The Strange and Instructive Case of Carole Hooven of Harvard

 

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said at the hearing, "Carole Hooven an evolutionary biologist, was forced to resign, because she stated that a person's sex is  biological and binary...and so, President Gay, in what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn't?"

--Congressional hearing about antisemitism on campus. Question to President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, who could not answer it, and resigned shortly thereafter. 

Carol Hooven is not a name I knew before the February 23rd issue of the Boston Globe, which carried in its "Ideas" section an article by her called "Don't Let Anyone confuse You: There Really Are Only Two Sexes."

Professor Hooven, Formerly of Harvard

I began reading with the usual bias I carry to all newspaper articles about this topic I know from my own longstanding academic involvement, expecting to get more and more annoyed as I usually do, but as I progressed through the paragraphs, I became more and more excited: Here, finally, is an article by someone who has thought this stuff through.

Imagine that: an article in the newspaper by someone who actually knows what she is talking about!

Professor Hooven explored the different meanings of the words "sex" and "gender" and their uses, and explored how whether a person harbored sperm or eggs had been used to assign sex or gender, and the role of the Y chromosome and the cases where the sex chromosomes are present in unusual combinations or numbers.

She also alluded to Clownfish who can change sex and make sperm from testes and later eggs from ovaries. But she notes, among mammals there are no examples of sexual plasticity like this. 

So, by the end of the article, she had me. 

Until I read her little identifier at the bottom: She is fellow at the American Enterprise Institute! How did a mind so supple and open wind up at a place like the AEI?

Well, Professor Google to the rescue: In her article "Why I Left Harvard," Professor Hooven walks you through her experience on campus with chairmen of various departments and committees running for cover, trying not to get dragged down with her, defending her remarks that sex, as we define it for medical purposes, really is binary.

Did you know there are committees at Harvard there are central DEI offices, complete with staff, headed by the Chief Diversity and inclusion Officer (CDIO) whose mission is to create a "campus climate that is welcoming, inclusive, respectful, and free from bias and harassment?" And each department has DEI committees staffed by faculty, staff and grad students? Diversity: a goal for the department of engineering? 

But how "welcoming" is Harvard to a professor who questions whether biologic sex really is as plastic and fluid as current Transgender Clinics would insist?

To question has been raised whether transgender patients, suffering from "gender dysphoria" (the feeling you have been born in the wrong body if you are a woman but feel like a man) are more like homosexuals or more like patients with anorexia nervosa. The man who raised this was Dr. Paul McHugh at Johns Hopkins, when he suggested perhaps Transgender Clinics were taking the wrong approach by simply agreeing with patients that they ought to be castrated and have mastectomies and given mega doses of testosterone. For his troubles, Dr. McHugh was ostracized and medical students (MEDICAL STUDENTS at Johns Hopkins!) refused to speak to him.

A similar fate awaited Professor Hooven at Harvard. Like McHugh, she found that free expression of opinion, questioning the prevailing orthodoxy was fatal to career longevity at an academic institution. The very place where ideas are meant to be examined and questioned, turned out to be no better, and perhaps worse, than a religious order.

Life at Harvard, at least as Professor Hooven depicts it, makes the Inquisition look like a pub crawl.

I still do know know enough about Professor Hooven--I'll have to watch her interviews on FOX NEWS and listen to her on Joe Rogan. There may be more to her story. But at least at first blush, she seems to be just one more nail in the coffin of the notion that Harvard is a place of superior intellect.