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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.

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.

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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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.

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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:

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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.

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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

Brown, G. A., Shaw, B. S., & Shaw, I. (2025). Sex-based differences in shot put, javelin throw, and long jump in 8-and-under and 9-10-year-old athletes. Eur J Sport Sci, 25(1), e12241. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsc.12241

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

Brown, G. A., Shaw, B. S., & Shaw, I. (2026b). Sex Differences in Running Performance Among 8-and-Under and 9-10-Year-Old Children in US Regional Track Championships. Scand J Med Sci Sports, 36(3), e70251. https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.70251

Hamilton, B. R., Guppy, F. M., Barrett, J., Seal, L., & Pitsiladis, Y. (2021). Integrating transwomen athletes into elite competition: the case of elite archery and shooting. Eur J Sport Sci, 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/17461391.2021.1938692

Hilton, E. N., & Lundberg, T. R. (2021). Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage. Sports Med, 51(2), 199-214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3

Hunter, S. K., S, S. A., Bhargava, A., Harper, J., Hirschberg, A. L., B, D. L., K, L. M., N, J. N., Stachenfeld, N. S., & Bermon, S. (2023). The Biological Basis of Sex Differences in Athletic Performance: Consensus Statement for the American College of Sports Medicine. Med Sci Sports Exerc, 55(12), 2328-2360. https://doi.org/10.1249/MSS.0000000000003300

Joyner, M. J., Hunter, S. K., & Senefeld, J. W. (2025). Evidence on sex differences in sports performance. J Appl Physiol (1985), 138(1), 274-281. https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00615.2024

Lakie, M. (2010). The influence of muscle tremor on shooting performance. Exp Physiol, 95(3), 441-450. https://doi.org/10.1113/expphysiol.2009.047555

Lundberg, T. R., & Menickelli, J. (2025). Sex Differences in Disc Golf Performance: Implications for Eligibility Criteria for Women’s Competitions. Eur J Sport Sci, 25(8), e70008. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsc.70008

Mon-Lopez, D., Tejero-Gonzalez, C. M., de la Rubia Riaza, A., & Calvo, J. L. (2020). Pistol and Rifle Performance: Gender and Relative Age Effect Analysis. Int J Environ Res Public Health, 17(4). https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17041365

Nuzzo, J. L. (2025). Sex Differences in Grip Strength From Birth to Age 16: A Meta-Analysis. Eur J Sport Sci, 25(3), e12268. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsc.12268

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

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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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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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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.

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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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 war against biology has not slowed down. Despite the chatter on X that woke ideology is dead or at least in retreat, a brief internet search reveals that activists are still flooding the zone with sex pseudoscience.

Just in the last few weeks, we’ve seen several examples. Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes published a piece in Science Politics arguing that government efforts to define sex as a biological binary are based on “falsehoods and erroneous assertions.” IFLScience ran an article claiming there is “no clean definition” of biological sex. The Trans Advocacy & Complaints Collective published a piece insisting that “sex does not fit neatly in boxes.” And now a peer-reviewed paper in BioScience claims that teaching students what the authors call “the diversity of biological sex” makes LGBTQIA+ students feel more included and enjoy biology more.

That last example is particularly concerning, because peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals carry more weight than newspaper think pieces or activist blog posts. They influence how biology is taught, how future teachers are trained, and regularly serve as the basis for public policy.

The BioScience paper presents itself as offering a more “accurate” way to teach about biological sex, but what it actually offers is the same sex pseudoscience activists have been pushing for years. It promotes confusion about what sex is, arbitrariness in how it is defined, and a conflation of exceptions and variations with the category itself.

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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.

Editor’s Note

The following is an interview I did with the German skeptics organization Die Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften (GWUP), or in English, the Society for the Scientific Study of Parasciences.

GWUP is a longstanding rationalist and scientific-skeptical organization dedicated to distinguishing evidence-based science from pseudoscientific and paranormal claims, and to providing clear, reliable information so people can make sound decisions.

In this interview, we discuss the biology of sex, why biologists define sex by gametes, the activist frameworks used to challenge the sex binary, the professional consequences of defending basic biological realities, and what scientific skepticism requires when politically charged claims are treated as settled science.

I am pleased to reproduce the interview here from GWUP’s website with permission.

Colin Wright
CEO/Editor-in-Chief, Reality’s Last Stand

Introduction

In November 2025, Wright published “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes” in Archives of Sexual Behavior, a scholarly commentary that has become a touchstone in debates over biological sex. The paper systematically addresses the various models that have been proposed to challenge the sex binary—from chromosomal definitions to sex spectrum theories—and explains why biologists define sex in terms of gametes: sperm and ova.

We spoke with Wright about the science underlying the sex binary, the professional consequences of defending it, and what skeptics can learn from disagreements within their own community.

Q: As skeptics, we care about pseudoscience, but also about exaggerated or plainly false scientific claims. In your view, which findings are misrepresented the most, be it in academia or in public?

A: The reality of the binary nature of biological sex, and the claim that it does not exist.

From New Atheism to the Sex Debate

Q: You came up through the skeptic and new atheist movements. How did you end up focusing on this particular topic?

A: I was heavily involved in pushing back against intelligent design and creationism. Those attacks tended to come from outside the academy—people learning things in churches or popular outlets that weren’t scientifically justifiable. I was in the academy pushing back against public misconceptions that originated outside of it.

With the sex biology issue, the misconceptions started outside the academy, but then quickly moved inside. These ideologies have entered many academic departments, so the leading proponents now tend to be within the academy, and the defenders are as well. A moral component has been attached to this question—it’s not just a scientific question anymore.

When I started talking about it, I expected a scientific argument—‘this is the evidence, you’re wrong because of this.’ But it totally avoided scientific disagreement. They went straight to ‘you’re a terrible, evil person parroting far-right fascist, white supremacist talking points.’ The academy and scientists are now the loudest promoters of these misconceptions, and the academy has a legitimizing effect. If journals and scientists say it, people assume it must be true.

The Archives of Sexual Behavior Paper

Q: What motivated you to write “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes” for Archives of Sexual Behavior?

A: I’ve been writing about this for about seven years. In 2023, I had a peer-reviewed book chapter on the two sexes with Emma Hilton. But the main criticism—partly valid—was that much of what I write appears in popular outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Quillette. These aren’t peer-reviewed journals, so that activists would dismiss my arguments as not scientifically rigorous.

They ignore the fact that people who submit articles pushing back against the sex spectrum stuff often get rejected outright, because journals view these perspectives as socially taboo and morally questionable. So when there was a call for commentaries from Archives of Sexual Behavior on this topic, I thought it was a good opportunity to write something succinct—to get all my arguments into an actual scientific journal that both scientists and the public can cite.

What’s bizarre is that there really weren’t any papers that just spelled out in simple terms what biological sexes are—what it means to be male or female. It’s like gravity: we all observe this force and take for granted that it exists. The same was true for sexes. All biologists understood it once we discovered what sperm and ova were, but few actually wrote it down in explicit terms. Activists exploited that gap. I decided to address this one question head-on because it’s the one being exploited most.

How Biologists Define Sex

Q: For readers who aren’t biologists: how do scientists define biological sex, and why do they say there are exactly two?

A: We need to think about how humanity viewed sex before we even knew what gametes were. We lacked the tools to observe them, yet it wasn’t difficult to recognize that there were two human sexes. We’re sexually dimorphic—men and women look different, have different reproductive anatomy, different functions. Women can get pregnant, gestate, and give birth; men cannot. We had a functional concept of sex, but we didn’t understand the fundamental basis.

We discovered sperm under a microscope in the 1600s and ova in the early 1800s. That’s when we began to understand that what we call males and females are two fundamentally different reproductive strategies: an individual either produces many small sex cells called sperm, or larger sex cells called ova. And this wasn’t unique to humans—it showed up in countless animals and even plants.

We call species that reproduce by fusing a large gamete and a small gamete “anisogamous.” We termed these strategies the ‘male’ strategy and ‘female’ strategy. What does it mean to be male? It means being an individual whose reproductive system has the biological function to produce many small gametes. Females have the biological function to produce fewer, larger gametes.

This became the universal concept of male and female. It’s what unites all species that look and behave nothing like humans. What makes me male, and a snail male, and a fish male, and an asparagus plant male, is that we’re all deploying this reproductive strategy involving small gametes. We have otherwise nothing in common—we look entirely different, our hormones are different.

There are only two sexes because there are only two types of gametes. There’s no intermediate one. Therefore, there can only be two sexes that an individual can have.

Addressing the Counter-Arguments

Q: Your paper identifies five main models used to argue against the sex binary. Could you briefly outline them?

A: First, there’s the conflation of mating types with sexes. Some fungi and slime molds reproduce sexually using gametes of the same size—we call these isogamous species. They have chemical compatibility types between gametes, sometimes thousands of them. Articles about ‘the slime mold with 30,000 sexes’ are based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Sexes refer only to males and females, which are defined by different-sized gametes. Species with same-sized gametes don’t have males and females—they have mating types.

Second, there’s the chromosomal or karyotype model. You’ll hear people say, ‘if you’re XX you’re female, if you’re XY you’re male.’ But this conflates how sex is determined in humans with what sex is. Many crocodilians and turtles don’t have sex chromosomes at all—their sex is determined by egg incubation temperature. People with Klinefelter syndrome (XXY) aren’t a third sex; they’re biologically male. These are chromosomal variations within the two sexes.

Third, there’s the sex spectrum model, which holds that sex is a continuous variable based on genital morphology. Some proponents think males and females aren’t real entities but exist only in a statistical sense—you can be varying degrees of male or female, but not definitively male or female. This ignores gametes entirely and has circular problems: how do you know what genital shape is ‘male’ unless you already know what males are, rooted in gametes?

Fourth, there’s the polythetic categories model—like family resemblance, in which members share overlapping characteristics, with no single feature necessary for membership. They try to apply this to sex, saying it’s a combination of chromosomes, hormones, height, and voice pitch, and many other sex-related traits. But how do you define which chromosomes or hormone profiles are ‘male’ without presupposing what males are, rooted in gametes?

Fifth—and most influential—is the multi-level model, which says we can’t talk about bodies having a sex. Instead, you’d say someone is ‘genetically male’ or ‘hormonally female’ or has a ‘male height.’ But again, how are they determining which chromosomes are male without presupposing that males and females exist apart from chromosomes, inevitably rooted in gametes?

Q: Do proponents of these different models argue among themselves?

A: That’s a good question, and one I’ve asked myself many times. There’s a strange silence and truce between them. I’m not arguing with the sex spectrum people while they argue with the karyotype people and the mating type people about the real definition. It’s all five models versus the binary model.

Even more baffling: there aren’t distinct camps. The same individuals hold all these views simultaneously, even though many are mutually exclusive. Different models are often invoked interchangeably, depending on what seems most persuasive in the moment. The conclusion then becomes, ‘See? Sex isn’t binary.’

It’s rooted in a Queer Theory approach where binaries are thought to signal artificiality and oppression. The emphasis often seems to be less on how many sexes there are than on rejecting the idea that there are only two. Three is fine, ten is fine, an infinite spectrum is fine—it just can’t be two, because two is bigoted. That’s really how the approach works.

The State of the Scientific “Debate”

Q: Is there a genuine controversy among biologists about the definition of sex?

A: If you’re looking at people studying the evolution of biological sex and sexual reproduction, there is overwhelming consensus. However, they’re insulated from cultural debates—just nerds studying computer models of how selection favored two different gamete types. It’s one of the most robust areas in evolutionary biology.

There are parallels to creationism. If you ask creationists about evolution, they’ll say it’s “hotly debated” because they want to portray it that way. With sex, activist and online discourse began framing the issue as controversial. The controversy was spoken into existence, even though it’s baseless and incoherent.

No empirical findings have overturned the core biological framework. No Nobel Prizes have been given for discovering the supposed sex spectrum. Again, it was just spoken into existence.

Professional Consequences

Q: Why aren’t more scientists speaking up?

A: Prominent biologists are speaking up. Richard Dawkins hasn’t written a scientific paper on it, but he’s written explicitly about biological sex and why the gamete definition is the universal and only coherent one. He’s one of the most preeminent biologists of our time, and he totally agrees with me. Jerry Coyne, one of the best evolutionary biologists in the world, shares my work and agrees with what I’m saying, because I’m not saying anything extreme. I’m really just articulating basic biology.

But we’d get more scientists willing to write about this if people who do—like me—weren’t immediately slandered as white supremacists and transphobes. Constantly defending yourself from such accusations is not a great way to build a career. That’s why it’s almost impossible to get pre-tenure faculty to speak up about this.

Writing about it has significantly harmed my academic career. Not everyone can start a Substack and make money as a public commentator. I was fortunate to get into this topic early, before anyone was really talking about it. Many people simply can’t afford to jump into this debate. It would be terrible for their careers.

What Would Change Your Mind?

Q: What evidence would you need to change your view that there are only two sexes?

A: That’s a crucial question. In the skeptic community, you always need to have something that could convince you you’re wrong. If you don’t, you’re just a zealot, not doing science.

For me, it’s really easy: we define sexes by the type of gamete an individual is biologically capable of producing. You’d need to present a third novel gamete type—in addition to or intermediate between sperm and ova—that an individual’s reproductive system could have the function to produce. That’s the only thing that could make there be more than two sexes.

Reactions to Your Sexual Archives Commentary

Q: Your Archives of Sexual Behavior article has drawn critique from other commentators (Mahr, 2026). One central criticism is that your claim that there are only two sexes is not simply an empirical conclusion, but effectively an a priori assumption built into your framework.

A: My reply is that the my claim that there are only two sexes is not an a priori assumption. It’s an a posteriori inference based on the observable fact that sexual reproduction in anisogamous species involves only two gamete types — small gametes (sperm) and large gametes (ova). In the article, I explicitly frame the disagreement this way: the labels we give to individual organisms that produce either large or small gametes—female and male, respectively—is a human convention, but the things being labeled are recurring natural phenomena that we did not invent and cannot change.

So what I’m doing is not “assume two sexes, then define sex by gametes.” The order is the reverse: we observe a stable reproductive division (sperm-producers vs ova-producers) across anisogamous taxa, and we use that division to define the two reproductive classes in a way that is cross-taxon coherent and explanatorily useful.

Q: Another central criticism is challenging the idea that the gamete-centered definition is objective or universal, calling it an “illusion of view-from-nowhere.” How do you reply to that?

A: I grant the trivial point that science is a human activity with a long history. But that does not imply that biology cannot describe mind-independent features of the world. In the article, I make this point by analogy: humans discover facts (like the structure of water or the heliocentric organization of the solar system) and then represent them through language and models, but the truth of those facts doesn’t depend on culture or how individual scientists are socially situated.

If we were visited by an advanced alien society from another galaxy, they would have absolutely nothing in common with us culturally or even biologically. But they would still be able to make the basic observations that the Sun sits at the center of our solarsystem, that water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, and that certain species reproduce by fusing two distinct types of gametes.

The gamete-based classification is “objective” because it tracks a real functional distinction in nature—what reproductive role an organism’s reproductive system has with respect to sperm vs ova. That is precisely what makes “male” and “female” comparable across taxa rather than collapsing into shifting trait-bundles that vary from species to species. No other basis for the sexes is biologically coherent.

Q: Yet another criticism raised is that a binary framing of sex risks invalidating the lived experiences of intersex and gender-diverse individuals. What is your response to that concern, and how do you see the relationship between a biological classification claim and preferences or recommendations for specific policies?

A: First, I’d separate questions that are often blended. One question is descriptive: what “sex” is as a biological classification in anisogamous species. Another question is normative: what legal rights, accommodations, or social practices we should adopt in light of conflicts of interest, fairness concerns, compassion, and so on. The article is explicit that these are distinct domains: policy preferences should never be used to dictate biology, even if biology can and should, when necessary and appropriate, inform policy discussions.

Q: The critique also refers to the claim that around 2% of people are intersex. How do you assess that number, and how is it relevant to the claim that there are only two biological sexes?

A: I assess the “~2% intersex” figure as misleading because it depends on an overly expansive definition of “intersex” that counts many conditions that are not sex-ambiguous in any clinically meaningful sense—i.e., it treats “intersex” as any deviation from a “Platonic ideal” of dimorphism across chromosomes, genitalia, gonads, or hormones. That definitional move inflates prevalence by design.

In the article, I point to Leonard Sax’s response: if “intersex” is to remain clinically meaningful, it should be restricted to cases where chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or where the phenotype appears sexually ambiguous. This results in an estimate on the order of ~0.018% rather than ~2%.

But—and this is crucial—whichever estimate one prefers or is more accurate, it is not actually relevant to the question of how many sexes there are, because rare developmental conditions do not constitute additional sexes. They do not create new reproductive classes with the function of producing novel gamete types beyond sperm and ova. At most, they create atypical or ambiguous development relative to one of the two existing reproductive classes.

How to Engage

Q: How do you deal with people who seem impervious to evidence on this issue?

A: Very few can have their mind changed, but I’ve encountered some who were genuinely confused—they bought into activist rhetoric but weren’t themselves ideological. I’ve been able to explain things, and they’ll say, ‘I see what you’re saying. I’ll modify how I speak about this.’ That’s great.

But most people won’t change, because it has become political to them. So I’m not fixated on trying to change their minds. Instead, I try to model the legitimate scientific approach: stick to facts, make arguments, don’t call people names, don’t make ad hominem remarks. Be the calmest person in the room. Address the facts directly but politely.

If you do all this and you’re met with vitriol and name-calling, people watching can see there’s some weird dynamic—this guy is clearly not crazy, he’s intelligent and calm. That juxtaposition does a lot of harm to their cause. People can see who the ideologue is in the scenario. I think that’s valuable.

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About the Author

Jowan Mahmod, PhD, is a multidisciplinary researcher focused on how digital technologies, identity, and shifting social norms are transforming contemporary societies. Dr. Mahmod’s work challenges dominant narratives by examining the psychological and sociological forces behind polarization, perception, and collective behavior. She is currently writing a second book that shows why polarization makes more sense once the deeper dysfunctions driving it are understood. You can follow her work at wehavebeenfooled.substack.com.

The question of whether Islam is compatible with Western values has become particularly loaded, as the discussion is assumed to revolve around binaries such as “good versus bad” or “progressive versus backward.” Framed that way, it turns into a moral question. It trivializes—and often obscures—a conclusion that is fairly straightforward from a historical and rational perspective, even if we set aside Islam’s more extreme manifestations.

Value systems don’t emerge from nothing. They are shaped by the social, political, and economic conditions in which they develop, and by the incentives and constraints they were forced to navigate. A comparison with medieval Europe makes the point without triggering the same defensiveness. No one argues that the sacred and moral order of thirteenth-century Europe—a world of religious absolutism and patriarchy, where women were legally and socially subordinate to men and heretics were persecuted—could function within today’s secular democracies.

What works under one set of conditions often does not hold under another. Seen this way, asking whether an Islamic value system sits comfortably within modern liberal democracies should be no more inflammatory than asking whether medieval European values are compatible with contemporary Western society.

Values are not just private beliefs about right and wrong. They are highly consequential because they shape motives, attitudes, and goals. They form an ordered set of priorities that characterizes and orients people—what they pursue, what they tolerate, what they fear losing, and what they are willing to sacrifice, both individually and collectively. When a society’s value system shifts, those priorities shift with it—and so does the society.

The irony is that Western societies are, at this very moment, in the middle of their own value shift—one in which postmodern sensibilities increasingly compete with the ideals of modernity. That clash makes something easy to see: when incompatible value systems insist on shaping public life, conflict and polarization are the predictable result. The friction shows up not only in policy, but in the regulation of language and speech. Yet this basic logic is often treated as impolite—or simply ignored—when the conversation turns to Islam. The omission is even more striking given that many of the postmodern generation’s normative expectations rest on a worldview that is fundamentally at odds with the Islamic one.

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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.

Author’s Note

In 2025, I published a Commentary in Archives of Sexual Behavior titled “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes,” in which I laid out the empirical case for the binary nature of sex and addressed several of the most common activist frameworks used to deny or obscure it. The piece has since been accessed more than 30,000 times on the journal’s website, making it the 11th most accessed paper in the journal’s 55-year history.

In January 2026, Dana Mahr, a German scholar of science and technology studies, published a Letter to the Editor critiquing my Commentary through the lens of “feminist epistemology.” I did not find the critique persuasive, to put it mildly. I was invited to respond, and respond I did.

Ever since I began writing publicly about the biology of sex in response to the spread of sex-and-gender pseudoscience, all I have wanted is serious academic debate. Instead, I and others who have tried to defend biological reality—among them Carole Hooven, Emma Hilton, Alex Byrne, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Tomas Bogardus, Heather Heying, and others—have routinely been met with personal attacks and sneering dismissal rather than substantive engagement.

That has begun to change. Over the last decade, as dissenting academics have refused to be silenced or driven out, activists have lost some of their ability to suppress debate through censorship, stigma, and institutional pressure. Increasingly, they are being forced to defend their ideas in public, such as in court and, at last, on the pages of academic journals. That is unlikely to end well for ideologies that treat the sexes as social constructs. Such ideas may survive within the insular ideological circles found in many humanities departments, but they collapse on contact with reality and serious criticism.

I am extremely pleased to have this exchange on the academic record. Some early reactions on X suggested that responding was pointless because scholars like Mahr are too ideologically committed ever to change their minds. Perhaps. But neither Mahr nor any other postmodern academic are ever my primary target audience. The audience I primarily write for is the broader scientific community and the general public, who I believe are still fully capable of recognizing the difference between a clear, good-faith argument and rhetoric designed to obscure, evade, or manipulate. Just as importantly, I hope this exchange helps model what scholarly disagreement should look like: direct engagement with arguments, not snark, slander, or character assassination.

If you enjoy my response below, please consider sharing it on social media.

I welcome Mahr’s (2026) Letter to the Editor critiquing my Commentary (Wright, 2025) on the nature and number of the sexes. Academic disagreement provides an opportunity to clarify points of dispute and potential confusion, and to equip both the scientific community and the broader public with a more accurate understanding of the underlying biology. Because debates about sex are increasingly consequential for public policy, I appreciate the opportunity to respond to Mahr’s specific points. For clarity, I address my disagreements in the order they appear.

Mahr’s first critique is that I allegedly treat the binary “two-and only two” nature of sex as an “a priori” assumption, and that this “presumes a neutral, context-free scientific fact.” Mahr writes that “The very act of defining ‘male’ and ‘female’ by gametes is not a purely descriptive truth but a choice shaped by historical and cultural norms.” While I agree that the labels we assign to things are human conventions—we could have used different words than male and female—the substantive claim at issue is not a label but the observable and recurring natural reproductive phenomenon of anisogamy.

My argument is not “a priori” in the sense of being asserted before observation. It is an a posteriori argument based on the observation that, across anisogamous taxa, individuals participate in reproduction via reproductive systems with the function to produce either small gametes (sperm) or large gametes (ova) (Hilton & Wright, 2023; Minot, 1888). The nomenclature we use for these reproductive classes is a human convention, but the underlying biology is not. Here’s an analogy: Humans named “water” long before we knew its composition, and only later discovered through experiment that it is a molecule composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (H₂O) (Edelstein, 1948; Eisenberg & Kauzmann, 1969). We could have chosen a different name for the molecule, but its structure was what it was before we discovered it and would remain the same regardless of what we called it. Likewise, the two reproductive strategies based on producing either small and large gametes predate any human categorization by over a billion years (Butterfield, 2000).

Mahr then rejects my claim that the gamete-centered definition is objective or universal, calling such claims a “god trick” and an “illusion of view-from-nowhere,” and appealing to feminist epistemology to argue that scientific categories are historically and socially situated. In the broad sense, science is indeed a human activity embedded in history. But it does not follow that biology cannot therefore describe objective, mind-independent features of the world. Many scientific claims are objective in the relevant sense: The Sun sits at the center of our solar system (Copernicus, 1543); water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen in a 2:1 ratio (von Humboldt & Gay-Lussac, 1805). Humans had to discover these facts and represent them through language and models, but their truth is not dependent on culture. Likewise, male and female as reproductive classes based on gamete size are an observable, general phenomenon that makes these categories coherent, comparable across taxa, and explanatorily useful (Hilton & Wright, 2023). The question is not whether or how scientists are “socially situated,” but whether the proposed classification tracks a real and recurrent functional distinction in nature. In anisogamous species, it does.

Mahr next argues that a gamete-based definition “ignores the many other biological features that vary (chromosomes, hormones, brain structures, etc.),” and claims that the “biological elements commonly linked to ‘sex’ (including cells, tissues, molecules, structures, and pathways) do not neatly divide into two distinct categories.” From this, Mahr concludes that defining sex “strictly by gamete size is a reduction that omits these complexities.” This objection is addressed directly in my original Commentary’s discussion of “polythetic” accounts of sex (Wright, 2025). There, I described the polythetic view as one in which sex is treated as “an aggregate of traits—chromosomes, gonads, gametes, hormones, neuroanatomy, secondary sex characteristics, and other sexually dimorphic traits—and individuals are assigned degrees of maleness or femaleness according to how their overall profile aligns with what is considered male-typical or female-typical.”

The difficulty with this view is not that trait variation is uninteresting, but that polythetic models conflate determinants and downstream correlates of sex with sex itself. As I wrote, “Traits are labeled ‘male-typical’ or ‘female-typical’ because they correlate with males and females already identified independently—ultimately by reference to gametes.” In other words, the polythetic view collapses in on itself because it depends on the very classificatory foundation—male and female as functional reproductive classes rooted in gametes—it seeks to replace.

The gamete-based definition does not deny biological variation; it organizes it. Chromosomes, hormones, genital development, and many dimorphic traits vary—sometimes substantially—within each sex, and development can produce atypical outcomes. But variation in correlates of sex is not the same thing as variation in sex itself. In anisogamous organisms, the universal distinction that makes “male” and “female” biologically comparable across taxa is reproductive function with respect to sperm versus ova (Bogardus, 2025). This is also why it is a mistake to treat any of these correlates, whether individually or collectively, as constitutive of sex.

For instance, there is nothing inherently “male” about a Y chromosome as such. In mammals, the Y chromosome happens to play a central role in triggering male development (Wilhelm et al., 2007); in birds, the sex chromosomes differ (ZW systems) (Ellegren, 2000); and many reptiles lack sex chromosomes entirely (Janzen & Paukstis, 1991). Yet despite the diversity of sex determination mechanisms (Bachtrog et al., 2014), the sex classes across taxa remain intelligible and comparable because they remain anchored in gamete size. This is also why sex change in sequential hermaphrodites is intelligible: We identify the transition precisely by a shift in which type of gamete the organism’s reproductive system has the function to produce (Avise & Mank, 2009). Without gametes as the universal defining trait, “male” and “female” lose all cross-taxon coherence and become nothing more than meaningless labels attached to shifting bundles of correlates.

Mahr then takes issue with my claim that definitional clarity has “scientific and societal benefits,” arguing that “rigid essentialism about sex often undergirds exclusionary norms,” including when “policy-makers or courts cite ‘science’ to restrict transgender rights.” This concern highlights an important distinction. One issue is descriptive: What an individual’s sex is as a biological classification in anisogamous species. Another is normative: What rights or accommodations a society ought to adopt for males and females. My claims about the number of sexes and how they are defined are not grounded in a preference for any policy outcome, but in what makes the categories biologically coherent and explanatorily useful. People are free to advocate for many different policies regarding sport, bathrooms, or even social recognition. But while biology can and should inform policy, policy preferences should never be used to dictate biology.

Finally, Mahr writes that the binary view “risks invalidating the lived experiences of intersex and gender-diverse individuals,” references “non-binary genders,” and invokes the claim that “a large body of research shows that about 2% of people have intersex traits that challenge a simple XX/XY schema.” My Commentary was intentionally about the biology of sex, not gender identity, roles, or expression. Those are separate topics that are irrelevant to how many sexes there are and how they are defined in evolutionary and reproductive terms.

With respect to the claim that “about 2% of people have intersex traits that challenge a simple XX/XY schema,” it is both misleading and, as presented, poorly supported by the citations provided (Fausto-Sterling, 1993, 2025). The widely repeated “2%” figure is arrived at by adopting an overly expansive definition of “intersex” as deviation from a “Platonic ideal of physical dimorphism at the chromosomal, genital, gonadal, or hormonal levels” (Blackless et al., 2000). Because conforming to a “Platonic ideal” is an impossibly high standard, this approach dramatically inflates prevalence by counting many non-ambiguous conditions as “intersex.” In response, Sax (2002) argued that if “intersex” is to retain a clinically meaningful definition, it should be “restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female.” Under this narrower, realistic, and clinically useful definition, the prevalence estimate drops two orders of magnitude to approximately 0.018%. However, the existence and prevalence of DSDs or “intersex” conditions are irrelevant to the question of how many sexes there are. While developmental variation may produce sexually ambiguous phenotypes in extremely rare cases, they do not constitute additional or intermediate sexes because they do not result in reproductive anatomy with the function of producing novel gamete types beyond sperm and ova.

In sum, Mahr’s critique is mainly about the sociology of categories and the policy implications of scientific debates. Those are fair topics to discuss, but they do not change the biological basis for how the sexes are defined. The sex binary is not an “a priori” assumption, but an empirical observation that there exist only two distinct gamete types in anisogamous species. Treating sex as a polythetic bundle of correlates confuses the determinants and downstream effects of sex with sex itself, and ultimately relies on the gamete foundation it seeks to undermine.

The renowned geneticist, Dobzhansky (1973), wrote that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” highlighting evolution as the unifying framework that makes life’s diversity, complexity, and interconnectedness comprehensible. I contend that a parallel statement applies similarly to reproductive biology: Nothing in the biology of the sexes makes sense except in the light of gametes.

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