zoo animals? What about wasting water? What about driving up electricity prices? Fair enough. So let’s talk honestly about the downsides.

First: water. It’s true that many data centers require considerable amounts of water for cooling—roughly 164 billion gallons per year nationwide. That is a lot—until you put it in context. Golf courses use an estimated 500–750 billion gallons annually, residential lawns around 3 trillion gallons—yes, with a “T”—and agriculture roughly 43 trillion gallons. Agriculture accounts for about 90 percent of annual U.S. water consumption. Data centers account for just 0.14 percent.

There’s another important distinction to make. Older data centers are more likely to rely on evaporative cooling, which consumes water without returning it directly to the local water supply. Many newer facilities, including the one proposed near my home in Nashville, instead use closed-loop, recycled-water, or air-cooling systems that can dramatically reduce water consumption.

What about electricity? After all, it’s well established that data centers are power hogs. But so far, researchers have found no statistically significant impact on residential electricity bills when costs are properly allocated. Developers work with local utilities and regulators to determine whether the grid can accommodate the additional demand. Data centers also pay “large-load tariffs” designed to offset the costs they impose on the system. In some cases, their enormous demand can actually spread the grid’s fixed costs across more customers and lower residential electricity bills.

President Trump also recently expanded the voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge, under which major technology companies and utilities commit to covering the costs of new power generation and grid infrastructure required by AI data centers rather than passing them on to residential customers. The pledge is voluntary rather than a binding regulation, but participating companies appear to be following it in both spirit and practice.

Then there’s noise. Here in Nashville, one of the biggest concerns is that zoo animals such as clouded leopards, which can be sensitive to mechanical noise, could be disturbed by the persistent hum of data-center cooling equipment. That strikes me as a perfectly reasonable concern.

But here the evidence is lacking on both sides. The zoo has offered no “specific evidence that data centers would pose a unique problem” for its animals. At the same time, the company cannot definitively demonstrate that the animals would not be adversely affected.

For its part, the developer has promised to keep noise levels below the limits required by local zoning codes and to implement additional measures, including acoustic planning and sound walls. It’s also worth noting that, on the decibel scale, “data centers are a bit louder than libraries and a bit quieter than pickleball courts.” The proposed site is also located in an industrial park beside a major railyard and is already home to a smaller data center.

Given these facts, I’ll leave judgment to you—and to the courts now litigating the company’s case against the city of Nashville. But whatever the outcome, the issue is anything but black and white.

Other concerns about data centers include light pollution, their land footprint, and their generally unattractive appearance. But lighting can be reconfigured relatively easily. As for land use, U.S. data centers are projected to occupy a total area roughly the size of Rhode Island by 2030. For comparison, the land currently used to grow corn for ethanol—which may actually be environmentally worse than the gasoline it replaces—already covers an area roughly the size of New York State.

And yes, data centers may not be pretty to look at. But what major infrastructure is? I’m not arguing that one should be built in every suburban enclave. That’s what zoning is for. Local governments can concentrate data centers in industrial areas and impose reasonable requirements on their design, lighting, landscaping, noise, and appearance.

This debate has also emerged at a strange economic moment. People on both sides of the political aisle are decrying an “affordability crisis” in which grocery prices have surged by more than 30 percent since 2019, the home-price-to-income ratio has risen to nearly twice its historical benchmark, and 49 percent of American families lack the resources to cover their essential expenses.

But the affordability crisis is really a symptom of a deeper economic malaise. Cumulative inflation is up 30 percent since 2020. The national debt just crossed $40 trillion—about $116,800 for every person living in the United States. The federal deficit has reached $1.8 trillion this year alone. Social Security and Medicare are projected to face insolvency within the next decade.

So how does America climb out of this economic hole? How do we bring prices down, raise living standards, and make life more affordable again?

I don’t think anyone has the complete answer. But I’m fairly certain we won’t get there by building less infrastructure, enabling less innovation, surrendering technological competitiveness, and generating less economic growth.

The simple reality is that data centers are among the most valuable economic investments a modern city, state, or country can make. Yes, they use a lot of water and electricity. Yes, they can be noisy and unattractive. But most of these problems can be managed through good planning—and what, realistically, is the alternative?

In the early nineteenth century, nobody had ever traveled faster than a galloping horse. Anti-railway “experts” warned that traveling at more than 20 or 30 miles per hour could cause brain damage, paralysis, suffocation, miscarriage, blindness, and even spontaneous psychotic breaks. Railway surveyors faced organized obstruction, sabotage, riots, and physical beatings. Aristocrats funded propaganda campaigns, anti-railway activism, and legal efforts to halt construction.

I can’t help but think of these historical parallels when I see Nashville responding to today’s data-center panic by attempting to retroactively seize the company’s land through eminent domain—even though the company legally purchased the property and received regulatory approval to build. And while the public concern is certainly real, it’s not entirely organic: recent reporting has discovered that China is spending billions on foreign-influence campaigns designed, in part, to stoke American opposition to AI infrastructure.

Now, let me take off my Big Tech shill hat for a moment: I honestly don’t love any of this. I’m not much of a tech nerd. I don’t love the AI revolution, and I have serious concerns about what it could mean for society and for our humanity. I work in the social-media world, so I’m probably more familiar with the downsides than most. There are days when I’d gladly unplug from the algorithms, throw away my smartphone, and go live the way human beings were “meant” to live—whatever that means.

But for better or worse, this is the time in which we live.

One of my favorite escapes from my Internet-saturated brain is reading and rereading J.R.R. Tolkien. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo Baggins, despairing that he has been unwillingly swept up in the affair of the Ring, tells Gandalf: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”

I often think of Gandalf’s reply: “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

At the end of the day, make up your own mind. I’m not some die-hard data-center booster, and I don’t particularly care if we differ in opinion on whether they are a net benefit or not. Nobody is paying me to say any of this. What bothers me is watching misinformation and irrational fear push people toward policies that may ultimately leave them—and everyone else—worse off in the long run.

So yeah, if I have to decide what to do with the “time given me” on this particular issue, I generally come down in favor of building data centers.

Now that you have the facts, you can decide for yourself.

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About the Author

Frederick Prete teaches neurobiology at Lake Forest College. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago, where he ran a laboratory studying the neurophysiology of praying mantis visual systems, and he has taught in both biology and psychology departments. His work has been published in a variety of academic journals, including Science, the Journal of Experimental Biology, and the Journal of the History of Biology.

He has also written for online publications including Quillette, Minding the Campus, the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, and the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, often on the history of biology, academia, and education. He has published two edited volumes in neurophysiology and behavior, including The Praying Mantids, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. He is currently Director of the Haptic Research Lab at Lake Forest College, where the lab develops haptic-enhanced mobility aids, including white canes, for people who are blind or low-vision. More information is available at www.hapticinsight.org.

When I ask people what they know about the praying mantis, the most common answer—by far—is that the female eats the male during sex. In an informal survey I conducted at the University of Chicago and at Roosevelt University, 149 psychology students were shown a picture of a mantis and asked to write down one fact they knew about it. Of all the responses, “the female eats her mate” came up far more often than any other. The mantis’s cryptic appearance, its extraordinary hunting behavior, its remarkable visual system—none came close. Clearly, what most people think they know about the praying mantis is that it’s a sexually motivated cannibal.

Despite its erotic allure, however, the widespread belief that sex and cannibalism are linked in the mantis is wrong. To understand why—and why the belief persists—you have to go back a very long way. Not just to the 1886 article in the prestigious journal Science that is usually blamed for starting the modern myth. Much further. Back four thousand years, to ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, where the stories that shape our beliefs about this fascinating insect first emerged.

A Divine Creature

In the ancient world, the praying mantis was understood primarily through its posture. The insect holds its raptorial forelegs raised in front of its body in a way that, to human eyes, looks unmistakably like an attitude of prayer. Across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, this posture inspired a persistent set of beliefs about the mantis’s spiritual nature. Ancient Sumerian cuneiform texts from the ninth century B.C. called it the “necromancer” and the “soothsayer of the field.” In Egypt, as early as 1550 B.C., the mantis appeared in The Book of the Dead as a minor deity, the “Bird-fly,” who guided the souls of the dead to the afterlife. The ancient Greeks named the insect mantis—meaning “prophet”—for its supposed ability to point lost travelers toward home, a legend repeated in European natural-history texts well into the seventeenth century.

The cultural contrast with the Far East is striking. In China and Japan, where the mantis had been carefully observed for centuries, the insect was celebrated not for its piety but for its ferocity. Ninth-century Chinese poets used the mantis as a metaphor for boldness; by the tenth century, mantids were being kept for organized fighting contests, a sport popular enough to produce its own monographs and a thriving trade in specialized equipment. While Europeans were writing about the mantis’s helpfulness to lost children, the Chinese were wagering money on how quickly one could dismember its opponent.

A Reputation Reversed

The Western reputation for mantid gentleness began to erode in the mid-eighteenth century. The first blow came from the German painter and naturalist August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof (1705–1795), who placed several mantids together in a glass jar for observation and found, to his astonishment, that they attacked one another with ferocious intensity, the victor invariably devouring the vanquished. More alarming than the fighting itself was Rösel’s finding that the mantids continued to kill and eat one another even when supplied with an abundance of other, perfectly adequate food.

The second blow came from an account involving a Mr. Dorthes, an entomologist traveling in France with the naturalist James Smith, whose observations were recorded in Smith’s 1807 travel narrative. Having placed a male and female mantis together in a bottle, Dorthes watched the pair mate, after which “the larger and stronger [female] . . . devoured the head and upper part of the body of her companion. But the most wonderful circumstance is, that a subsequent union took place; the life and vigor of the male being unimpaired by the loss of his head, as that part is not in insects the seat of the brain: this was no sooner concluded than his insatiable mate ate up the rest of his body!”

These accounts spread rapidly through the popular and scientific literature, displacing the image of the pious mantis and replacing it with something darker. They were repeated by virtually everyone who wrote about mantids, often juxtaposed with the older, kinder characterizations—as if the insect had two sides to its character, one gentle and one savage. George Shaw’s General Zoology of 1806, for instance, recorded both the legend of the mantis guiding lost travelers home and Rösel’s account of mantids fighting like hussars with sabers, cleaving opponents asunder with a single stroke.

The general distaste with which mantid cannibalism was viewed is evident in the widely read and influential Introduction to Entomology, written by the natural theologians William Kirby (1759–1850) and William Spence (1783–1860). Among the indirect benefits derived from insects, Kirby and Spence counted the fact that many species, by feeding on others, help keep insect populations in check. But however beneficial it might be to eat unrelated insects in excess numbers, eating one’s own kind was another matter entirely. “But before I quit this subject,” they wrote, “I may call your attention to what may be denominated Cannibal Insects, since in spite of those disclaimers who would persuade us that man is the only animal that preys upon his own species, a large number of insects are guilty of the same offence.” Prominent among them was the “cowardly and cruel” mantis, which appeared to engage in cannibalism out of sheer wantonness, even “when in no need of other food.”

The famous French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), in his Animal Kingdom, reiterated the reports of Rösel and others and added his own assessment. The mantis, Cuvier wrote, was an anomalous insect with a fundamentally malevolent disposition—cowardly in that it would flee from an ant while freely destroying helpless flies. Most importantly, Cuvier restated the central claim that had by then become conventional wisdom: “They are so cruel and carnivorous that (even as hatchlings) they kill and eat one another, without being compelled to do so by hunger.”

The Birth of the Modern Myth

By the early nineteenth century, then, mantid behavior was understood as having two distinct components, corresponding to the two sides of the mantis’s character: it ate small prey for ordinary nutrition, and it ate its own kind out of viciousness. This framework was firmly in place by the time mating-related cannibalism became a subject of serious discussion, and it shaped how those new observations were interpreted.

The story as most people know it today traces back to a 500-word anecdote published in 1886 in the journal Science by the entomologist Leland O. Howard. Howard described witnessing a female mantis bite off a male’s head during mating. The observation was brief and the sample size was one, but the story spread with extraordinary speed and tenacity.

What gave the observation its staying power was not its scientific rigor. It was how neatly it fit into an explanatory framework that had been building for more than a century. The mantis was already understood as an insect of dual character—pious on the outside, murderous within. Mating-related cannibalism was not a puzzling anomaly; it was confirmation. It slotted perfectly into a way of thinking about the insect that stretched back to Rösel’s jar and, before that, to the ancient legend of the mysterious creature that prayed.

The most influential popularizer of this view was the French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre (1823–1915), whose vivid and widely read Souvenirs entomologiques described mantid mating in the most dramatic terms. Fabre observed females consuming males and interpreted what he saw as an expression of some deep, primitive female nature. “Manners were not gentle in those epochs, which were full of lust to destroy in order to produce,” he wrote; “and the Mantis, a feeble memory of those ancient ghosts, might well preserve the customs of an earlier age.” Of the females he observed, he wrote: “I have seen the same Mantis treat seven husbands in this fashion. She admitted all to her embraces, and all paid for the nuptial ecstacy with their lives.” And of the moment of decapitation itself: “I have seen the thing with my own eyes, and I have not yet recovered from my surprise.”

Fabre’s prose was influential enough to set the terms of the debate for decades, despite the fact that his methodology was essentially nonexistent. He described what he saw under highly artificial conditions—captive animals in unfamiliar environments, crowded together and often hungry—and from those observations drew sweeping conclusions about the nature of the species.

The Headless Husband

The Dorthes account, combined with Fabre’s observations, prompted a question that turned out to be scientifically productive, even if it began from a flawed premise: How was it physiologically possible for a decapitated male mantis to continue mating? The neurophysiologist Kenneth Roeder investigated this question in the 1930s and found a real answer. In male mantids, the nerve ganglia that control copulatory movements are located in the abdomen, not the head. Decapitation does, however, remove the brain’s coordinating influence over those ganglia, producing more vigorous and prolonged copulatory movements in a headless male than in an intact one—analogous to the vigorous, undirected running of a freshly decapitated chicken.

This was a genuine finding. The problem was what happened next: it was interpreted not as an interesting neurophysiological fact about the organization of the insect nervous system, but as evidence that decapitation had evolved as a functional component of mantid mating. The female, it was argued, bites off the male’s head specifically to improve the efficiency of copulation—a grim but elegant solution to a reproductive challenge. This explanation was immediately and widely accepted.

What went largely unheeded was Roeder’s explicit argument against this interpretation. He pointed out that mating-related cannibalism occurred in only a minority of cases, and that the conditions under which it was most likely—captivity, crowding, and food deprivation—were artifacts of the laboratory, not features of mantid life in the field. Cannibalism, he argued, was neither a regular nor a necessary part of mating behavior.

But he was ignored.

In truth, mating-associated cannibalism was simply one instance of a broader, more mundane behavior. Mantids of every age and sex eat one another under ordinary predatory circumstances—a fact well documented since Rösel’s jar. What happens between mates is more specific, and stranger, than the myth allows. In some cases, the female simply catches and eats an approaching male before he ever gets the chance to mount her, exactly as she would any other prey. Sometimes, when mounting does occur, she reaches back to remove the perturbance, grabs the male’s head—the only part she can reach—and pulls it forward into her jaws. She continues eating through the head and into the thorax until what remains is too short for her to grip, at which point she lets go. The abdomen and stub of thorax that remain stay mounted on her, still copulating. That image—a headless, half-eaten male continuing to mate—was the genuinely startling observation at the center of the whole controversy.

Roeder’s neurophysiological model carried real institutional weight. He was among the founding figures of American neuroethology, and an explanation bearing his name was not easily set aside. But the decapitation model was not the only part of his legacy that would reinforce the sexual-cannibalism myth. There is a coda to this part of the story that never made it into the published record.

The 1959 paper that became the standard reference on what praying mantids actually recognize as prey—Rilling, Mittelstaedt, and Roeder’s “Prey Recognition in the Praying Mantis”—grew out of an experiment Susan Rilling conducted as a student in Roeder’s lab. She made a series of simple paper lures, all roughly fly-sized, some fitted with artificial wings, and dangled them on strings in front of tethered mantids to see which ones provoked a strike. Every lure she built was fly-like. She never tested anything shaped like a mantid, another insect, or anything larger. Unsurprisingly, the mantids readily struck at the fly-sized lures, and Rilling concluded that fly-sized objects are what trigger a mantis’s prey-catching response.

By Mittelstaedt’s own account, he and Roeder did not think the experiment was worth publishing: its design was too narrow to support the conclusion Rilling wanted to draw from it. In a letter to my research assistant years later, Mittelstaedt recalled that Rilling nagged the two of them until they finally agreed to publish it—that she clamored for entrance into immortality, as she viewed it. The paper was published in 1959, and because its senior coauthors were already leading figures in neuroethology, it carried an authority the experiment itself did not deserve. Nonetheless, for the next three decades—until my own research at the University of Chicago—Rilling’s paper stood as the only systematic word on what praying mantids identify as prey.

Taken together, Roeder’s neurophysiological model and his student’s behavioral study gave the two prevailing theories everything they needed to lock together into a single, self-consistent account: ordinary predatory behavior is triggered by fly-sized objects, while cannibalism is a separate, nonpredatory sexual behavior that exists to elicit vigorous copulatory behavior from the male. Roeder himself had intended neither finding to support that interpretation. His model of decapitation was meant as a narrow, mechanistic account of ganglion function, not a theory of sexual selection, and he had explicitly argued against treating mating-related cannibalism as regular or necessary. But once his authority and his student’s experiment were read together, the combination took on a teleological cast that neither result, on its own, was meant to support.

Once that interpretation took hold, everything that failed to fit it dropped out of the literature. Reports of male-on-male cannibalism, female-on-female cannibalism, cannibalism among sexually immature mantids, and even the ordinary predatory case of a female eating a male outside a sexual encounter—all common enough in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature—quietly disappeared from later accounts. What remained was a two-part story: predatory attacks on fly-sized prey, and sexual cannibalism by adult females. Everything else became functionally invisible.

What the Evidence Actually Showed

By the mid-twentieth century, evidence against the prevailing theory had quietly accumulated. Field observers found mating-related cannibalism far harder to document in the wild than laboratory studies suggested, while researchers who varied captive conditions found that well-fed, uncrowded females rarely cannibalized their mates at all—a relationship between hunger, stress, and cannibalism that the ruling theory had little reason to examine. Just as neglected was the sheer breadth of the mantid diet: frogs, lizards, small birds, mice, snakes, turtles, and insects of every kind. That range sat uneasily with the idea that mantids had evolved specifically to catch flies—an idea that owed less to any study of wild predation than to the historical convenience of feeding captive mantids flies.

None of this was, strictly speaking, new information. Reports of mantids taking prey far larger than flies had appeared periodically since the mid-eighteenth century and continued throughout the twentieth. But they appeared mostly in the ecological literature, where field researchers documented mantids as opportunistic predators of whatever prey happened to be available, rather than in the neurophysiology and behavior literature that had absorbed Roeder’s and Rilling’s work.

For decades, the two bodies of research ran on separate tracks, each largely unread by the other. Ecologists cataloguing mantids eating birds, mice, and lizards were not in conversation with laboratory researchers building experimental paradigms around fly-sized lures and decapitated ganglia, and the divide was never bridged. Meanwhile, it was the sexual-cannibalism story—vivid, faintly lurid, and endlessly retellable—that captured the field’s imagination, not the more mundane finding that mantids are generalist predators that eat whatever they can catch.

The dichotomy between normal fly-catching and abnormal, sexualized cannibalism survived as long as it did partly because the evidence that would have dissolved it was being published in a different literature, for a different audience, and was never brought into the same conversation as the story everyone already wanted to tell.

A Ruling Theory

The concept of the “ruling theory”—drawn from the geologist T. C. Chamberlin—describes what happens when a hypothesis becomes so deeply embedded in a field’s assumptions that contradictory evidence can no longer dislodge it: confirming observations are taken as confirmation, while disconfirming ones are dismissed as anomalies. Mantid research became a case study in exactly this. Two mutually reinforcing theories—that the mantis has a normal, fly-catching side and an abnormal, cannibalistic side, and that cannibalism of mates is a specialized reproductive strategy rather than ordinary predation—created a framework so internally coherent that, in practice, it became impossible to disconfirm.

If a mantis ate a fly, that was normal. If it ate a mate, that was special. No observation could challenge the distinction, because the distinction itself explained everything.

What the Mantis Actually Is

The most defensible interpretation of the evidence is also the least dramatic: the praying mantis is a generalized, opportunistic predator. It eats what it can catch and subdue—neither a specialized fly-catching machine nor an insect with a mysterious cannibalistic dark side, but an animal pursuing available prey with the tools it has across an unusually wide range of prey types and sizes.

Cannibalism occurs in mantids, as it does in many predatory species, when conspecifics are available, predators are hungry, and alternative prey is scarce. It is not a behavioral specialty, not an intrinsic feature of mating, and not an expression of some ancient, primitive female nature. It is opportunistic predation, no more and no less—and the fact that we have spent centuries interpreting it otherwise says more about our own storytelling than about the insect.

The myth of the sexually cannibalistic mantis is a remarkable case study in how science can go wrong. It begins with genuine observations that were genuinely surprising. It passes through generations of storytellers—priests, poets, naturalists, neurophysiologists—each of whom found in the insect a reflection of something they already believed. It survives not because the evidence supports it, but because the framework surrounding it renders disconfirming evidence invisible. And it persists today, in every classroom where a student is told that the female praying mantis eats her mate, as if that were a simple fact about the natural world rather than a story we have been telling ourselves for four thousand years.

This essay is adapted from: Prete, F. R. & Wolfe, M. M. (1992). “Religious supplicant, seductive cannibal, or reflex machine? In search of the praying mantis.” Journal of the History of Biology, 25(1), 91–136.

See Steven Pinker Live This September

Join Steven Pinker for an evening of wide-ranging conversation about language, human nature, rationality, and progress, followed by questions from the audience. Whether you are a longtime reader or simply curious about his work, this North American tour offers a rare chance to hear one of today’s leading public intellectuals discuss and develop his ideas at length.

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Joe Figliolia is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute where he writes about ethics, society and culture with a particular focus on pediatric gender medicine. His writing has appeared in City Journal, The Dispatch, and the New York Post, among others. Figliolia earned an MA from NYU’s Center for Experimental Humanities.

The conceptual foundations of youth gender medicine embrace several contentious assumptions about the nature of gender dysphoria and cross-sex identification. A recent paper in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, however, provides an important clinical corrective to some of the dominant cultural narratives surrounding “gender diversity.”

As the authors point out, clinical practice for trans-identified youth is often shaped by activist-driven assumptions that can overshadow—and flatten—the clinical complexity of individual patients. As recent malpractice suits lay bare, these ideological tenets can override nuance and stated guardrails, with potentially lifelong consequences for patients.

In Exploring the Psychological Mechanism of Transition and Detransition, researchers Lal and Levine draw on thirty-seven retrospective autobiographical accounts from detransitioners to propose several overlapping developmental and psychological pathways that may contribute to trans-identification. The proposed mechanisms include social contagion, neurodevelopmental disorders, dissociative responses to sexual abuse, distress over same-sex attraction, and fears surrounding adult sexuality and sex stereotypes.

This developmentally nuanced and psychologically rich approach to case formulation stands in marked contrast to that of many “affirming” clinicians, who often take self-declared identities at face value, treating them as innate and immutable. Lal and Levine, by contrast, argue that trans-identification may function more as an idiom of distress—a culturally available framework through which diffuse psychological distress is interpreted and expressed. In this way, the study challenges central tenets of the gender-affirmative model, deepens our understanding of the clinical needs of trans-identified patients and detransitioners, and makes the case for new clinical models that can better conceptualize and address the factors contributing to trans-identification.

Crucially, nearly all study participants reported that social and institutional forces played a role in their initial transitions, lending support to concerns about social contagion in the rapid rise of transgender identities in recent years, particularly among young people.

Notably, some participants compared gender ideology to a “mimetic virus.” They described learning about transition through online forums and being socialized into the tenets of “gender ideology” through interactions with both peers and adults.

Participants also reported that their exposure to gender ideology was not confined to the digital world but extended into schools, where it was sometimes actively reinforced by staff. “Several participants described school environments where social transition was actively encouraged by staff, sometimes overriding parental hesitation,” the researchers noted. In this account, schools can function as another stop on what critics have called “the transgender conveyor belt”—a network of institutional practices, professional guidance, and laws that tip the scales toward “affirmation.”

Another transition pathway emerging from the interview data involves the relationship between neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and ADHD and self-appraisals related to one’s “gender.” Notably, one-third of the sample reported a neurodevelopmental diagnosis.

In retrospect, participants with autism diagnoses believed that their traits such as black-and-white thinking, sensory sensitivities, and social difficulties were sometimes misattributed to gender dysphoria. Some also suggested that adopting a transgender identity and entering a rule-based community with relatively clear social expectations helped mitigate social challenges associated with autism. Similarly, some participants with ADHD reported that gender transition itself became a “hyperfixation” that provided mental stimulation and a concrete goal to work towards.

A second, overlapping pathway emerging from the autobiographical accounts involved transgender identification as a dissociative response to sexual abuse or trauma. Nearly half the sample (N = 17) suggested that this played a role in their transition. Participants often reported that transitioning was motivated less by a strong desire to be perceived as the opposite sex than by a desire to escape their own sex. One female participant, for example, described how her transition was catalyzed by profound discomfort with the sense that her body was “on display” for boys and men.

These themes dovetail with another pathway identified by the researchers which involves a fear of adult sexuality and gendered expectations (N = 12). Among boys in this subgroup, most described their transition as a “flight from manhood” and, in some cases, as a way to suppress a sexuality they regarded as “inherently evil” because of pervasive negative stereotypes about masculinity. Other boys and men felt unable to live up to masculine ideals and therefore concluded that they could not succeed as men by the stereotypical and regressive logic of “gender identity” theory.

Interestingly, another transition theme to emerge was that, for some young people, identifying as and transitioning to the opposite sex was perceived as less stigmatizing than openly acknowledging their same-sex attraction.

Eleven detransitioners identified with this theme, with one male participant remarking that he “100%” transitioned to avoid the shame he associated with homosexuality. A female participant similarly reported that being a “trans man” created less social friction than living as a masculine lesbian. These accounts echo critics such as Andrew Sullivan, who have long argued that the rise in trans identification is partly driven by the “conversion” of same-sex-attracted youth who have not yet matured into their adult sexuality.

The study also provides insight into potential mechanisms that may help maintain trans-identification, including “validation euphoria” and the sunk-cost fallacy. These mechanisms could help explain why reports of patient regret are often delayed for years. And while detransition is often assumed to be rare, the true rate among today’s cohort of trans-identified youth remains virtually unknown.

Lal and Levine’s interviews with detransitioners also help identify potential catalysts for identity change. Interestingly, each involved an event or consequence that disrupted participants’ earlier self-conceptions. This finding is consistent with observations from gender-critical clinicians, who note that patients often fare better when their attention shifts outward, away from an intense internal fixation with being perceived as the opposite sex. Reported catalysts included unexpected life events, losing “affirming” friends or communities—which exposed individuals to perspectives outside their previous social circles—and medical complications from transitioning.

Unfortunately, because because the accounts of detransitioners challenge the orthodoxy of the affirmative-care model, their considerable needs are often overlooked by the same institutions and communities that championed their initial transitions. In the interviews, participants described feeling abandoned by the medical establishment and ostracized by former trans peers, suffering psychological distress related to medicalization, and experiencing embarrassment and shame as they returned to living as their sex.

As part of recent settlement agreements with the Department of Justice, Texas Children’s Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and Connecticut Children’s have agreed to establish first-of-their-kind clinics dedicated to detransition care. While this is a step in the right direction, detransitioners’ needs will likely extend well beyond procedural reversals to include psychological, social, and community support.

Lal and Levine’s study has limitations, but it nonetheless provides valuable insight into what one cohort of detransitioners believes motivated their transitions, sustained their identities, and ultimately led them to reject the medical-transition pathway. As the authors note, qualitative research can also generate hypotheses for future quantitative studies. Taken together, the findings provide further support for critics who argue that the “affirmative” model is incompatible with clinical best practices and lacks the psychological and developmental nuance that should be fundamental to sound clinical care.

Of course, such reforms are easier said than done. The American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the National Association of Social Workers have largely embraced the activist premises underlying youth gender medicine. Those commitments are reflected in their practice guidelines, professional education and training standards, and, in some cases, continuing-education requirements.

Concerned practitioners and researchers should summon the courage to press for systematic reviews requirements in support of policy statements, ideologically balanced panels when such policies are developed, and full transparency regarding conflicts of interest among committee and panel members. More fundamentally, these disciplines must move away from justifying experimental interventions on the basis of identity claims or civil-rights imperatives and recognize that distress, not identity, is the proper object of treatment.

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Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist, a Manhattan Institute fellow, and the CEO and editor-in-chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His work focuses on the science and public policy of sex and gender. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, The Washington Examiner, and other leading news outlets and scientific journals.

What’s going on with women’s basketball?

Within the span of about a day, two former NBA players announced that they intend to enter the 2027 WNBA draft. Yes, the “W” NBA, where the W stands for “Women’s.” The first to announce his intentions was Enes Kanter Freedom, a 6-foot-10, 250-pound center who played in the NBA for 11 seasons and averaged 11.2 points and 7.8 rebounds per game. Then, on the heels of Freedom’s announcement, Royce White, a 6-foot-8, 270-pound former Houston Rockets first-round pick, announced similar plans.

Were these men struggling internally for years before feeling safe enough to announce their true female identities? Pride Month in June would have been an optimal time to do that. No, these men are instead making a timely political point. Freedom, in a video posted on X, said that after reviewing the eligibility guidelines, he was declaring himself a WNBA draft prospect. White was even more explicit, telling Fox News, “I’m just having a blast in my feminine era.”

How we got here requires some explanation. Oddly enough, the path runs through Sophie Cunningham’s index finger.

During a June 22 game between Cunningham’s Indiana Fever and her former team, the Phoenix Mercury, WNBA star Caitlin Clark received a technical foul following an altercation with DeWanna Bonner. Cunningham responded by pointing insistently at Bonner, coupled with a skeptical and accusatory stare, seemingly demanding to know why Bonner had not also been assessed a technical. She kept pointing. And pointing. For about 22 seconds. The video got clipped and went viral on social media, where it escaped its original context and took on a meme life of its own.

By then, ESPN had already interviewed Cunningham for a lengthy feature. The viral finger-pointing episode had elevated her profile and turned her into one of the WNBA’s most recognizable personalities. The interview was released on July 21 and included Cunningham’s never-before-known views on males who identify as women competing in women’s sports. Cunningham wanted to “protect young girls” who should not be forced to compete against “biological men.” She harbored no hatred of transgender people, she said, but believed we can treat people with kindness while still being honest about sex differences. The following day, after her response had been officially drafted into the culture war, reporters gave her an opportunity to walk back or soften her remarks. “I said what I said,” she told them, while adding that her position was “common sense.”

Cunningham immediately transformed into one of the most prominent athletes calling to protect women’s sports. Her remarks set off a fight that the WNBA had mostly managed to avoid.

Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve then shared her views. “I come from a space of inclusion,” she said, arguing that the transgender-athlete issue was being blown out of proportion. “We need to protect trans kids,” Reeve added. “To me, it’s a human rights issue.” She later wore a shirt reading “Trans Kids Belong” during Minnesota’s game against Indiana. Golden State Valkyries forward Gabby Williams went even further: “I would welcome a trans athlete on my team or against my team, anytime.” She characterized objections as “another way to kind of attack trans people” and described transgender rights as “the next battle we have to fight as athletes.”

The debate then entered the stands. When two 16-year-old girls attending a Seattle Storm game displayed signs thanking Cunningham for speaking up for girls, Storm minority owner Celeste Keaton confronted the teenagers and used profanity toward them. The Storm apologized, and the WNBA later fined Keaton and suspended her for five home games. Some Storm players also reportedly directed thumbs-down gestures at the girls.

All of this led to enhanced scrutiny over the WNBA’s eligibility criteria. Many sports organizations such as the International Olympic Committee, World Athletics, and World Rugby have tightened up their rules with explicit language after experiencing significant controversy with male athletes vying for inclusion. The WNBA is, obviously, supposed to be a women’s league. Its collective-bargaining agreement says that “players who are women” are eligible, though it contains no additional language about whether “women” refers to sex, gender identity, or a natural or medicalized physiological state. This is likely because the WNBA has yet to face a serious test case—until now.

On declaring himself eligible for the 2027 WNBA draft, Enes Kanter Freedom said, “If simply declaring who you are is all that’s required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA.” Royce White, since his announcement, has been describing himself as a “sometimes identifying transgender woman” and even a “Black trans lesbian with a penile aesthetic.”

It’s easy to call for inclusion, or feign ignorance about what a woman is, or claim not to know the purpose of women’s sports when presented with abstract hypotheticals. But the WNBA has just been presented with two very real, very large, and very male test cases.

Their declarations have been dismissed by many as “stunts.” And in one sense, of course, they are stunts. Neither Freedom nor White genuinely believes he is a woman with sudden desires to come out of retirement and play professional women’s basketball. They are deliberately creating a spectacle.

But stunts can be effective in highlighting absurdity and forcing clarity—in this case, about where the WNBA truly stands on transgender inclusion. Either the league blocks these men from playing, revealing that it understands what a woman is and why excluding males is necessary, or it lets them in, likely prompting a backlash so extreme that indifference on the “What is a woman?” question won’t be sustainable.

One common way to dismiss concerns about male athletes who identify as women participating in female sports has been numerical: no males currently play in the WNBA, so why obsess over a theoretical problem? This response takes no stand on the merits about whether male inclusion is fair; it only observes that it’s rare. That’s a strange premise on which to design the rules of a sport.

If, for example, a sport’s rules contained vague language about whether performance-enhancing drugs were permitted, and objections were made calling for clearer wording, those criticisms would not be answered by stating that only three athletes are taking those drugs. And, technically speaking, those athletes wouldn’t be cheating because they would be competing under the rules as written. That’s why good rules are written in advance to close obvious, exploitable loopholes before they become major problems or sources of embarrassment.

Freedom and White have opted for an accelerationist approach. Why tolerate badly articulated rules and wait for them to be exploited in the future when they can be easily fixed right now?

If Freedom and White are ineligible, the WNBA will have to explain why. If it’s because they are biologically male, the league will need to clarify this in the rules language. If, conversely, Freedom and White can play with the women, and all that matters is a person’s “gender identity,” then the league will need to make that explicit. If eligibility is more complicated, and depends on hormones, puberty, medical transition, or some other standard, that, too, will need to be stated clearly and justified.

In response to the announcements by Freedom and White, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert convened a task force of team presidents and general managers to discuss eligibility rules on August 12. The meeting apparently did not produce any clarification; discussions will continue over the “coming weeks and months,” the league says. However long that may take, the WNBA can no longer respond to concerns by asserting that only women are allowed to play in the women’s league. Everyone knows what the W stands for. The question—for some people, anyway—is how to define “woman.”

Most of us already know the answer. We’ll wait to see if the WNBA does.

This essay was originally published in City Journal on August 14, 2026.

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About the Authors

Robert Deaner, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Grand Valley State University. His research uses an evolutionary perspective to illuminate sex differences and their portrayal.

Mike Lombardo, PhD, is a Professor Emeritus of Biology at Grand Valley State University. His research interests include the evolution of sports and throwing in humans and cooperation and behavioral ecology in birds.

The phrase “throw like a girl” is a crude stereotype, but, like many stereotypes, it contains more than a grain of truth. In fact, the sex difference in overhand throwing is one of the largest behavioral sex differences ever measured.

Psychologists typically express group differences in standard deviations. Among young children, boys outperform girls in throwing distance and velocity by about 1.5 standard deviations. The gap widens across childhood and adolescence. By late adolescence and adulthood, estimates are generally around two standard deviations or greater. Thomas and French’s classic meta-analysis remains a useful starting point for examining this sex difference.

A difference of two standard deviations is roughly the same magnitude as the familiar adult sex difference in height. It means that the average man throws as well as or better than about 98 percent of women.

The raw numbers make the point just as clearly. In one study of young adults, men threw a tennis ball at an average velocity of 29.4 meters per second, compared with 18.6 meters per second for women. In other words, the women averaged about 63 percent of the men’s throwing velocity. At elite levels, the sex difference remains large. In modern track and field competition, men throw the javelin about 30 percent farther than women despite using a heavier javelin. The sex difference in javelin performance is therefore substantially larger than the familiar male advantages in running and jumping events.

These are group averages, not rules about individuals. The distributions overlap, some girls and women throw extremely well, and training matters. Nonetheless, the sex difference is large, appears well before puberty, and generally increases with age.

* * *

In 2018, we published two review articles in The Quarterly Review of Biology. The first, Born to Throw, examined the ecological circumstances that may have favored the evolution of powerful human throwing. The second, On the Evolution of Sex Differences in Throwing, explored why throwing ability is so strongly sexually differentiated.

We argued that throwing probably first became important in threat displays and physical conflict and was later incorporated into hunting and power scavenging—that is, driving predators and other scavengers away from kills. Because males participated far more often in dangerous physical combat and more often in hunting, we proposed that selection for throwing-related traits was stronger in males.

Our claim was never that training and culture do not matter, that every boy throws better than every girl, or that girls and women should be discouraged from throwing activities. We argued only that the large average sex difference in throwing is partly innate.

Readers interested in a shorter account of the underlying research can read our article How Humans Became the Best Throwers on the Planet in The Conversation.

More recently, developmental biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling published Throwing Like a Girl: A Critique of Past Approaches and an Illustrated Proposal for a Path Forward in Biology of Sex Differences. Much of her article challenges our evolutionary account. We responded in a commentary published in Evolutionary Psychological Science. Free versions are available through Springer SharedIt and PsyArXiv.

Our disagreement is about throwing, but we think it illustrates something much larger: how Blank Slate thinking can persist even among researchers who readily acknowledge that nature and nurture interact.

Steven Pinker popularized the Blank Slate metaphor in his 2002 book The Blank Slate. In its most extreme form, the Blank Slate view holds that humans possess little meaningful evolved psychological structure and that culture and socialization therefore do nearly all the work in producing behavioral differences, including differences between girls and boys and between women and men.

Few serious scholars explicitly defend that position today. Instead, they say that nature and nurture interact.

Good. They do.

The problem begins when we ask what biology is actually allowed to explain.

See Steven Pinker Live This September!

Interested in learning more about The Blank Slate? This September, you can ask Steven Pinker about it yourself.

More than two decades after its publication, Pinker’s The Blank Slate remains one of the most important books ever written. Its central argument was simple: human beings are not infinitely malleable products of culture. We have a nature, shaped in part by evolution, and any serious attempt to understand society must begin by confronting the facts of human psychology rather than wishing them away.

That commitment to following evidence wherever it leads has defined Pinker’s career. This September, the Harvard psychologist and bestselling author will bring that approach to the stage for a series of live events across the United States and Canada.

Pinker will explore the ideas that have animated decades of his work—from human nature, language, and rationality to violence, progress, and the forces that shape modern society. He’ll also discuss themes from his latest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows.

These events offer something interviews and short lectures rarely can: the chance to hear Pinker develop his arguments at conversational length and then put your own questions to him during the audience Q&A. If The Blank Slate left you with questions—or convinced you that its warnings are even more relevant today—this is your opportunity to continue the conversation in person.

TOUR DATES: New York (Sept. 1), Boston area (Sept. 10), Chicago (Sept. 11), San Francisco (Sept. 12), Montreal (Sept. 13), and Toronto (Sept. 15).

Tickets and event details are available through Steven Pinker’s official tour website.

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Why Fausto-Sterling Matters

Fausto-Sterling is not an incidental figure in modern debates about sex. Her famous 1993 essay The Five Sexes helped popularize the idea that the familiar male-female binary is biologically inadequate. She proposed additional “sexes” based on intersex conditions and argued more broadly that sex should be understood as a continuum.

Those arguments became enormously influential. In our view, they also created lasting confusion by encouraging people to mistake variation in sexual development for evidence that biological sex itself is not binary. But when it comes to sexual reproduction, the distinction is straightforward: females are organized around producing ova and males around producing sperm. There is no third gamete type or reproductive role, and intersex conditions do not create one.

One of us has examined these arguments in an essay for Skeptic. Other evolutionary biologists, including Colin Wright, have also offered detailed treatments of the issue.

We will leave that debate there. In this essay, our dispute with Fausto-Sterling concerns a different question: Can an important behavioral difference between males and females be partly biological?

Fausto-Sterling emphasizes that nature and nurture are “entangled.” Fine. We agree. The problem is that after making this concession, she allows biology to explain essentially nothing.

Misrepresenting Our Evolutionary Argument

Fausto-Sterling portrays recent challenges to “Man the Hunter” as a serious problem for our hypothesis. Women, she argues, hunted more than traditional accounts acknowledged. She therefore concludes that the idea that women experienced less selection for throwing prowess needs to go “back to the drawing board.”

There is an immediate problem with this critique: hunting was not our primary evolutionary scenario. Combat was.

We said this explicitly. Both of our 2018 papers proposed that throwing first arose in threat displays and fighting and was later incorporated into hunting. Indeed, the abstract of Born to Throw states that “throwing first arose during agonistic interactions and was later incorporated into hunting by human ancestors.” This was not a stray speculation buried in a footnote. It was the central evolutionary scenario we proposed.

The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that physical aggression, lethal combat, and warfare are heavily male-biased behaviors. That part of our hypothesis therefore matters greatly.

Fausto-Sterling does not merely give combat too little attention. She effectively recasts our hypothesis as one centered on hunting and then attacks that version instead.

We cannot know whether this reflects careless reading or something less innocent. What we can say is that her readers are not given an accurate account of the hypothesis she claims to be criticizing. That is poor scholarship.

That said, hunting was an important secondary component of our hypothesis, so her treatment of that evidence deserves attention as well.

Woman the Hunter

A 2023 paper by Anderson and colleagues, The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s Contribution to the Hunt Across Ethnographic Contexts, received enormous publicity. After reviewing ethnographic descriptions of 63 foraging societies, the authors reported evidence of women hunting in 79 percent of them.

The finding quickly spread as evidence that “Man the Hunter” was a sexist myth, and Fausto-Sterling embraced it as a challenge to our evolutionary scenario.

There was, however, a serious problem. Roughly a year before Fausto-Sterling submitted her paper in 2025, a 15-author team—including numerous researchers with extensive experience studying hunter-gatherers—published Female Foragers Sometimes Hunt, Yet Gendered Divisions of Labor Are Real. The authors identified problems with sample selection and coding, as well as a more fundamental problem with what the 79-percent statistic actually measures.

The basic issue is easy to understand: asking whether women ever hunt is not the same as measuring how sexually differentiated hunting is.

Imagine a society in which 100 men hunt regularly and one woman hunts occasionally. If an ethnographer mentions her, that society can be coded as “women hunt.”

Technically true, but nearly useless for estimating the magnitude of the sex difference.

Hagen, one of the critique’s authors, illustrated the problem using individual-level records from a large cross-cultural dataset on foraging. Males accounted for the overwhelming majority of hunting records and about 99.7 percent of the recorded hunted meat.

The dataset was not designed to provide an unbiased global estimate, and Hagen emphasized several reasons for caution. Nevertheless, it vividly illustrates how little the binary variable “women hunt: yes or no?” tells us about the magnitude of the sexual division of labor.

Women sometimes hunt. Of course they do. But that does not mean hunting is not strongly sexually differentiated.

In sum, both components of our evolutionary scenario—male-male combat and hunting—remain highly plausible and are supported by substantial evidence.

What Happened to the Rest of the Evidence?

Fausto-Sterling’s treatment of the evolutionary evidence is only part of the problem.

Our 2018 argument did not rest on a handful of studies showing that boys throw farther and faster than girls. We reviewed evidence on throwing velocity and distance, accuracy and targeting, elite performance, training and sports experience, cross-cultural behavior, prenatal androgen exposure, shoulder and arm anatomy, and injury patterns.

Fausto-Sterling engages with only one part of that evidence: sex differences in children’s throwing.

Consider experience. Girls improve when they practice throwing. Of course they do. The important question is whether differences in experience explain most or all of the sex difference.

The evidence suggests they do not. In Does the Throwing “Gender Gap” Occur in Germany?, Ehl, Roberton, and Langendorfer studied German children partly because throwing sports were less culturally prominent there. Boys nevertheless displayed more advanced throwing patterns than girls. More strikingly, there was almost no overlap in throwing velocity, with a sex difference of roughly five standard deviations.

An especially informative study examined Aboriginal Australian children. Historical accounts suggested that Aboriginal girls and women had substantially more throwing-related experience than is typical in Western societies. The Aboriginal girls threw better than girls in several comparison samples. In other words, experience mattered. Yet Aboriginal boys still threw faster than Aboriginal girls. The sex difference was smaller than in U.S. samples but remained large, at about 1.4 standard deviations. Thomas and colleagues’ study of Aboriginal Australian children illustrates what a genuine interactionist account would predict: environmental experience can alter performance without erasing an underlying sex difference.

Then there is anatomy. Our review identified numerous sexually differentiated features of the shoulder and upper body that contribute, or plausibly contribute, to throwing performance. Consider just one: the glenoid fossa, the socket of the scapula where the upper arm articulates with the shoulder.

Across the eight adult samples we reviewed that measured glenoid height or breadth, males had larger dimensions in every case. The median sex difference was about 2.3 standard deviations—a very large difference, despite some overlap between the male and female distributions. Sex differences in glenoid dimensions can even be detected in young children.

No single finding proves our evolutionary hypothesis. What matters is the convergence of developmental, cross-cultural, performance, and anatomical evidence. Fausto-Sterling does not seriously grapple with that convergence.

Apparently It Can’t Be Innate If It’s Not Present at Birth

Fausto-Sterling makes an especially puzzling developmental argument when discussing the early emergence of the sex difference. She notes that throwing differences are “not there at birth, when infants cannot even lift their head.”

Well, yes.

Many evolved traits and capacities—such as walking and talking—are absent at birth and emerge only through development. An innate predisposition does not need to appear fully formed in a newborn. Genes regulate developmental pathways. Hormones act at particular stages. Bones and muscles grow. Nervous systems mature and respond to experience.

A newborn’s inability to throw therefore tells us essentially nothing about whether later sex differences in throwing are partly innate. Treating “not present at birth” as evidence against an evolved contribution confuses innateness with neonatal expression.

For a developmental biologist, that is a remarkable mistake.

Statistically Controlling Away What Needs to Be Explained

Fausto-Sterling makes another blunder in her use of statistical control.

She discusses Roberton and Konczak’s study of children’s overarm throwing, which measured developmental components such as humeral motion, trunk and forearm action, stepping, and stride. Once those components were entered into a regression model, sex explained little additional variation in throwing velocity. Fausto-Sterling highlights the authors’ description of sex as “redundant with developmental level.”

But this analysis describes the difference; it does not explain its cause.

Suppose we tried to explain the male-female difference in height by entering femur length, tibia length, and torso length into a regression. Once those components were included, sex would add little additional predictive power for total height. That obviously would not show that the height difference is nonbiological. It would merely identify the physical components through which the sex difference is expressed.

Ten Babies Cannot Settle the Question

Fausto-Sterling’s article also includes an empirical component: an exploratory analysis of ten infants—five boys and five girls—with especially detailed discussion of one boy and one girl. The five boys began active ball play at an average age of 9.7 months, compared with 12.1 months for the girls. Fausto-Sterling also observed more ball-related interaction in some mother-son dyads and uses these observations to illustrate how different experiences might send boys and girls down different developmental pathways.

The observations are interesting and may point to real environmental contributions. They cannot, however, answer the most important causal questions. Did mothers create the difference by treating sons and daughters differently? Did the infants differ in their attraction to balls and thereby elicit different responses from their mothers? Did both processes contribute?

Observations of ten infants cannot tell us.

More fundamentally, Fausto-Sterling treats developmental and evolutionary explanations as though they compete, when they should complement one another. A complete account must address both how a sex difference develops and why natural selection may have favored the underlying predispositions.

Children are not passive recipients of socialization. They seek out some experiences and avoid others, differ in what captures their attention, and may elicit different responses from parents. Parents, in turn, influence their children. Ridley captured this dynamic in the title of his 2003 book, Nature Via Nurture: biological predispositions often develop through experience rather than instead of it.

There is also a striking asymmetry in Fausto-Sterling’s standards of evidence. She questions whether studies of sex differences in children’s throwing across eight countries can support broad conclusions, partly because some samples were modest. By our calculation from the studies listed in her own Table 1, the median sample size was 160. Yet she is willing to draw theoretical lessons from a study of just ten infants, with much of the detailed narrative resting on only two of them.

Small samples, apparently, become more illuminating when they point in the preferred direction.

The Modern Blank Slate

This is where the throwing dispute becomes more interesting than throwing itself. Few scholars today explicitly embrace the strong Blank Slate. The standard language—including Fausto-Sterling’s—is interactionist: nature and nurture interact; genes and environments interact; biology and culture interact.

For many sex-and-gender scholars, however, this interactionist language amounts to little more than lip service. Again and again, reasonable observations about development or social influence are used to prevent biology from explaining much of anything.

A trait is plastic, so biology is discounted. Parents treat boys and girls differently, so parental behavior is presumed to have created the difference. Practice changes performance, so the original difference is treated as socially produced. Development mediates a difference, so developmental processes are treated as alternatives to evolutionary ones.

The premises may be true. In each case, however, the conclusion does not follow.

Consider nutrition. It strongly affects height, but no serious person concludes that the average sex difference in height is therefore socially created. Or consider walking. Experience helps children learn to walk, but habitual, efficient bipedal locomotion depends on evolved anatomy and developmental machinery.

Saying that nature and nurture are “entangled” is therefore correct, but it does not answer the question of what each contributes. Throwing provides one unusually clear example. Occupational interests provide another—and one that matters far more in ordinary modern life.

From Throwing to Occupational Interests

Throwing probably mattered greatly throughout much of human evolutionary history but matters relatively little for most people today. Occupational interests are almost the reverse. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors never had to decide whether to become computer programmers, carpenters, graphic designers, nurses, or elementary-school teachers. Yet the interests that shape such choices now have major practical consequences.

One of the largest and best-replicated psychological sex differences involves the people-things dimension. In their 2009 meta-analysis, Men and Things, Women and People, Su, Rounds, and Armstrong analyzed data from 503,188 people. Men showed greater interest in working with things, while women showed greater interest in working with people. The difference was nearly one standard deviation, and the sex difference in engineering interests was even larger.

More recently, Stoet and Geary analyzed the occupational aspirations of 473,260 adolescents across 80 countries and economic regions. In every country, more boys aspired to things-oriented and STEM careers, while more girls aspired to people-oriented careers. These differences also tended to be larger in countries with greater female empowerment.

Cross-national comparisons cannot settle questions of causation, but the recurrence of these differences across societies is difficult to reconcile with a socialization-only account.

Relevant differences also appear long before young people begin choosing careers. A meta-analysis of 75 studies found robust sex-typed toy preferences, while a longitudinal study by Kung found that gender-typed play at age three and a half predicted gender-typed occupational interests at age 13.

None of this proves that occupational interests are innate. Socialization begins early too.

Evidence consistent with a hormonal contribution comes from congenital adrenal hyperplasia, or CAH. Females with classic CAH experience unusually high prenatal androgen exposure. Beltz, Swanson, and Berenbaum found that females with CAH showed greater things-oriented interests than unaffected females, while Frisén and colleagues found that women with CAH were more likely than controls to work in male-dominated occupations, especially among those with the form associated with the greatest prenatal androgen exposure.

CAH cannot by itself establish the effects of prenatal androgens because the condition has consequences beyond hormone exposure, and sample sizes are necessarily modest. But when considered alongside the large population-level sex difference, its early developmental precursors, and its recurrence across cultures, the CAH evidence makes a purely socialization-based account increasingly difficult to sustain.

Biology Gets a Courtesy Mention

So how do scholars who describe themselves as interactionists, yet remain deeply skeptical of evolutionary explanations, respond to this evidence?

A 2021 exchange about sex differences in STEM provides a striking example.

STEM interests are not identical to the broader people-things dimension, but the connection is direct. Engineering, physics, and computer science are among the most things-oriented fields, and broad differences in occupational interests help shape who enters them.

In Men, Women and STEM: Why the Differences and What Should Be Done?, Stewart-Williams and Halsey argued that sex differences in career-related preferences—including people-things interests—reflect both biological and cultural influences and contribute to unequal participation in STEM.

El-Hout, Garr-Schultz, and Cheryan responded in Beyond Biology: The Importance of Cultural Factors in Explaining Gender Disparities in STEM Preferences. They accurately acknowledge that Stewart-Williams and Halsey’s position is interactionist: both social and biological factors contribute. They then write, “There are three reasons why we find the biological explanation troubling.”

From there, nearly all of their explanatory attention turns to culture: stereotypes, “masculine defaults,” belonging, classroom environments, self-promotion, and interventions intended to make STEM settings more attractive to women.

Much of this evidence is useful, even compelling. For example, high-school girls reported greater immediate interest in taking a computer-science course after encountering a classroom without stereotypically “geeky” cues. That shows that environmental cues can shift expressed interest. It does not show, however, that the effect persists, alters career choices, or explains the broader sex difference in occupational interests.

More importantly, evidence that environments can influence interests tells us nothing about whether innate predispositions also contribute. Yet this is the rhetorical implication of El-Hout and colleagues’ argument: evidence for social influence is treated as though it weakens the case for biological influence. The inference does not follow.

El-Hout and colleagues then make a different kind of argument: biological explanations may have undesirable social consequences. They warn that such explanations can reinforce stereotypes and describe them as “treading on dangerous ground.”

Some biological claims may indeed have undesirable social consequences, and that matters when scientists consider how to communicate their findings. But it tells us nothing about whether those claims are true.

Fine, Joel, and Rippon employ a similar strategy in their widely circulated essay Eight Things You Need to Know About Sex, Gender, Brains, and Behavior. Most of their cautions are valid: distributions overlap, brains are plastic, development is complicated, and environmental effects occur. But none of those observations shows that psychological sex differences are not substantially influenced by biology.

This is the recurring move. Begin with a sound observation about overlap, plasticity, development, or social influence. Then treat it as though it undermines the possibility of an innate biological contribution.

The premise is true. The implied conclusion does not follow.

Back to Throwing: What Evidence Would Count?

So let’s return to throwing and ask a more precise question: What evidence would refute—or at least substantially weaken—the hypothesis that the male throwing advantage partly reflects innate factors?

Suppose carefully controlled studies found that the sex difference disappeared once boys and girls received equivalent training and experience. Suppose the difference did not consistently appear across cultures. Suppose prenatal androgen exposure was unrelated to throwing-relevant behavior. Suppose males and females showed no systematic differences in anatomy relevant to throwing.

Would those findings weaken our hypothesis? Absolutely.

But much of the evidence points in the opposite direction. The male advantage appears across cultures, emerges early, persists even when training and experience are taken into account, and is accompanied by relevant anatomical and hormonal evidence. No single finding proves our hypothesis. Taken together, however, the evidence makes a socialization-only explanation difficult to sustain.

The researchers who produced this evidence deserve more than silence. Many spent years designing demanding developmental, cross-cultural, anatomical, hormonal, and training-controlled studies precisely to test whether socialization alone could explain the difference. Imagine doing that work, only to see Fausto-Sterling write about the same question as though the research does not exist whenever its findings are inconvenient for her argument. That is more than selective citation. It is a shabby and deeply disrespectful way to treat both the researchers and the evidence.

The Blank Slate Zombie

The strong Blank Slate—the idea that human psychology is largely written by culture—has been declared dead many times. Yet it refuses to stay dead. That is why we think of it as a zombie.

Today, biology is usually acknowledged. Nature and nurture interact. Fine. But the Blank Slate survives through two recurring moves. First, reasonable observations—that traits are plastic, parents influence children, experience matters, and development mediates behavior—are treated as though they rule out an innate contribution. They do not. Second, evidence that could challenge a socialization-only explanation is ignored, minimized, or sidestepped.

Fausto-Sterling uses both moves. Together, they make the Blank Slate effectively unfalsifiable—and therefore impossible to kill. That may be rhetorically effective, but it is not science. Science requires allowing evidence to overturn the story you would prefer to believe.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist, a Manhattan Institute fellow, and the CEO and editor-in-chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His work focuses on the science and public policy of sex and gender. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, The Washington Examiner, and other leading news outlets and scientific journals.

Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate seems to have aged in reverse. It was published in 2002, though I read it in 2006 when I started developing an obsession with evolutionary psychology. At the time, I viewed it as the killing blow to blank slate psychology—the notion that human nature is purely a product of social construction. The book sat on my shelf all these years as a representation of an argument that had been definitively won. But after personally battling gender ideology and sex pseudoscience for almost a decade, it now represents a warning to society that went shamefully ignored.

The intellectual habits and belief systems Pinker criticized did not disappear. Instead, they infected neighboring fields, became infused with moral dogma, and then expanded from making claims about the mind to making claims about the body itself.

Blank slate psychology has a long history. John Locke once described the human mind as “white paper” drawn on by life experience. Twentieth century behaviorists were even more extreme. John B. Watson famously claimed that, given a dozen infants and full control over their environment, he could train any one of them to become a doctor, lawyer, artist, or thief, regardless of inherited traits. This confidence in the power of conditioning spread into psychology, education, and popular culture.

Pinker’s great achievement in The Blank Slate was not simply showing that genes matter, as many competent scientists have demonstrated before. Rather, it was exposing the way that fear of human nature had distorted entire fields of study. Many intellectuals seemed to believe that simply recognizing innate differences would somehow justify unequal treatment before the law or weaken the case for social reform. Pinker argued that scientific facts must be separated from moral judgments, because if you believe that equality under the law requires everyone to be biologically interchangeable, you’re hitching your moral commitments to empirical claims that are always only one experiment away from being proven false.

See Steven Pinker Live This September

Join Steven Pinker for an evening of wide-ranging conversation about language, human nature, rationality, and progress, followed by questions from the audience. Whether you are a longtime reader or simply curious about his work, this North American tour offers a rare chance to hear one of today’s leading public intellectuals discuss and develop his ideas at length.

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As an evolutionary biologist, I have always found the strongest version of blank slate psychology almost impossible to take seriously, because even the most cursory glance at nature shows it to be false. Put down the Women’s Studies journal article and look at data from our closest animal relatives. Simply knowing average body size differences between the males and females of a species can tell us a great deal about their likely current behavior as well as the evolutionary forces in the past that produced them. For instance, when males are a lot larger than females, as in gorillas, we generally expect intense competition among males for access to harems of females, and large differences in reproductive success as a result. When size differences are small or nonexistent, as in gibbons, we more often see males and females pairing up and less extreme competition among males. While this rule doesn’t hold in every case, it is a firmly established pattern with a sound evolutionary reasoning.

Humans did not emerge from outside nature. To believe that humans have somehow shed all our inherited tendencies requires one to hold that while every other animal has behavioral traits shaped by evolution, humans somehow lost them, only for our societies to recreate the same sex-related patterns through socialization. Why would evolution erase these tendencies only for culture to independently produce them in the same form? Why not just keep the evolved tendencies? I have yet to hear coherent answers to these questions.

Political pushback to this basic evolutionary reasoning is not new. When E. O. Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, the vast majority of the book focused on nonhuman animals, where readers were presumably all nodding along to his sound and compelling arguments. But in the final chapter, he crossed what he later called the “guarded boundary” between the natural sciences and the humanities. The social justice activists of the era accused sociobiology of promoting racism, sexism, eugenics, and even genocide. At a 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, protesters poured a pitcher of water over Wilson’s head while chanting that he was “all wet.”

Shockingly little has changed since then. Human evolutionary psychology—especially when applied to sex differences—is still met with strong resistance. I hesitate to call human evolutionary psychology “controversial” because the notion of evolved psychological differences between the sexes is almost universally accepted as true among evolutionary biologists. The evidence is overwhelming. We’ve since moved on to asking and answering the relevant questions downstream of that fact, like which traits differ, how large those differences are, and how biology and culture might interact.

Socialization matters, of course. I don’t know any biologists who’ve ever claimed it doesn’t. But many feminist scholars and social scientists frequently portray culture alone as a complete explanation, but strangely only for the biological differences it finds ideologically inconvenient. Colette Dowling’s The Frailty Myth, for example, argued that the athletic advantage that boys enjoy over girls are mostly produced by culture and tried to argue that strength differences mostly disappear when men and women are matched for size and training. But this simply isn’t true. Controlling for body size, males have considerably more lean mass and much greater upper-body strength. That doesn’t mean training doesn’t matter, but it does not erase sexual dimorphism.

Given that we have more than enough data to debunk blank slate psychology many times over, why didn’t Pinker’s book and the quarter-century of data generated after its publication settle the debate once and for all? Unfortunately, academia is unusually good at shielding bad ideas from outside criticism. Most scientists are busy with their own research and assume that weak arguments will remain on the fringes. This was my mindset for years. I viewed sex pseudoscience as akin to belief in a flat Earth. I only spoke up once I realized how quickly it was gaining political influence and institutional protection. This was made possible by treating disagreement as a form of harm, which isn’t really a debate tactic available to flat-Earthers.

That was my experience after I published “The New Evolution Deniers” in 2018 and began challenging the widespread denial of biological sex differences beyond the brain. Blank-slate psychology had somehow mutated into blank-slate morphology. The older and more familiar claim was that male and female minds were basically identical until society imposed gender roles on them. The new claim was that the sexes themselves were infinitely malleable social constructs that can be altered through identity, language, hormones, or surgery.

Once a field becomes protected from criticism on moral grounds, it completely loses its “self-correcting” empirical anchor and begins to drift further from reality.

Pinker has taken a different path from mine. He has remained in academia and used the enormous credibility he has built over his career to defend reason, scientific truth, and open debate on volatile topics. He is Harvard’s Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology and a co-leader of the university’s Council on Academic Freedom. His work on psychology, language, human nature, and rational thinking makes him unusually difficult to dismiss as a crank.

Prominent dissenters make it easier for others to speak openly. An adjunct professor can often be quietly cancelled; Steven Pinker is much harder to silence. His calm demeanor and precise style also helps. I have tried to follow the same approach of prioritizing facts over rhetoric.

Some people on the right dislike Pinker because of his strong opposition to Donald Trump. But political tribe is the wrong place to draw the line. The more important divide is between people who try to discover what is true and people who attempt to bend the facts to conform to their ideological commitments. On that question, Pinker has been one of the most ardent and consistent defenders of truth out there, and he has done so from within institutions that desperately need internal resistance.

The Blank Slate remains essential reading because the impulse it challenged never disappeared. It may never disappear. Pinker understood early that denying human nature does not make society more moral or humane, because you cannot build a better society on a false theory of humanity.

See Steven Pinker Live This September

This September, Steven Pinker brings his ideas to the stage for a series of live events across North America. Drawing on decades of work in psychology, language, human nature, rationality, and human progress, Pinker will explore the major questions that have shaped his bestselling books and distinguished academic career.

These events offer something that interviews and short lectures rarely allow: the chance to hear Pinker develop his ideas at conversational length—and to put your own questions to him during the audience Q&A.

Whether you have followed Pinker’s work for years or are simply curious about one of today’s most influential public intellectuals, this is a rare opportunity to see his clear, evidence-driven style of thinking in action.

Tour dates:

September 1 — New York (TICKET LINK)
September 10 — Boston area (TICKET LINK)
September 11 — Chicago (TICKET LINK)
September 12 — San Francisco (TICKET LINK)
September 13 — Montreal (TICKET LINK)
September 15 — Toronto (TICKET LINK)

Tickets and event details are available through Steven Pinker’s official website.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

Ashley Webb, a man who identifies as a woman and is running for the United States Senate in Maine in the wake of Graham Platner’s sudden withdrawal, went viral recently for promising that he would never lie to or deceive the public. The remark struck many viewers as ironic, given that Webb made it while wearing a dress, presenting himself as a woman, and expecting voters to address him as one.

But I think the more important question is not whether Webb is consciously deceiving anyone. While honesty and transparency are important, being sincere in one’s beliefs is not the same as possessing a sound and reasonable mind. A person can hold genuine beliefs that are wildly detached from reality.

Webb’s online public record reveals that his tether to reality is, at best, alarmingly tenuous, and I believe having a firm grasp of reality should not be viewed as optional for someone seeking one of the most powerful offices in the country.

Webb identifies not only as transgender but also as intersex. Earlier this month, he announced his run for the Democratic nomination in a post titled “Running Openly as Trans Intersex candidate for Senate in Maine.”

The account’s comment history contains some truly extraordinary claims.

Webb claims to ovulate. Webb also claims to experience a monthly period that began when he was 25. However, because Webb was born with “external male parts” rather than “the proper hole,” the supposed menstrual blood cannot leave through a vagina. Instead, Webb believes that a hidden female reproductive tract formed an “exit connection” with his colon, causing monthly rectal bleeding.

“When you don’t have the proper hole, it finds one of two exits,” Webb wrote. “My exit connection was made with my colon. Cause when I get this monthly pain, that is where the blood comes out of.”

Webb has not given any anatomical evidence for this claim. According to his other posts, colonoscopies have not found any such connection, while repeated CT scans have failed to reveal a uterus or ovaries.

Read more

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About the Author

James L. Nuzzo, PhD, is an exercise scientist and men’s health researcher. Dr. Nuzzo has published over 80 research articles in peer-reviewed journals. He writes regularly about exercise, men’s health, and academia at The Nuzzo Letter on Substack. Dr. Nuzzo is also active on X @JamesLNuzzo.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is not merely a set of workplace trainings or campus slogans. DEI is a political movement rooted in critical theory, intersectionality, and “social justice”—ideas that often begin from premises at odds with reality. The result is a worldview that does not merely fail to promote human flourishing, but actively obstructs it.

That obstruction comes at a cost.

A framework for understanding those costs can help explain the damage DEI has done, expedite its removal from institutions, and warn future generations against repeating the mistake. DEI imposes three broad kinds of costs: the cost of commission, the cost of omission,[1] and the cost of correction.

The Cost of Commission

The cost of commission is probably what most people think of first when they think about the price of DEI. It is the cost of doing DEI.

Some of that cost is financial. Between 2016 and 2024, the University of Michigan spent $250 million on DEI staffing and programs, with many DEI staffers earning between $152,000 and $416,000 per year. Federal agencies have spent billions more on DEI-related projects, including the Departments of Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services. And because DEI causes bureaucracy to bloat, it reduces institutional efficiency that creates indirect costs that are harder to measure but no less real.

DEI also creates unnecessary noise in systems. In academia, this has been achieved by lowering the bar for what counts as rigorous scholarship. Thousands of DEI-based papers are submitted to journals each year, further clogging an already overburdened and flawed peer-review system. Professors’ inboxes fill with requests to review weak papers dressed up in fashionable jargon. When those papers are eventually published, they pollute databases with junk research that other scholars must waste time navigating around.

But the costs of commission do not end there.

DEI policies and practices also harm human health and well-being. They include the physical and psychological harms caused by “gender-affirming care.” They include the injuries, lost medals, and lost opportunities suffered by women and girls forced to compete against male athletes. They include the damage done by public health authorities telling people that their health is almost entirely determined by “structural” forces, and feminist psychiatry telling boys and men that their struggles are the product of privilege and toxic masculinity.

DEI judicial activism is another costly act of commission. When judges influenced by critical legal theory treat criminals less harshly because those criminals occupy favored identity categories, the public becomes less safe. Take, for example, the case of a New York City woman who, after being assaulted by a black man, refused to cooperate with prosecutors because she did not want to see another black man go to jail. Weeks later, that same man killed an elderly man in the subway.

Human life, quite literally, can be one of the costs of DEI.

The Cost of Omission

The costs of commission are bad enough. But for every act of commission, there is usually an omission.

Omission means leaving something out, or failing to do something that should have been done. In the case of DEI, the cost of omission is the cost of all the things institutions did not do because they were busy doing DEI instead. It represents the counterfactual: the research not conducted, the students not taught, the time not spent on the actual mission of the institution.

Counterfactuals are hard to quantify because they concern things that never happened. Nevertheless, we can still speculate rationally about the kinds of losses DEI has imposed.

In academic research, the cost of omission includes the knowledge that was never produced because a government agency funded a DEI project instead of a more academically serious one. It includes the papers that were never published—or were delayed in publication—because their conclusions offended the ideological commitments of journal editors. And, in the most extreme cases, it includes the entire careers and research programs derailed because scholars were punished or cancelled for challenging DEI orthodoxy.

In teaching, the cost of omission is the insightful lecture students never heard because a professor was hired for ideological or demographic reasons rather than academic merit. It is the serious course material that was minimized, distorted, or crowded out to make room for DEI programming. It is the hours students spent completing ideological coursework instead of studying history, biology, economics, literature, mathematics, or any number of subjects that might have actually expanded their minds. One analysis estimated that undergraduates in the United States spend a combined 40 million hours fulfilling DEI course requirements.

Finally, there is the time lost by faculty and staff. In 2024, more than 4.1 million people worked as faculty or staff at American colleges and universities. If each spent just 30 minutes a year on DEI-related requirements, that would amount to more than 2 million hours annually diverted from other work. Even if the burden were only 10 minutes per person per year, the total would still be roughly 685,000 hours.

Those hours could have been spent grading papers, answering student emails, improving lectures, reading scholarship, writing papers, collecting data, analyzing results, or simply giving one’s mind a needed rest. Instead, they were fed into the DEI machine.

The Cost of Correction

The cost of correction is the time, money, and labor required to fix the problems DEI creates.

Correction is costly because it pulls people away from their usual productive work. The hours spent cleaning up DEI’s messes are hours not spent building, teaching, researching, writing, discovering, or creating something new. Correctors become institutional janitors, forced to spend their time cleaning up the ideological trash left behind by others.

Examples are everywhere. Individuals and organizations now devote enormous resources to correcting DEI-driven policies, such as Olympic rules allowing male athletes to compete in women’s sports. Others spend years challenging DEI’s legal overreach, including lawsuits over discriminatory hiring practices and the destruction of sex-based protections for women and girls.

Then there are the institutions created as alternatives to DEI-captured ones. Peterson Academy, the University of Austin, and the growing network of classical liberal schools all exist, at least in part, because so many existing educational institutions have been corrupted by DEI. The same is true of organizations founded to oppose DEI’s excesses, including Reality’s Last Stand, Do No Harm, The College Fix, and Critical Therapy Antidote.

Researchers pay this cost, too. They spend hours, days, and sometimes years correcting crazy DEI research that should never have passed peer review in the first place. Each week, Colin Wright and I devote many hours to this corrective work. But we are not alone.

Consider David Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri. In 2021, and again in 2025, Geary took time away from his usual research and teaching in evolution and cognitive development to write essays in Quillette exposing the blatant sex discrimination embedded in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index.

When serious scholars like Geary must spend their days on DEI clean-up duty, something valuable is lost. The public gains a necessary correction. But science loses the work those scholars might otherwise have done.

Residual Costs and the Clean-up Mission

DEI has imposed enormous costs through commission, omission, and correction. Some of the direct financial costs can be quantified. But many of the deeper costs are harder to measure: the wasted time, the institutional decay, the research never conducted, the careers derailed, the standards lowered, and the years now required to repair the damage.

And the costs are not confined to today and the past. They will persist for years.

In a recent analysis, I found that some aspects of DEI in academic articles appear to have peaked a year or two ago. But others have not. Even where the trend has started to decline, the prevalence of DEI language remains far higher than it was before 2019.

That means the institutional clean-up mission is far from over. Universities are now staffed by DEI-era hires who carry these assumptions into their teaching, research, mentoring, peer review, and administrative work. Even if formal DEI offices are dismantled, the ideology will live on inside departments, journals, classrooms, grant committees, and professional associations.

DEI has been a societal nuisance. It has wasted time and money, increased political polarization, lowered standards of performance and civility, and lied to people about the causes of their own circumstances.

None of this matches the image DEI activists like to project: empathy, kindness, inclusion, moral superiority. There is nothing especially empathetic, kind, or moral about uprooting the foundations of human freedom and flourishing and replacing them with lies, discrimination, and a return to tribal warfare.

Those engaged in DEI clean-up duty should not lose sight of the importance of the mission.

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Notes

[1] Credit to Victor Davis Hanson, who has referred to costs of commission and omission on his podcast: Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words. The cost of correction is my contribution to this framework for conceptualizing the broad costs of DEI.

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About the Author

Dr. Greg Brown is a professor of Exercise Science at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. His research focuses on the effects of nutritional supplements, physiological responses to exercise, and sex differences in sports performance. He has over 60 peer-reviewed publications and is an active member of several professional organizations, including the American College of Sports Medicine and the National Strength and Conditioning Association. He enjoys running, hunting, fishing, and spending time with his family. He and his wife, Amber, have two sons, one daughter in law, and a grandson.

The International Olympic Committee’s 2026 policy on protecting the female category acknowledges a basic fact: males retain substantial performance advantages across sports. But the IOC’s accompanying FAQ suggests that some precision sports, including shooting and archery, may be less affected by these differences.

At first glance, that seems plausible. Shooting and archery appear to reward skill, focus, and technique more than raw strength or speed. There is no sprinting, no jumping, no tackling, no collision. Just focus, control, and precision. So it is easy to assume that because these sports depend so heavily on skill, biological differences between males and females should matter little, if at all (Hamilton et al., 2021).

But that assumption does not match my experience.

I have been involved in shooting and archery since I was five years old. Across five decades, I have used air rifles, handguns, rimfire and centerfire rifles, shotguns, recurve bows, and compound bows in both recreational and hunting contexts. I have also taught archery, firearm safety, and shooting skills to youth and college students.

My academic and professional background is in human performance. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Physical Education, a master’s degree in Exercise Science, and a Ph.D. in Health and Human Performance. I also spent more than two decades as a professor of exercise science. Across all those settings—on the range, in the field, and in the classroom—I have observed the same pattern: even in sports that emphasize precision and technique, physical differences between males and females can meaningfully affect performance.

At first, those differences are not always obvious. Beginners in archery and shooting usually start in roughly the same place. Everyone has to learn stance, grip, aim, breathing, and follow-through. But with practice, certain patterns begin to emerge.

Some shooters can hold a bow at full draw or a pistol at arm’s length for longer periods without shaking, even after repeated shots. Others fatigue more quickly. And when fatigue sets in, accuracy declines.

These differences are often described as differences in “skill.” But they are not only skill. They are also rooted in anatomy and physiology.

Consider archery. Drawing a bow requires upper-body and shoulder strength. The archer must pull the bowstring backward against the resistance created by the bow’s limbs until reaching the anchor point. Then the archer must hold the string steady while aiming before releasing the arrow.

With a recurve or straight bow, resistance increases throughout the draw because the limbs bend farther as the string is pulled back. A compound bow works differently. Its system of pulleys and cables creates a “let-off” effect, reducing the amount of force required to hold the string at full draw.

But the let-off does not eliminate the strength requirement. A compound bow with a 70-pound draw weight may require only about 35 pounds of holding force while aiming. Yet the archer must still smoothly generate the full 70 pounds of force at some point during the draw.

Holding a bow at full draw is not passive. It is an isometric strength task. The muscles of the upper back, shoulders, and arms must remain contracted while the archer aims (Spancken et al., 2021; Zemkova & Zapletalova, 2022). Similarly, holding a pistol at arm’s length requires continuous stabilization from the shoulder to the hand while minimizing tremor (Mon-Lopez et al., 2020).

In both cases, the athlete is resisting movement rather than creating it. And that resistance depends directly on muscular strength and endurance.

On average, males have substantially greater upper-body strength than females, even before puberty, and that gap widens significantly afterward (Hunter et al., 2023; Joyner et al., 2025; Nuzzo, 2025; Nuzzo & Pinto, 2025). This matters because the same physical task imposes a different relative burden depending on the athlete’s maximum capacity.

A bow that requires 30 pounds of force to draw represents a much higher percentage of maximal strength for a weaker archer than for a stronger one. The same is true of holding a pistol steady over time. So while the equipment may be identical. The physical demand represents a greater challenge to females than males.

That difference in relative effort has a predictable consequence over repeated shots: fatigue.

Fatigue is the enemy of precision. As muscles tire, small oscillations increase, stability declines, and shot-to-shot consistency suffers. In archery, fatigue can appear as a loss of smoothness while drawing the bow, increased movement at full draw, or shaking arms that cause the arrow to rattle on the rest. Accuracy deteriorates accordingly.

In firearm shooting, fatigue may show up as a loss of smoothness when raising the weapon to shooting position, tremor in the sight picture, noticeable movement of the muzzle, or jerking of the trigger. Each can reduce accuracy. Even slight instability can produce measurable differences in performance, especially over repeated attempts (Lakie, 2010).

The same principle applies in sports like skeet and trap, where the shooter must shoulder a shotgun again and again. Tired muscles do not bring the gun into firing position as quickly or effectively. The result is that the shooter engages targets a fraction later, when they are slightly farther away and more likely to slip through gaps in the shot pattern.

Because males, on average, operate at a lower percentage of their maximum strength when shouldering a rifle or shotgun, holding a pistol at arm’s length, or lifting and drawing a bow, they are generally less susceptible to fatigue and better able to maintain consistency over time.

This is not a matter of effort or determination. It is a matter of physiology.

Equipment can amplify these differences.

In archery, greater strength allows an athlete to use a bow with a higher draw weight. Higher draw weights produce faster arrow speeds, flatter trajectories, and less sensitivity to small errors in distance estimation or environmental conditions such as wind. In practical terms, stronger archers can use equipment that is more forgiving. In Olympic archery, men typically use bows with draw weights of about 45 to 55 pounds, while women typically use bows in the 35- to 45-pound range.

But lowering the draw weight for female archers does not necessarily eliminate the physical difference between the athletes.

Suppose a male archer has roughly 40 percent greater upper-body strength. A 46- to 51-pound bow may still represent a lower relative demand for him than a 33- to 40-pound bow represents for a female archer. Using midpoint values, the male archer’s 48.5-pound draw weight is equivalent to about 34.6 pounds after adjusting for his strength advantage. The female archer’s 36.5-pound draw weight, by contrast, remains a direct demand on her available strength.

So even when equipment is scaled downward, the female archer may still face greater relative strain. That matters most over repeated shots, when fatigue, postural stability, and the ability to hold steady at full draw become increasingly important.

Body size also matters. Males are, on average, taller, heavier, longer-limbed, and have more lean body mass than females (Hunter et al., 2023; Joyner et al., 2025; Tucker et al., 2024). In archery, a longer draw length allows more energy to be transferred to the arrow, increasing arrow velocity. In shooting sports, greater body mass can improve inertial stability, making the athlete less affected by small perturbations and better able to tolerate recoil. A larger body also means that the same draw weight represents a smaller challenge relative to body mass, which should make repeated draws less fatiguing.

Recoil is another factor that is easy to overlook.

In firearm shooting, especially in disciplines involving repeated or rapid fire with shotguns or centerfire rifles, the ability to absorb recoil and return the firearm efficiently to the target is critical. This is not merely theoretical. Anyone who has finished four or five rounds on a trap range, taking 25 shots per round, knows that even light shotshell loads and a relatively soft-recoiling shotgun produce a substantial cumulative impact on the shoulder.

For larger athletes with greater muscle mass and strength, it is simply easier to tolerate and stabilize against that repeated force, resulting in more consistent performance over time.

The shotgun and load may generate the same free recoil energy for both shooters, but recoil is not experienced equally by all shooters.

Over a 125-shot trap session, cumulative exposure can reach roughly 2,250 to 2,500 foot-pounds of recoil energy. For a 5-foot-10, 200-pound male shooter, that may remain manageable across the session. For a 5-foot-5, 170-pound female shooter, the same recoil impulse may feel sharper and become more fatiguing as the shots accumulate.

So even when the equipment is identical, and even when the recoil is objectively “moderate,” the physical demand is not identical. Body size, strength, shoulder anatomy, and fatigue can make the same shooting event meaningfully more demanding for one shooter than another.

None of this suggests skill does not matter. Of course it does. Precision sports require fine motor control, concentration, repetition, and discipline. There is also substantial overlap between individuals, meaning many females outperform many males.

But overlap does not negate average differences. Nor does it erase the effects those differences can have on performance.

Participation patterns in these sports reflect some of these realities. Archery and shooting sports remain predominantly male, both recreationally and competitively. That is evident in industry demographics, media coverage, and the makeup of most shooting ranges and archery clubs. Many factors likely contribute to this imbalance. But the physical demands associated with strength, stability, and fatigue resistance may help shape both initial participation and long-term retention.

Efforts to increase female participation are worthwhile. But available evidence suggests that many girls and women value female-only sporting opportunities. Eliminating female-only categories in shooting sports is therefore unlikely to increase female participation. In some cases, it may discourage it.

These patterns are not incidental. They reflect the same underlying physiological differences that shape performance in these activities.

The better conclusion is this: sports like archery and shooting are not strength-dominated, but they are strength-influenced.

Stability, fatigue resistance, and equipment handling all contribute to accuracy. And all are shaped, at least in part, by physical capacity. Those capacities differ, on average, between males and females.

It is true that in some archery and shooting competitions, male and female scores may appear similar. At first glance, that might suggest sex does not meaningfully influence performance in these sports. But similar outcomes do not necessarily mean identical underlying demands.

Given well-established differences in muscle mass, strength, and body size, female athletes likely need to operate closer to their physiological limits to achieve the same steadiness and control. They may require greater technical adaptation, more refined motor control, or more deliberate strategies for managing fatigue and equipment constraints, including lower draw weights or recoil compensation.

In that sense, similar scores may reflect different physiological costs rather than identical performance conditions.

This fits with a broader body of research showing that males outperform females across a wide range of physical performance measures, including strength, power, and endurance (Brown et al., 2025, 2026a, 2026b; Hilton & Lundberg, 2021; Hunter et al., 2023; Joyner et al., 2025; Lundberg & Menickelli, 2025; Tucker et al., 2024). These differences are not confined to obvious power sports. They matter in any activity where physical capacity influences performance, even indirectly.

After years behind bows, rifles, and shotguns, one lesson stands out: what looks like pure skill is often skill expressed through the body.

And the body matters.

The target does not respond to intentions or beliefs. It reflects the interaction between technique and physical capacity. Precision is not the absence of strength. In many cases, it depends on it.

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References

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Brown, G. A., Shaw, B. S., & Shaw, I. (2026a). Sex-Based Performance Differences in Shot Put, Javelin, and Long Jump Among U.S. Youth Athletes Aged 10 Years and Under. J Strength Cond Res, 40(4), 451-459. https://doi.org/10.1519/JSC.0000000000005335

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Nuzzo, J. L., & Pinto, M. D. (2025). Sex Differences in Upper- and Lower-Limb Muscle Strength in Children and Adolescents: A Meta-Analysis. Eur J Sport Sci, 25(5), e12282. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsc.12282

Spancken, S., Steingrebe, H., & Stein, T. (2021). Factors that influence performance in Olympic air-rifle and small-bore shooting: A systematic review. PLoS One, 16(3), e0247353. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247353

Tucker, R., Hilton, E. N., McGawley, K., Pollock, N., Millet, G. P., Sandbakk, O., Howatson, G., Brown, G. A., Carlson, L. A., Chen, M. A., Heron, N., Kirk, C., Murphy, M. H., Pringle, J., Richardson, A., Santos-Concejero, J., Christiansen, A. V., Jones, C., Alonso, J. M.,…Lundberg, T. R. (2024). Fair and Safe Eligibility Criteria for Women’s Sport. Scand J Med Sci Sports, 34(8), e14715. https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.14715

Zemkova, E., & Zapletalova, L. (2022). The Role of Neuromuscular Control of Postural and Core Stability in Functional Movement and Athlete Performance. Front Physiol, 13, 796097. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2022.796097

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

Within minutes of the Supreme Court’s decision allowing states to protect girls’ and women’s sports, the headlines arrived in formation.

“Supreme Court Allows States to Bar Transgender Athletes From Girls’ Sports,” said the New York Times. According to NPR, the Court had upheld “bans on transgender athletes participating in women and girls’ sports.” Reuters claimed the Court had cleared the way for “transgender sports bans.” The BBC, NBC, ABC, ESPN, USA Today and others all settled on some version of the same phrase: transgender athletes banned from sports.

They know they’re lying. We know they’re lying. And they know that we know they’re lying.

Let’s be clear: the Supreme Court did not “ban transgender athletes from sports” this week. It didn’t even ban transgender athletes from women’s sports. The Court simply allowed states to pass laws that restrict girls’ and women’s sports to female athletes, which is the entire point of having a female category in the first place. The decision has nothing to do with identity or pronouns. The disputed trait is sex.

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Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

For years, we were told not to worry about pediatric gender medicine because it was vanishingly rare. Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, we were assured, were reserved for a tiny number of carefully assessed children with severe and persistent distress.

But when new data show that these treatments aren’t so rare, the same defenders suddenly change their tune: the numbers are no longer reassuring because they are small; now they are reassuring because they are large. More children receiving medical transition means that a previously hidden population finally feels safe enough to pursue the care it has always needed. Higher cross-sex identity persistence after social transition or administering puberty blockers means the interventions were obviously appropriate.

Any outcome, it seems, can be interpreted as proof that “gender-affirming care” is successful. But this is not how evidence-based medicine is supposed to work. This is how an ideology protects itself from falsification.

The latest example comes from Oregon. As Benjamin Ryan first reported, a new study in Research Connections analyzed insurance claims for 868,740 insured Oregon adolescents ages 8 to 17 from 2016 to 2023. The data cover roughly 80 percent of insured Oregonians. The figures were shocking.

By age 17, roughly one in 240 insured Oregon girls was taking testosterone, and about one in 630 boys was taking estrogen. Across all ages in the study, about 1 percent of insured Oregon youth had a gender-related diagnosis. For girls, the figure was 1.5 percent.

These aren’t nationwide numbers. Oregon is an unusually progressive state with an unusually supportive legal and insurance environment for pediatric gender medicine. But they give us a glimpse of what happens when supporters of child transition receive little to no pushback.

The study’s authors don’t view the numbers as alarming. They still describe medical transition as “rare” and emphasize that access remains “limited” even in Oregon. They suggest that the state’s supportive policy environment likely contributed to greater access, while “structural and systemic barriers” may still be holding treatment rates down.

Whatever the data, they support the affirmative model. If the rates are low, that proves the panic is overblown. If the rates are high, that’s evidence that access is improving. If the rates rise, that means stigma is declining. If they don’t rise enough, that means barriers remain. Heads they win, tails you’re a bigot.

This pattern shows up again and again. Years ago, when critics warned that puberty blockers appeared to function less as a “pause button” and more as the first step on a nearly automatic pathway to cross-sex hormones, defenders insisted that persistence meant the children had been properly selected. But if administering puberty blockers changes the likelihood that a child will persist in rejecting their sex from about 15–20 percent to more than 97 percent, then persistence isn’t proof that the child’s transgender identity was fixed all along—it’s evidence that the intervention made permanent what would have been ephemeral.

Kenneth Zucker, one of the world’s leading experts on childhood gender dysphoria, has warned that even social transition is not a neutral act. Changing a child’s name, pronouns, clothing, and social identity is a psychosocial intervention. It may reduce distress in the short term, but it also seems to increase the likelihood that a child’s cross-sex identity persists into adolescence, when puberty blockers and hormones are put on the table.

That possibility should haunt the field. Instead, it is dismissed.

Consider a new Canadian study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health and shared by pediatric psychiatrist and gender medicine proponent Jack Turban on social media. Researchers examined 445 adolescents referred to gender clinics. After a median follow-up of 2.4 years, 97.1 percent still identified as transgender or nonbinary, and only 1.1 percent of those who started cross-sex hormones stopped taking them. The study presents this as reassuring evidence that adolescent transgender identity is extremely stable, and that concerns about regret and potential detransition are overblown.

The same logic appeared in response to the Oregon data. Trans activist Ari Drennen said on X that it “should not be shocking” that 0.4 percent of 17-year-old girls in Oregon are chemically transitioning. But it is shocking. If one in 240 girls aged 17 in a state were receiving any other powerful intervention for a new psychiatric diagnosis that permanently deepened their voice, caused them to grow beards, altered their sexual function, and affected their fertility, no serious person would shrug and say, “Sounds about right.”

At some point, defenders of pediatric gender medicine must answer several simple questions: What result would make you reconsider? Would it be one in 100 girls on testosterone? What about one in 50? What rate of regret or detransition is too high? Would you accept that as evidence that suicidality and mental health don’t improve after treatment? How many systematic evidence reviews must conclude that the evidence of benefit is extremely weak while the risk of serious harm is significant?

We should have insisted on answers long ago, before we ever started performing this medical experiment on children—not after the results come in, when activists have had ample time to devise post hoc explanations about why the latest horrific finding is actually wonderful news.

Falsifiability is a basic principle of science. No claim that can be supported by every possible outcome has any business being called scientific or “evidence-based.”

This essay was originally published in City Journal.

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Benjamin Ryan is an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. He is a contributor for The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News, The Free Press, and The New York Sun. He has also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic and The Nation, among many others. Follow him on X: @benryanwriter. Visit his website: benryan.net

This article was originally published on the author’s Substack: Hazard Ratio.

King’s College London on Friday announced that, after a period of reflection and regrouping amid outcry from all sides, the leaders of the much-debated, much-ballyhooed National Health Service clinical trial of puberty blockers for gender-distressed youths would continue largely as planned.

The study’s design has received just a few tweaks, most notably the addition of new minimum ages for participants: 11 years old for natal girls and age 12 for natal boys.

Otherwise, it’s full steam ahead for the £10 million, or $14 million, study.

But anyone who understands even the basic parameters of how pediatric gender medicine works—and what the central purpose of this medical field is—can see that this clinical trial, which if designed properly might have afforded the world some desperately needed insights into these controversial medical practices, is headed straight into the scientific abyss.

Multiple observational studies, including one conducted by the NHS itself and published in 2021 and another, long-delayed study out of the United States that finally emerged in preprint last year, have already found that minors who take puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria or gender incongruence see essentially no change in major mental health metrics. Such disappointing conclusions stood in contrast to the more glowing findings of the foundational cohort study out of the Netherlands that was published in 2011 and helped spark global excitement and launch the pediatric gender medicine field worldwide.

The authors of the U.S. puberty-blocker study, led by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, formerly of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, rationalized the lack of apparent benefit from taking puberty blockers by suggesting that the mental health of youths on these drugs would have worsened absent the medication.

That may very well be true, and such a premise points to the fact that these medications have only ever been meant to tee up treatment with cross-sex hormones. A coterie of pediatric gender medicine advocates, in fact, wrote an amicus brief for last year’s U.S. Supreme Court case over Tennessee’s ban of gender-transition treatments for minors in which they criticized Britain’s Cass Review for conceiving of blockers and hormones as anything but part and parcel of one another.

The fact is that almost all youth who take blockers for gender dysphoria go on to take hormones, according to multiple studies, including at the NHS. As British journalist Hannah Barnes wrote in her seminal investigation of the NHS’s doomed pediatric gender clinic, Time to Think, it is essentially unheard of in psychology to have any sort of test that has a close-to-perfect accuracy rate. In other words, gender-clinic providers haven’t simply succeeded brilliantly at selecting all the right kids to put on this treatment pathway, especially given how cursory, rushed or non-existent the assessment process can be at these clinics.

Considering all this, it is abundantly evident that gender-dysphoric adolescents have never conceived of the period they must spend on blockers as a “time to think” about their gender, as leaders in pediatric gender medicine long misled the public to believe (that is, before at least some of them conducted an about-face and started insisting, accurately, that blockers and hormones are simply part of a continuum). These youths quite clearly view the blockers as a waystation, a temporary burden they must satisfy on behalf of adult authority figures before they get what they actually want: hormones.

Given the planned NHS study, called PATHWAYS, has a randomized element—youths will be randomly assigned to go on blockers immediately or following a one-year delay—there was at least some hope that the study could have produced higher quality evidence than the critically flawed collection of studies that have been produced to date.

None of the past or ongoing studies of gender-transition treatment for youths have been randomized controlled trials. Instead, they are largely a messy and compromised collection of prospective cohort studies that for the most part have no comparison groups and typically have short follow-up times of 12 to 24 months. Or, in the case of Kristina Olson’s study out of Princeton, there is an ever-lengthening follow-up time, but the cohort is not at all representative of the typical youths presenting at a gender clinic these days, given the participants typically socially transitioned very young, by age six or seven.

So the whole world has turned its eyes Britain in hopes that, being an island nation that in 2024 passed a strict legislative ban of puberty blockers for minors outside of a clinical trial, the NHS might manage to recruit and retain a sizeable population of youths seeking gender-transition drugs. Denied other (legal) means of obtaining these drugs (hormones are blocked for those under 16 and are increasingly hard to get even for older minors in the UK), British youths might stay in the study even if they aren’t randomized to receive blockers immediately.

But if youths in PATHWAYS aren’t provided hormones after starting blockers, it is highly likely that all we will learn from this lengthy and expensive clinical trial—youths are set to receive blockers for up to two years and the study is slated to run for five-and-a-half years overall—is more of what we already know: that not much happens psychologically when these kids take blockers.

Furthermore, there isn’t much puberty actually to arrest among the youths who present at gender clinics these days. Recent research out of the United States, including one analysis of national insurance data and a comparable analysis focusing on Oregon, have suggested that only a fraction of the minors who receive gender-transition interventions actually take puberty blockers. And an even smaller minority start such treatment when they are young enough to be in puberty’s early stages.

The typical youth who presents at a gender clinic in the Western world these days, including in England, is a 14- to 16- year-old biological girl who only began exhibiting gender-related distress after puberty’s onset. PATHWAYS will only accept youths who are under age 16 when entering the study. So, given the age and sex breakdowns of youths upon their referrals to Britain’s since-shuttered gender clinic (see the chart below, from the 2024 Cass Review), that means that the bulk of the youths eligible for this new study will likely be 14- and 15-year-old natal girls.

Such youths are likely either in the final phase of puberty or are entirely finished with the developmental process. PATHWAYS, per its inclusion criteria, welcomes youths who are in any of the so-called Tanner stages of puberty, from Tanner 2 (the earliest phase) to Tanner 5 (meaning puberty is finished). So by the study authors’ own admission, they are perfectly willing to give puberty blockers to minors with no puberty to block.

Given that natal females have no physiological need to take blockers in advance of starting testosterone (for natal males, blockers can help suppress their natural testosterone production and thus supplement estrogen treatment), for these youths, starting blockers amounts to all risks with no clinical purpose.

Representatives for King’s College London, which is leading the trial on behalf of the NHS, did not respond to my brutally frank request for comment. Otherwise, in their press release announcing the slight revisions to the trial, they stated: “We will always welcome scrutiny of research involving children and young people because their health and safety is paramount. Our priority remains to safely, and robustly, investigate the benefits and risks of puberty suppression for young people with gender incongruence to improve the evidence base and inform NHS healthcare.”

The PATHWAYS study does have an important element in which some of the youths will receive a series of brain scans. This is perhaps the only part of the overall research endeavor that could yield vital results that could help inform worldwide care of gender-dysphoric youths. According to a 2024 review paper, scientific knowledge of the impacts of puberty blockers on the brain remains woefully thin. And there are concerns that the powerful drugs might have deleterious impacts on neurocognition.

Blockers are supposed to be the warm-up act to the main event, in which, at least in theory, people who identify as transgender spend a lifetime on cross-sex hormones—or, in the case of natal females in particular, they stay on testosterone long enough to permanently deepen the voice and prompt the permanent growth of facial and body hair.

Considering all this, why in heaven’s name isn’t the NHS planning to study cross-sex hormones in youths?

Is this study simply an expensive charade to kick the political can down the road?

This article was originally published on the author’s Substack: Hazard Ratio.

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Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

The moral panic that swept through higher education after 2020 caused tremendous damage. In the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, antiracism, decolonization, and “social justice,” universities scrambled to avoid accusations of racism by building new offices, making DEI a central factor in hiring and promotion, and going on a hiring spree for “diverse” candidates to artificially augment the non-white racial makeup of faculty.

All of this took place at a time when public confidence in higher education was already in the gutter. At the exact moment universities needed to show the public that they were still committed to truth-seeking and academic rigor, many just doubled down on the ideological rhetoric and actions that caused so many Americans write them off in the first place.

The University of North Carolina (UNC), however, has been one of the few major public universities where trustees have shown some willingness to resist this ideological takeover. In 2021, they refused to approve a tenured appointment for Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist behind the New York Times’ overtly political “1619 Project,” correctly perceiving that Hannah-Jones wasn’t being recruited for having strong credentials, but rather as the face of a controversial political project that rewrote America’s founding through a highly contested racial narrative.

The trustees’ instincts were sound. Unfortunately, their resolve was not. After protests and national backlash, the board ultimately approved Hannah-Jones for the tenured position. But this backfired in humiliating fashion when she subsequently declined the offer and took a position at Howard University.

Now the board faces a similar test. This time the candidate is Kiran Asher, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who last month was proposed for a distinguished professorship at UNC with tenure. According to reports, Asher’s hire had already been approved by the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences, the university-wide appointment, promotion, and tenure committee, and UNC’s new provost, Magnus Egerstedt. By the time her case reached the Board of Trustees, many faculty viewed final approval as a mere formality.

But the trustees exercised their veto power, and voted to reject Asher’s appointment. The backlash has begun.

UNC is a public university created to serve North Carolina and advance its stated mission: “to serve as a center for research, scholarship, and creativity” and to educate the next generation of leaders. Trustees exist to protect that mission over the long term. While they’re not supposed or expected to micromanage every faculty search, when a proposed lifetime appointment raises serious questions about whether scholarship has been subordinated to ideology, they have not only the right but the duty to intervene.

Asher’s work sits squarely inside the activist academic world exposed by the 2018 “Grievance Studies” affair, where skeptics managed to get a half-dozen nonsense papers published in popular, peer reviewed feminist journals. One absurd paper was even chosen as one of twelve “lead pieces” in celebration of the journal’s 25th year in production. Decolonial feminism, postcolonial theory, anticapitalist critique, Queer Theory, and notions of “embodied” and “situated knowledges” run through Asher’s scholarship, as well as allusions to her “postcolonial feminist rage and research” and her insistence that research must be joined to activism.

In one co-authored paper, Asher and Priti Ramamurthy explain that anticolonial scholarship foregrounds how colonial practices create “Eurocentric” forms of knowledge-production that marginalize “other forms of knowing and being in the world.” They write that postcolonial and decolonial approaches agree that “the political task of working toward liberation, decolonization, and social justice must accompany scholarly and academic tasks of analysis.”

These are not one-off papers. Such ideas form the foundation of her scholarship. To win back the public’s trust, we need fewer scholars motivated by politics and “rage,” and more who are committed to cool-headed analyses to uncover truth.

Decolonial scholarship treats the university system and modern science as instruments of oppression that must be destabilized, dismantled, or replaced by alternative “ways of knowing.” In plain English, this means that the standards that made universities useful in the first place—evidence, logic, falsifiability, replicability, disciplined argument, and openness to criticism—are portrayed as forms of oppression rather than tools for discovering what’s objectively true.

A university is an institution built around the production and transmission of reliable knowledge. That requires methods capable of separating what is true from what is merely felt, asserted, or politically useful. The scientific method may have been primarily formalized by white Westerners, but it is not owned by the West. It can be used, checked, and replicated by anyone, anywhere. Its universality is precisely what makes it such a powerful tool. Any ideology that rejects it as a form of Western oppression has no place in institutions committed to rigorous scholarship and the pursuit of truth.

How could Asher’s hiring advance the mission of the university when her personal and professional mission as an activist is to undermine its very legitimacy? If a field or candidate is devoted to replacing disciplined inquiry with identity-based epistemology or activist “praxis,” trustees are allowed to—and should—say no.

They are also allowed to question the judgment of administrators who send such appointments forward. Provost Magnus Egerstedt supported Asher’s appointment and advanced it to the board for final approval. That’s unsurprising, given that Egerstedt was part of UC Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering Anti-Racism Task Force, an initiative created in the wake of the post-Floyd moral panic.

While that alone should not disqualify his recommendation, it does show that he comes from the same activist culture UNC’s trustees have been trying to resist, and that they were right to not simply defer to his judgment.

Asher’s own comments after her rejection reveal the bullet that was dodged. She suggested that the board’s decision was part of a broader pattern affecting “women and people of color,” especially those doing “gender work, race work, social justice work, non-Christian work, Islamic studies,” and said, “I don’t see this as an individual thing—it’s all systematic.” She also said someone told her “the BOT has gone rogue,” adding that “rogue doesn’t just happen” and that certain things “facilitate a certain kind of rogueness.”

But the board did not “go rogue.” They are not obligated to grant tenured appointments to scholars whose work treats the university’s foundations and mere existence as oppressive structures to be dismantled.

The UNC Board of Trustees made the right call in blocking Asher’s appointment, and other university trustees should use them as a model for what real oversight looks like. Faculty and administrators will complain. Activists will accuse them of political interference. National media may frame the decision as an attack on academic freedom. But academic freedom does not require public universities to grant lifetime appointments to every scholar approved by a process that’s been ideologically captured.

Trustees should expect backlash, and they should ignore it. The pressure to fold is strongest precisely when their resolve matters most.

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About the Author

Joseph Burgo, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist with over 40 years of experience, specializing in narcissism, shame, and psychological defense mechanisms. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including The Narcissist You Know and Why Do I Do That?, and has written for mainstream outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Psychology Today.

Our evolutionary past endowed us with a reward system in which behaviors that increase the odds of passing along our genes to offspring via sexual intercourse will give us pleasure. For men, that means genital stimulation leading to arousal and ejaculation during intercourse will release neurotransmitters that produce feelings of pleasure. Relying on the same reward system, men who self-stimulate and ejaculate in the absence of an available sex partner will also experience pleasure.

In other words, men masturbate because it feels good.

Men also masturbate to relieve tension. When surveyed, men consistently rank stress relief among their primary motivations for masturbating. According to one study that appeared in Psychology Today, as much as 80 percent of men report masturbating as a form of stress relief. Masturbation as self-soothing behavior has also been observed in non-human primates and other mammals. While we can’t know the exact psychological motivations of chimpanzees who masturbate in captivity, researchers have long assumed that masturbation in captive primates is directly connected to the stress of confinement.

Men and other male primates masturbate to relieve stress and calm feelings of anxiety.

In the wild, low-status males masturbate more frequently than high-status males. Lower-ranking male rhesus macaques mate less frequently than their dominant counterparts and, on days when mating doesn’t occur, are significantly more likely to masturbate. Among a group of bearded capuchins studied in the wild, all five of the masturbation events observed were performed exclusively by the lowest-ranking male in a colony of seventeen. It is their position on the dominance hierarchy that limits their access to females and drives the behavior.

Men and other male primates masturbate when they lack access to mates, and it is their rank on the status hierarchy that determines that access.

Research suggests that among non-human primates, when a male observes conspecifics copulate, it can trigger masturbatory activity directly, implying that such stimuli heighten arousal sufficiently to initiate the behavior. Human males respond to visual sexual stimuli in the same way, but rather than waiting for a chance observation of others having sex, they deliberately seek out pornography in order to increase arousal, intensify orgasm, and maximize their pleasure.

Men watch pornography because it heightens their feelings of pleasure during masturbation and makes for more satisfying orgasms.

With me so far?

To assert that sex-induced pleasure in the service of procreation is “good” and self-pleasuring “bad” goes beyond neuroscience, and concerns the variable rules human civilizations establish to regulate sexuality within the differing social systems we inhabit. And to state the obvious, those rules usually reflect an underlying moral code. In the early pages of this essay, I’ve tried to describe the reasons why men masturbate without reference to such codes.

I invite you to pause for a moment and examine your reactions to what you’ve read so far. You might be feeling an urge to object though you don’t have a readily identifiable reason. Maybe your own moral code has been activated by the word “pornography” with accompanying feelings of disapproval or disgust. The idea of men masturbating in front of computer screens running pornographic videos tends to trigger negative reactions in many people.

I believe this same visceral response drives many of the recent books condemning pornography and its supposed harms. This is not to accuse anyone of dishonesty. But when we begin with a strong emotional response such as disgust, alarm, or moral concern, confirmation bias is difficult to avoid. Without necessarily realizing it, we become more receptive to evidence that confirms what we already feel, and less receptive to evidence that complicates it.

In The Righteous Mind and his broader research on moral psychology, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt demonstrated that moral conclusions typically precede the reasoning used to justify them. We feel something to be wrong and then go in search of an argument; the rational case is constructed after the fact to support an intuition already firmly in place. He called this phenomenon “moral dumbfounding”—the experience of feeling certain that something is wrong while being unable to articulate a coherent reason why it should be so. The tell, in Haidt’s research, is disgust, particularly relevant around violations of purity and sanctity, which is to say, around sex.

Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation is currently the most prominent popular account of how the brain’s reward system drives addictive behavior, and it illustrates Haidt’s point with particular clarity. Lembke is a Stanford psychiatrist writing from within the neuroscientific tradition, which gives her conclusions an air of clinical authority. Yet near the end of her first chapter, having established the dopamine framework, she pivots abruptly to “over-consumption” and observes that the “world’s natural resources are rapidly diminishing.” It’s a remarkable sentence to find in a book ostensibly about brain chemistry. What it reveals is that the addiction framework is functioning as a vehicle for a broader moral anxiety about pleasure, indulgence, and excess. It has less to do with dopamine receptors and more with her belief that people are consuming too much of the wrong things and ought to stop.

This is not merely a theoretical observation. A substantial body of peer-reviewed research has examined the relationship between moral attitudes and perceived pornography addiction, and the findings are striking. Across three studies, researchers found a robust positive relationship between religiosity and perceived addiction to pornography, mediated by moral disapproval of pornography use. Crucially, these results persisted even when actual levels of pornography use were controlled, meaning that moral disapproval predicted feeling addicted to pornography regardless of how much pornography subjects actually watched.

Researchers in this field use the term “moral incongruence” to describe this mechanism: individuals who morally disapprove of pornography but engage in its use experience a discrepancy between their ideal and perceived selves, which can result in psychological distress. This distress may lead them to label themselves as addicted even in the absence of dysregulated consumption. In other words, the feeling of being addicted to pornography tells us more about a person’s moral attitudes toward pornography than it does about their actual patterns of use.

The books that have popularized the pornography addiction argument illustrate this pattern well. Your Brain on Porn by Gary Wilson, Pornocracy by Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel, and The Porn Myth by Matthew Fradd all arrive at the same destination (pornography is harmful and must be condemned) by different routes.

Matthew Fradd’s The Porn Myth is an explicitly Catholic text, and its conclusion that pornography is sinful is never seriously in doubt.

In Wilson’s case, the moral destination was declared in advance: while writing his ostensibly scientific account of pornography addiction, Wilson was simultaneously teaching Karezza, a practice based on the belief that avoiding orgasm and intense sexual pleasure leads to greater spiritual and physical wellbeing. Wilson had no scientific training or academic qualifications and, according to historian Brian M. Watson, had made a career “peddling pseudoscience.” Wilson’s widely viewed TEDx talk on porn addiction was ultimately removed from the official TED site but is still available on YouTube, with a warning that it “contains several assertions that are not supported by academically respected studies in medicine and psychology.”

The same dynamic is at work in Pornocracy, though Bartosch’s framework is feminist rather than religious. As the Irish Times observed of the book, it “announces itself as an investigation into the harms of pornography but delivers agenda in drag as scholarship, a book built from contradiction, moral panic and logical fallacies rather than research.” The same criticism, I would argue, applies to the genre as a whole. Whatever their differences in emphasis, neuroscientific, religious, or feminist, these books share a common architecture: the moral conclusion comes first, and the argument is then constructed around it.

The preferred scientific vehicle for that conclusion is the language of addiction. Pornography use, these authors argue, hijacks the brain’s dopamine reward system in the same way that drugs do and is therefore an addiction like any other. But this framing significantly mischaracterizes the true nature of addiction. In classical addiction, as the neuroscientific literature and the DSM-5 establishes, the brain’s dopamine system undergoes measurable structural changes in response to a substance. Tolerance develops as dopamine receptors are downregulated, requiring escalating doses to achieve the same effect. Abrupt cessation produces withdrawal: a distinct cluster of negative physical and psychological symptoms driven by the brain’s attempt to restore homeostatic balance. These are not merely behavioral patterns but neurological adaptations with identifiable mechanisms.

According to one study, substance use disorders are characterized specifically by pharmacological tolerance and withdrawal, alongside impaired control and social or lifestyle impairment. The fact that dopamine is involved in both drug addiction and the pleasurable experience of watching pornography does not make them equivalent phenomena, any more than it makes falling in love or eating a good meal an addiction; both of these also release dopamine. By this logic, any experience that activates our evolved reward system becomes a candidate for the addiction label. The label then loses all diagnostic meaning.

A related argument, prominent in Pornocracy and elsewhere, holds that pornography users inevitably seek out ever more extreme content over time, driven by the algorithm and by a growing tolerance to milder material, and that this escalation constitutes evidence of addiction. But the evidence here is, at best, equivocal. Peer-reviewed researchers themselves acknowledge that whether escalating patterns of pornography use reflect genuine addictive mechanisms “remains contentious,” with scholars both acknowledging and refuting the legitimacy of tolerance to pornographic stimuli. More fundamentally, seeking novelty is not the same thing as developing tolerance. The fact that pornography users prefer to watch something new rather than re-watch the same video they saw last week is no more evidence of tolerance than my preference for a new television series over re-watching Game of Thrones for the fifth time. Novelty-seeking is a basic feature of human curiosity; it is wired into the same reward system that makes us into explorers, readers, and travelers. To label it pathological when it occurs in a sexual context, while ignoring it everywhere else, is to reveal that the concern is not really with the neuroscience at all.

These authors consistently blur the distinction between addiction and compulsion, which are not interchangeable terms. Addiction, as we have seen, is defined by neurochemical dependence; by tolerance, withdrawal, and escalating consumption driven by the brain’s adaptation to a substance. Compulsion, by contrast, is a psychologically driven behavior rooted in anxiety, shame, and emotional pain; it functions as a coping mechanism for intolerable internal states. The World Health Organization drew precisely this distinction when it classified compulsive sexual behavior disorder in the ICD-11 not among addictive and substance use disorders, but among impulse control disorders. The evidence does not support the claim that its underlying mechanisms are equivalent to those of substance addiction.

Research consistently finds that men with compulsive sexual behavior show elevated levels of shame and guilt, and high rates of comorbidity with anxiety and mood disorders. This suggests that the behavior is best understood as a response to psychological distress rather than a symptom of neurological hijacking. According to one study, stress levels are positively correlated with compulsive sexual behavior; the sexual behavior functions as a form of relief from that distress, however temporary and however costly.

In other words, if a man is watching large amounts of pornography and masturbating frequently, the most clinically useful question is not “what has the algorithm done to his brain?” but “what is he trying to escape, and why does he need such relief?” As Jason Winters, a lecturer in human sexuality at the University of British Columbia, has written, “psychological problems and mental disorders can lead to problematic porn use as a means to cope and self-medicate”—not the other way around.

What is a man trying to escape when he turns compulsively to pornography, and why does he need so much relief? The answer, I would suggest, lies not in the architecture of pornography websites but in the conditions of men’s lives. Do we have reason to believe that men in our culture suffer from elevated levels of shame, stress, and status anxiety? After decades of hearing about #MeToo, the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, male privilege, and rape culture on campus, is there reason to believe that men today seek out pornography not only because it is more readily available but because they feel bad about being men?

In 2023, American men died by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. Among young men between the ages of 18 and 23, two-thirds report feeling that no one really knows them. Richard Reeves, in Of Boys and Men, published by the Brookings Institution and hardly a manifesto of the men’s rights movement, documents in careful detail how boys and men are falling behind educationally, economically, and socially across the developed world. These statistics describe a group under considerable stress, struggling with shame, and in urgent need of relief.

The books I have discussed in this essay aren’t wrong to notice that many men watch a great deal of pornography. They’re wrong about the reasons why they do it.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

The latest ruling in Tickle v. Giggle this month is a major loss for Sall Grover and her women-only app, Giggle for Girls. But it’s also a warning about what happens when law drifts too far from reality and begins punishing people for acting as if facts still matter.

The case began in 2021, when Roxanne Tickle, a male who identifies as a woman and had a Queensland birth certificate reissued to list his sex as female, downloaded Giggle for Girls, an app created by Grover as a women-only digital space. Tickle initially gained access after uploading a selfie, but was later blocked after manual review. Tickle complained to the Australian Human Rights Commission in December 2021, then sued under Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act, alleging discrimination on the basis of gender identity. In 2024, the Federal Court found that Giggle and Grover had indirectly discriminated against Tickle and ordered them to pay him $10,000.

On May 15, 2026, the Full Federal Court went further. It dismissed Grover’s appeal, allowed Tickle’s cross-appeal, replaced the finding of indirect discrimination with direct discrimination, and doubled the damages to $20,000. The court held that Grover and Giggle unlawfully discriminated against Tickle by excluding and then refusing to readmit Tickle “on the basis of her gender-related appearance,” thereby treating Tickle less favorably than “a person designated female at birth” seeking access to the app. Reuters reported that Grover plans to seek an appeal to Australia’s High Court.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

We’re often told that science is “self-correcting.”

But that’s not really true.

Science doesn’t correct itself like a thermostat adjusting the temperature in your house. Science is a human institution run by human beings. And human beings are vulnerable to career incentives, groupthink, moral fads, political pressure, and fear.

And when those forces capture academic journals, peer review stops being a filter for bad ideas and starts becoming more of a credentialing system for fashionable nonsense.

This isn’t exactly new.

In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal managed to publish a totally gibberish article in the journal Social Text full of trendy postmodern jargon. His point was simple: if you flatter the ideological commitments of certain academic editors, nonsense can pass as real scholarship.

Two decades later, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian pulled off the “grievance studies” hoax, placing over a half dozen absurd papers in peer-reviewed journals. One paper used dog parks to analyze rape culture and “queer performativity.” Another rewrote parts of Mein Kampf in the language of feminist theory.

The problem wasn’t just that fake papers got published. It was that they were completely indistinguishable from the real thing.

And today, the problem is even worse.

We now have serious science journals publishing papers about feminist lesbians marrying brine shrimp. We have disturbing papers that aim to “queer” and sexualize infants. We have scholarship on “lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities” and “trans-dog intimacies.”

But while Clown World papers are concerning because it makes a complete mockery of academia, the same broken, ideologically captured system is also publishing research in legitimate science and medical journals that pushes sex and gender pseudoscience, relies on deeply flawed data, and influences policies on the medical transition of children and young adults.

That’s not funny. That affects real people. It affects medicine. It affects law. It affects children.

And when critics try to respond, they often discover there’s no serious mechanism for correction. Submitted Letters to the Editor often go completely ignored. Contrary evidence is rejected without comment. As a result, the best critiques are often relegated to personal blog posts, social media threads, or newspaper op-eds, while the original paper remains in the literature wearing the armor of “peer review.”

That is untenable.

So Kevin McCaffree, editor-in-chief of Theory and Society, and I decided to do something about it.

Today, in the Wall Street Journal, we announced a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review.”

The idea is simple: publication should be the beginning of academic scrutiny, not the end of it.

A Peer Review article can critique a paper from any scholarly journal. It can address problems with methods, evidence, logic, definitions, theory, or interpretation. But it has to focus on the claims and arguments, not personal attacks.

Submissions are capped at 2,500 words and go through a straightforward merit review instead of endless gatekeeping and ideological screening. We ask just one basic question: Is this critique coherent, serious, reasonable, or even popular enough to deserve scholarly attention?

If yes, it gets published.

And the authors of the original paper get a built-in right of reply, so readers can see the critique and the response in a legitimate academic venue.

That’s how science is supposed to work.

Science becomes self-correcting only when real people build the mechanisms that allow correction to happen.

That’s what we’ve done.

Now it’s time for academics to use it.

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About the Author

James L. Nuzzo, PhD, is an exercise scientist and men’s health researcher. Dr. Nuzzo has published over 80 research articles in peer-reviewed journals. He writes regularly about exercise, men’s health, and academia at The Nuzzo Letter, with additional writings appearing at Reality’s Last Stand and Australians for Science & Freedom. In 2025, Dr. Nuzzo documented his academic cancellation using a freedom of information request. He is active on X @JamesLNuzzo.

Earlier this year, a meta-analysis on physical fitness in transgender individuals was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, one of the most historically important journals in sports medicine and exercise science. The paper’s eight authors, led by Sofia Mendes Sieczkowska, concluded that “transgender women do not exhibit significant differences in upper-body strength, lower-body strength, or maximal oxygen consumption relative to cisgender women after 1–3 years of [gender-affirming hormone therapy].” Based on this conclusion, the authors expressed support for “nuanced, sport-specific policies rather than blanket bans” regarding the inclusion of transgender individuals in sports.

The paper caused an initial stir online—and rightly so. Below, I show how the authors misled the public by concluding that their meta-analysis provided evidence of no difference in muscle strength between women and transgender women (i.e., biological males) after “1–3 years” of cross-sex hormones. More specifically, the authors did not even follow their own inclusion criteria. In some cases, they included data that should have been excluded; in others, they excluded data that should have been included. Underlying all of this is the fact that the muscle-strength meta-analysis was underpowered from the start, with only a few studies contributing to the analysis.

Let us now take a closer look at the data and the claims.

Figure 2 in the paper, shown below, presents the data comparing muscle strength in cisgender and transgender women. Panel A is the forest plot for the meta-analysis of upper-body strength, while Panel B is the forest plot for the meta-analysis of lower-body strength.

On the left side of each plot are the labels for the individual studies included in the meta-analysis. These labels contain the surnames of the researchers who conducted the original studies, the year of publication, and the studies’ reference numbers in the paper’s reference list.

In total, six studies are shown in Panels A and B. The first is the Alvares 2025 study, which appears in both panels because it included data on both upper-body and lower-body strength. The others are Ceolin 2024, Hamilton 2024, Andrade 2022, Jenkins 2020, and Saitong 2025. Saitong 2025 appears twice in Panel B for reasons I will explain later.

In the plots, each study has a blue square associated with it. The blue square represents that study’s effect size, which reflects the magnitude of the difference in muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women. The upper-body strength analysis included four effect sizes from four studies, while the lower-body strength analysis included only four effect sizes from three studies.

The thin black lines extending to the left and right of each blue square are the 95% confidence intervals (CIs). The narrower the CI around the blue square, the more confident we can be that the blue square accurately reflects the true difference in muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women. The wider the CI, the less confident we can be.

The solid black vertical line in the middle of the plot aligns with zero on the x-axis and indicates no difference in muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women. The farther a blue square appears to the left of this zero line, the stronger the cisgender women were relative to the transgender women. The farther it appears to the right, the stronger the transgender women were relative to the cisgender women.

A large, light-blue diamond is displayed at the bottom of each plot. This diamond represents the overall effect size when all the studies in that plot are pooled together. Researchers use this pooled estimate to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference in a given fitness outcome between two groups. If the diamond crosses the vertical zero line, researchers generally conclude that there is no statistically significant difference between the groups. If the diamond does not cross the zero line, they conclude that a statistically significant difference does exist.

As seen in both Panels A and B, the diamonds cross the vertical zero line. This is why the authors concluded that there was no difference in upper-body or lower-body muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women.

Story over, right?

Too Few Studies

The overall effect size—the diamond—is only as meaningful as the inputs that comprise it. If researchers include studies that are irrelevant to the question, or exclude studies that are relevant to it, then the diamond, and the conclusions drawn from it, become meaningless.

More fundamentally, the number of individual studies that make up the overall effect size is critical. A meaningful meta-analysis typically includes a dozen or several dozen effect sizes. Meta-analyses based on only three or four effect sizes are inherently fragile. They can be easily distorted by a single outlier study, and that is precisely what happened in Figure 2.

Sieczkowska and her co-authors are not at fault for the limited number of available effect sizes. But they are responsible for choosing to conduct a meta-analysis on a topic for which so little data were available. Reaching such a bold conclusion from such sparse evidence was a further scientific failure. Put bluntly, Sieczkowska and her co-authors should never have conducted the muscle-strength meta-analyses shown in Figure 2.

And low statistical power is not the only problem with the muscle-strength meta-analyses in Figure 2. Incompetence and misleading statements were also on display.

Andrade 2022 Study: The Wrong Sex!

Let us start with the most shocking error in Figure 2: the inclusion of Andrade 2022. This study should not have been included in the muscle-strength meta-analysis at all.

According to Sieczkowska and her co-authors, Figure 2 presents results from studies comparing muscle strength between cisgender women and transgender women. But Andrade 2022 did not compare muscle strength between cisgender women and transgender women. It compared muscle strength between cisgender men and transgender men!

This is stated plainly in the title of the paper itself: “Bone mineral density, trabecular bone score and muscle strength in transgender men receiving testosterone therapy versus cisgender men” [italics added].

Ceolin 2024 and the Duration of Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy

Removing Andrade 2022 reduces the number of relevant muscle-strength studies in Figure 2 to five, and the number in Panel A, on upper-body strength, to three. One of these three remaining studies is Ceolin 2024.

Sieczkowska and her co-authors stated that, to be eligible for their meta-analysis, a study needed to include a group of transgender individuals who had undergone gender-affirming hormone therapy, apparently for any duration. With that inclusion criterion in mind, the next most shocking error in Figure 2 is the inclusion of Ceolin 2024.

Ceolin 2024 did not include transgender women who had undergone gender-affirming hormone therapy. In fact, this is stated explicitly in the paper’s title: “Bone health and body composition in transgender adults before gender-affirming hormonal therapy: data from the COMET study” [italics added].

Ceolin 2024 reported baseline data on upper-body strength in transgender women before they underwent gender-affirming hormone therapy. For this reason, the study should not have been included in the meta-analysis of upper-body strength shown in Panel A of Figure 2. Removing it reduces the number of eligible studies to four overall, and to only two for upper-body strength.

But the problems concerning the duration of gender-affirming hormone therapy do not end there.

In their conclusion, Sieczkowska and her co-authors stated that the transgender women in the meta-analysis had undergone “1–3 years” of gender-affirming hormone therapy. A closer look at the four remaining studies suggests otherwise.

The Alvares 2025 study did not state explicitly the average duration of the participants’ gender-affirming hormone therapy. So, how could Sieczkowska and co-authors possibly know that all the transgender women in the Alvares 2025 study had undergone 1-3 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy? If anything, one can assume that the average therapy duration was longer than 3 years based on the average age of the transgender women in the study (30.3 years old) and the average age at which the transgender women in the study started their gender-affirming hormone therapy (23.0 years old).

The Saitong 2025 study reported that the transgender women had “been undergoing feminizing gender-affirming therapy for 8-10 years.” Thus, the Saitong 2025 study clearly falls outside of the 1-3 years range mentioned in Sieczkowska and co-authors’ concluding remarks.

The Hamilton 2024 study reported that the transgender women had undergone one year or more years of gender-affirming hormone therapy, with an average therapy duration of four years. Thus, several of the participants in the Hamilton 2024 study would have been undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy for more than 3 years.

The Jenkins 2020 study reported that the transgender women had undergone a minimum of 2 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy, but no group average or range was provided. Thus, some participants in the Jenkins 2020 study would have also likely been undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy for more than 3 years.

To their credit, Sieczkowska and co-authors did mention elsewhere in their paper that “[t]herapy duration varied widely, ranging from 3 months to 14 years, with most studies reporting the following participants for 1–3 years of therapy.” Their statement confirms large heterogeneity in therapy duration, and this heterogeneity amplifies the existing problems in the already underpowered meta-analysis. Their statement also reveals that the “1-3 years” remark, which was used in their concluding statements, was a rough range based on all 52 studies in their paper—not just the studies that compared muscle strength in cisgender and transgender women.

So, Sieczkowska and co-authors misled readers when they said there was no difference in muscle strength between cisgender women and transgender women who had undergone “1-3 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy.” In fact, one could argue that none of the studies that were included in panels A and B in Figure 2 are represented by that remark.

Remarkably, the errors do not end there.

Alvares 2025 Study: The Small Men

The Alvares 2025 study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, examined body composition and physical fitness in cisgender women, transgender women, and cisgender men who had “engaged in regular volleyball training for at least 1 year.”

Alvares 2025 is a clear outlier in Panels A and B. It “pulls” the diamonds in both panels to the left and is the main reason the diamond in Panel A crosses the zero line. It also contributed substantially to the diamond in Panel B crossing the zero line.

Given that Alvares 2025 was an obvious outlier that strongly influenced the conclusions of the meta-analysis, one might have expected Sieczkowska and her co-authors to explain why this study was an outlier. Yet no such explanation was provided.

Here are some key details about Alvares 2025. First, the transgender women in the study were, on average, 5 cm shorter than the cisgender women and 13 cm shorter than the cisgender men. Second, the transgender women had an average body mass 7.8 kg lower than the cisgender women and 17.8 kg lower than the cisgender men. Third, the transgender women practiced volleyball 10 hours per week less than both the cisgender women and the cisgender men.

So what explains these bizarre results?

The cisgender women in Alvares 2025 were not ordinary recreational volleyball players or weekend warriors. They played in “second division national level championships.”

Importantly, Alvares and colleagues themselves addressed this issue in a section of their paper titled “Confounding factors.” There, they explicitly identified training experience, body height, and body mass as confounding factors that help explain why the average grip strength of the cisgender women in their study was greater than that of the transgender women.

Yet Sieczkowska and her co-authors did not inform readers about these confounding factors, which help explain why Alvares 2025 is an outlier in Figure 2. Moreover, because the cisgender and transgender women in Alvares 2025 were so oddly mismatched, the results of that study, and any meta-analysis that relies heavily on it, are of little scientific or practical value.

Jenkins 2020: Missing Data

One of the other problems with the muscle-strength meta-analysis in Figure 2 is that it omitted data that were eligible for inclusion under the authors’ own stated criteria.

The first example is Jenkins 2020, which examined body composition and physical fitness in cisgender women, transgender women, and cisgender men. One of the fitness tests Jenkins conducted was the vertical jump. Results from this test appear to be what Sieczkowska and her co-authors displayed in Panel B.

However, Jenkins and colleagues also reported grip-strength data for cisgender and transgender women. Yet Sieczkowska and her co-authors did not include these data in their meta-analysis of upper-body strength in Panel A.

This omission matters because the grip-strength data run counter to Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ conclusion. The average grip strength of the transgender women was 93.0 kg, compared with 63.9 kg for the cisgender women and 112.7 kg for the cisgender men. The 29.1 kg difference between transgender women and cisgender women was statistically significant, whereas the 19.7 kg difference between transgender women and cisgender men was not.

Saitong 2025: Missing Data

Sieczkowska and her co-authors categorized the vertical jump test as a measure of lower-body “strength.” But today, the vertical jump is more commonly, though still somewhat debatably, described as a test of “power.” In fact, this is how Alvares, Jenkins, and Saitong referred to it. Strength and power are correlated, and strength does correlate with vertical jump height. However, velocity and power are stronger correlates of vertical jump height than strength.

I highlight this issue of nomenclature for two reasons. First, inconsistent use of terminology can confuse readers about which fitness attributes are, and are not, affected by sex and gender-affirming hormone therapy. Second, in this meta-analysis, the inclusion of only the vertical jump as a lower-body strength test is odd, especially because at least one of the included studies—Saitong 2025—reported results from a more direct test of lower-body muscle strength: isokinetic peak torque of the knee extensor and knee flexor muscles.

Saitong 2025 examined these attributes in cisgender women, cisgender men, transgender women with orchiectomy (the surgical removal of the testes), and transgender women without orchiectomy. The group comparisons for the vertical jump and isokinetic peak torque tests were similar, with cisgender women tending to score lowest among all groups, though not necessarily at statistically significant levels. Nevertheless, Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ decision to include the vertical jump results, but not the isokinetic peak torque results, is odd.

Even stranger, Saitong 2025 also included two tests of upper-body strength that Sieczkowska and her co-authors did not include in their meta-analysis in Panel A: isokinetic peak torque of the elbow extensor muscles and isokinetic peak torque of the elbow flexor muscles. The results from these two tests are presented below. They show that cisgender women had the lowest average strength values, although their averages were not statistically different from those of transgender women who had undergone approximately 8–10 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy.

Elbow extensor isokinetic peak torque:

• Cisgender women: 25.9 ± 4.9 Nm

• Transgender women with orchiectomy and ~8–10 years of gender-affirming therapy: 27.2 ± 5.4 Nm

• Transgender women without orchiectomy and ~8–10 years of gender-affirming therapy: 29.1 ± 5.2 Nm

• Cisgender men: 47.3 ± 14.7 Nm

Elbow flexor isokinetic peak torque:

• Cisgender women: 19.2 ± 5.1 Nm

• Transgender women with orchiectomy and ~8–10 years of gender-affirming therapy: 21.5 ± 5.7 Nm

• Transgender women without orchiectomy and ~8–10 years of gender-affirming therapy: 21.3 ± 5.0 Nm

• Cisgender men: 36.3 ± 9.0 Nm

Another important point about Saitong 2025 is that the results from both transgender women with orchiectomy and transgender women without orchiectomy were compared against the same reference group of cisgender women. From the standpoint of study feasibility, this is understandable: it avoids the need to recruit a second reference group of cisgender women. But from a statistical standpoint, the double inclusion of the same reference group in a low-powered meta-analysis is problematic. If that reference group of cisgender women is unusual compared with the broader population of cisgender women, then its uniqueness will disproportionately influence an already flawed analysis.

The Non-Included Alvares Study: More Missing Data

Another bizarre aspect of the meta-analysis in Figure 2 is that at least one other study referenced elsewhere in the paper appears to qualify for inclusion in the figure but is absent from it. This was a second study by Alvares, listed as reference #38 in the paper and included in Figures 1 and 3.

This second Alvares study was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2022. It compared cisgender men, cisgender women, and transgender women who had undergone gender-affirming hormone therapy for 14 years, on average. One of the outcomes was grip strength. Grip strength was about 19 percent higher in transgender women than in cisgender women, 35.3 kg versus 29.7 kg, though this difference was not statistically significant. The grip strength of the cisgender men was 48.4 kg.

Including the grip-strength data from the transgender and cisgender women in Panel A would have “pulled” the diamond to the right, away from Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ conclusion.

Conclusion

On March 26, 2026, about a month and a half after Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ meta-analysis was published, the International Olympic Committee announced its new policy restricting eligibility for the female category at the Olympic Games and other IOC events to biological females. Thankfully, the IOC does not appear to have been influenced at the last minute by Sieczkowska’s paper. That said, findings published in papers like this can still influence sports policies developed by organizations other than the IOC, and they can still impact law.

As I have detailed, the meta-analysis of muscle-strength data in Figure 2 contains many flaws. It included multiple studies that do not meet the authors’ own stated eligibility criteria, while excluding multiple studies that do. Moreover, the meta-analysis was unsound from the start, because too few studies were available to support meaningful conclusions.

Sieczkowska and her co-authors should either issue a correction to their work or retract it altogether, particularly if similar problems exist elsewhere in the paper. Their conclusion that transgender women do not exhibit significant differences in upper-body or lower-body strength compared with cisgender women after 1–3 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy is inappropriate in light of the flaws highlighted above.

At this point, the more appropriate format for synthesizing this literature would be a narrative review, which would allow researchers to take a deeper look at the few available studies in this emerging area. Unfortunately, exercise scientists are often overly eager to publish meta-analyses because they are easier to complete than laboratory experiments, frequently cited by other researchers, and carry a patina of prestige because they are quantitative and require researchers to check a long list of procedural boxes that supposedly improve research quality.

Yet, as we have seen, these supposedly gold-standard procedures are no cure for good old-fashioned human incompetence.

This meta-analysis had eight authors, presumably two to four peer reviewers, and at least one editor. Yet apparently none of them identified one or more of the problems I have highlighted here. That is terrifying!

Finally, it is important to note that three of the papers discussed above were published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. This meta-analysis makes four. Two of those papers—the Hamilton 2024 study and the second Alvares study—required formal corrections. If Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ meta-analysis is corrected, it would become the third paper on this topic in the journal to require correction. That is a remarkably high proportion, and it reflects the British Journal of Sports Medicine’s failing peer review process.

Over the past few years, the British Journal of Sports Medicine has become increasingly political. It has placed itself at the center of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in sports medicine and exercise science publishing. One of the boxes Sieczkowska and her co-authors were required to check before publishing in the journal was the author DEI statement. These statements take up one or two paragraphs of valuable space in papers already limited to 5,000 words. Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ DEI statement took up 80 words.

Think about that for a minute.

Consider the one or two important points of scientific clarification that could have been made with those 80 words. For example, they could have been used to explain why Alvares 2025 was such an outlier and to caution readers against overinterpreting the results of the muscle-strength meta-analysis. Instead, readers learned about the authors’ sexes, gender identities, sexual orientations, career stages, geographic locations, and marginalization statuses—none of which help policymakers understand whether there are meaningful differences in muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women.

This is how DEI undermines science.

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Dr. Nuzzo conducts independent research on sex differences in physical fitness—some of which has been covered at Reality’s Last Stand. To support Dr. Nuzzo’s research, please see his GoFund Me research account.

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Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

This essay was originally published in The Washington Examiner on April 22, 2026.

The Montana Supreme Court’s decision last week in Kalarchik v. State should put to rest the right’s celebratory mantra that “woke is dead.” It isn’t. In a 5–2 ruling, the court upheld a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of key parts of Montana’s 2023 law, SB 458, and related agency policies that defined sex in binary, biological terms and limited changes to birth certificates and driver’s licenses. The ruling does not finally invalidate the law, but it allows Montanans with transgender or “nonbinary” identities to continue changing the sex marker on identity documents while the constitutional challenge proceeds. More importantly, the majority signaled its view that the challenged policies likely violate Montana’s constitution, holding that “transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination” and subjecting the state’s policy to strict scrutiny.

That outcome matters well beyond Montana, because it shows how thoroughly activist ideologies about sex and gender have penetrated elite institutions, including courts in conservative states. Montana’s legislature had attempted to define sex in law using objective biological criteria tied to reproductive function, while excluding “psychological, behavioral, social, chosen, or subjective experience of gender.” The court majority treated the refusal to translate gender identity into official sex classification as a form of unlawful sex discrimination.

Many of these sex-denying policies were not a result of some revolutionary scientific discovery, but from a form of linguistic capture. Existing legal terms were instead reinterpreted and redefined. “Sex,” once understood as a biological classification, was gradually made to include “gender identity,” a subjective feeling. Once an objective biological anchor is gone, policy will go wherever activists want to pull it. Montana’s law tried to reinstate that anchor, and failed.

That has been the standard pattern. The cultural campaign against the biological reality of sex began in niche activist blogs, women’s studies departments, and obscure ideological magazines. But it eventually moved into mainstream journalism and then into scientific and scholarly journals, where it acquired the prestige that courts and bureaucracies necessarily treat as authoritative.

In just the last few weeks, many outlets have been promoting this sex pseudoscience. Princeton anthropologist Agustin Fuentes argued in Science Politics that government efforts to define sex as a biological binary incorporate “falsehoods and erroneous assertions.” IFLScience ran a piece insisting there is “no clean definition” of biological sex. A piece from the Trans Advocacy & Complaints Collective declared that “sex does not fit neatly in boxes.” A new BioScience paper reported that teaching students “the diversity of biological sex” increased LGBTQIA+ students’ “sense of belonging.” And an Ecology Letters paper concluded that there is “no current consensus” on biological sex. It’s safe to say that the war on biology hasn’t slowed down. It has, in my estimation, been dramatically accelerating.

The main issue is not that these arguments are simply wrong, but that they create the appearance of scientific doubt around fundamental biological facts. Once enough papers and essays circulate claiming that sex is a spectrum or based on clusters of mutable traits, or something with “no consensus” definition, judges and policymakers can present themselves as merely choosing among competing expert views. But this is a manufactured controversy, because the basic biological claim that males and females are reproductive classes rooted in anisogamy (sperm vs ova) has not been overturned. Activists have merely expanded the topic from sex to everything associated with sex—hormones, morphology, behavior, developmental pathways, social roles—and then act as though the resulting complexity is proof that sex itself defies categorization.

That sleight of hand was on display in a recent debate at the University of Delaware between Fuentes and philosopher Tomas Bogardus. Before the debate even began, the moderator had to defend the legitimacy of discussing whether biological sex is binary at all, noting that some critics objected to the event’s very occurrence on the grounds that it could harm vulnerable communities.

Yet the debate also exposed why the activists have vehemently held a position of “no debate” for so long. Fuentes explicitly conceded that humans have two sexes—male and female—and said that when he speaks of sex as a spectrum, he does not mean three sexes or five sexes. Instead, his strategy is to widen the discourse around sex itself to what he called “sex biology,” a much broader category encompassing every axis that bodies, behaviors, endocrine systems, morphology, etc., can vary between the sexes. He emphasized overlapping distributions in height, weight, hormones, fat deposition, and other traits, then argued that because these traits are not distributed in perfectly discrete ways that a binary framing is not biologically sound or useful. Bogardus, by contrast, kept returning to the central question of the debate: what sex is, and how many there are. His (correct) answer was that male and female are functional reproductive classes rooted in producing either sperm or ova, and that variation in correlates of sex does not negate the sex categories themselves.

Of course it is true that not every sexually dimorphic trait is binary. Of course males and females overlap in countless characteristics. No biologist thinks every trait in an organism fall into in two perfect, non-overlapping bins. That has never been the claim. The claim is that in anisogamous species (those that reproduce by fusing sperm and ova) there are two sexes because there are two reproductive functions based on two gamete types. This is precisely the point I made in my 2025 Archives of Sexual Behavior commentary, “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes.” I also addressed the routine attempts to dissolve sex into trait clusters, and explained why these activist models actually presuppose the gamete-based model they seek to replace.

The legal implications of activist pseudoscience are so serious because once sex is no longer understood as a reproductive classification but as an aggregate of partly overlapping traits, it becomes infinitely malleable. Courts can then say that because people differ in complicated ways and because some sex-related traits do not line up neatly, the state has no principled basis for keeping sex distinct from identity. This is how law begins to privilege a pseudoscientific account of human beings while portraying those defending the true biological understanding of sex as ideologues.

My own paper was recently the target of a Letter to the Editor in the same journal by the German scholar Dana Mahr. I welcomed the criticism, because robust public debate about the facts is healthy. But rather than making a scientific refutation of my paper, Mahr chose to critique it from a “feminist epistemology” perspective, arguing that defining male and female by gametes is simply a choice shaped by historical and cultural norms. In my published response, I pointed out that while the labels we assign the reproductive classes “male” and “female” are conventional, the underlying reproductive phenomenon is not. The fact that anisogamous organisms reproduce through the fusion of two gamete types is no more created by language than the molecular structure of water is created by language. The real issue is whether our categories track a mind-independent feature of nature. In the case of biological sex, they do.

Our exchange encapsulates the entire conflict. On one side is the view that biology describes real features of the world. On the other is the claim that concepts literally create the world, and that our definitions should therefore bend toward achieving social and political goals.

Some people still proclaim that woke has peaked, is now trending down, and that the country is finally moving on. There is some truth to that politically, because the backlash against woke is real and the public is more skeptical and informed than it was five years ago. The Trump administration has moved to restore biological language in federal policy, and more scholars are now willing to defend basic biological realities in print. But surveying the daily output of academia, which I do regularly, gives no indication that the activist project is in retreat. It is simply consolidating. If you want to know where the next round of policy battles will come from, do not watch the news or scroll your social media feed. Read the journals.

Some of my colleagues believe we have entered the “lawfare” stage of this conflict. The people who are reachable have now heard the arguments and chosen their side. The fight is no longer mainly about consciousness-raising, but policy implementation. Which view of sex will be written into state and federal policy? Which view will courts treat as authoritative? Which view will medical boards, licensing agencies, school systems, and bureaucracies be able to cite as settled expertise? Those questions will be answered, in large part, by what appears in the academic literature. Progressives understand this, and are playing the long game by saturating academic journals with ideological nonsense.

The Montana decision should be understood in that light, and serve as a warning. Even in a red state, after years of public controversy, and after legislators tried to write biological reality back into law, the highest court in the state treated that effort as unconstitutional discrimination.

This is why serious scholars, now more than ever, must start actively engaging with activist pseudoscience in academic journals. Social media posts and think pieces are not nearly enough to combat the left’s slow manufacturing of expert consensus where it matters most.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pledged to rein in “woke indoctrination” in public education, he wasn’t bluffing. Over the last several years, he and the legislature have pursued an aggressive legal and governance strategy to push far-left ideology out of taxpayer-funded institutions. The justification is straightforward: the people have the right to demand that public universities not become subsidized activist factories.

Laws can close academic departments and impose subject-area bans on paper, but campuses are still run day-to-day by faculty and administrators who may not be interested in what voters want. When progressive activists dominate a university, they will inevitably try to circumvent the law.

Such efforts appear to be happening at New College today. Though the Gender Studies department was shut down at the Sarasota school, and Florida law forbids the use of state and federal funds to “promote or engage in political or social activism,” faculty continue to oversee work promoting activist pseudoscience, treat opposition to explicit content in K-12 libraries as equivalent to Nazism, and celebrate “queer bibliographies” and “resistance” to elected officials.

Consider a 2025 undergraduate thesis covering the “Evolution of Gender” in drama and fashion. Nova Myhill, a professor of English and Theater, Dance & Performance Studies at New College, sponsored the thesis, which explicitly lists “Gender Studies” as its “Area of Concentration.”

At a glance, the thesis appears to be a broad, benign survey of gender-expression conventions through fashion in the context of theater. But it quickly advances to extreme activist views of sex and biology. The opening section, titled “Our Idea of Sex,” portrays sex in humans not as “concrete” or “permanent” but as something “closer to being reflections of societal preconceptions than anything based only on ‘biology.’” It claims that the idea that humans have two sexes became widespread only “around the mid-1700s” due to “changing values of what was important within identity, class and gender beginning to take the utmost importance when using clothing as a symbol or sign of identity.” It even asserts that “there was a time when we conceived of the human race as only ‘one-sex’,” and that our “re-envisioning of the sexes” during the Enlightenment into two categories—male and female—actually “led to the differentiation and specific designation of reproductive organs; the penis, testicles, ovaries, and uterus.”

If this were the only undergraduate thesis at New College promoting such radical activist views, it might be dismissed. It is not.

In January 2026, the college approved and archived an undergraduate thesis in the Division of Humanities that engaged in political activism and covered Gender Queer and Fun Home—books the sexually explicit content of which has prompted parents to oppose their inclusion in school libraries. Myhill also sponsored this thesis and is thanked effusively in the acknowledgements.

Oddly, this thesis includes two abstracts. The first, more formal one describes an exploration of “book censorship, theft, and destruction,” framed as actions “employed to specifically target queer, trans, Jewish, and other marginalized communities,” and ends by describing the authors’ “queer works” as “an act of cultural legacy, heritage transmission, and resistance.” The second reads like a direct taunt of DeSantis and New College’s policy reforms:

This thesis is about queers, trans people, gender, Nazis, book burning, moral panics, censorship, Magnus Hirshfeld, pornography . . . queer bibliography, the Phantasma, classroom libraries, Ron DeSantis, what it’s like to be erased, and also how people fight back . . . so why not read it already?

This isn’t “academic” in any meaningful sense, but rather activist writing designed to indoctrinate, recruit, and promote activism.

In one section, the thesis classifies Gender Queer as essential reading and mocks DeSantis for displaying redacted pages from the book during his November 2023 debate with California Governor Gavin Newsom. It frames Florida’s higher education reforms as part of an “anti-gender movement” with “chilling reach.”

The thesis also compares Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo’s rhetoric to the “paranoia and persecution of McCarthyism in the 1950s” and claims that he helped incite a “reactive moral panic” like the one behind Nazi-era book purges in 1930s Germany. It compares Rufo’s tweet about abolishing the college’s Gender Studies program to a “long and fiery radio address” delivered by “Joseph Goebbels.” Again, such comparisons are not objective scholarship but political activism.

Other recent theses at New College also veer in an activist direction, including a 2025 thesis on “Queer Resistance and the Fight for Change in Morocco,” a 2026 thesis on “Why Queer People Like Horror Films,” and another in 2025 titled “Who Holds the Mic?: Exploring Image, Control, and Identity in Queer.”

Of course, Florida’s higher-ed reforms don’t ban students from discussing controversial topics in class or engaging in activism in their free time. State leaders intended them to prevent public institutions from using public funds to “promote, support, or maintain” programs or activities that “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “promote or engage in political or social activism.”

The work required to shepherd student theses entails faculty time and labor, institutional oversight, and curriculum funded by and developed under the authority of the university. It strains credulity to present as legitimate scholarship works that push false, ideologically charged views of biology or that describe themselves as works of “resistance.” A process that produces such works appears to flout Florida law’s intent to prevent state and federal funds from being used to “promote or engage in political or social activism.”

None of this is to say that shutting down New College’s gender-studies department was in vain. The volume of activist “scholarship” produced at the institution has declined markedly, and that’s a true achievement.

Nonetheless, Florida’s academic reforms are not self-enforcing. As always, personnel is policy. True believers on the faculty will look for workarounds. If nobody is paying attention, abolished departments will soon reappear inside more traditional ones—in this case, the departments of English and Theater, Dance & Performance Studies.

Institutional responsibility lies with the faculty and administrators who decide which scholarship to approve, endorse, or reward. New College’s trustees and the state legislature can pass resolutions and rewrite statutes, but they cannot monitor every thesis committee or syllabus. That requires constant vigilance, because the pattern is predictable: abolish the department, then watch its ideology migrate to the English department, the history department, or the library.

If New College wants to fulfill its evolution into a post-woke institution, its guardians should not approve scholarship that treats its vital reforms as analogous to a second Holocaust. Leaders should hold faculty accountable when they use university resources to resurrect discarded programs and pursue activism under new names.

This article was originally published in City Journal on April 14, 2026.

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