Proof that if transwomen athletes transition puberty, they must be allowed to compete with real women and if you don't, that is transphobic and anti-scientific.
No surprise that Fausto-Sterling is also responsible for the ridiculous comparison of intersex to redheads.
This also deals with the Myth of the Myth of Man the Hunter.
Even 20 years ago, you would've been overwhelmingly laughed at for claiming that physical differences between men and women were due to socialisation. But the reality of the slippery slope means that this is not an uncommon view nowadays.
Left wing logic: puberty happens after birth. Therefore, socialisation causes puberty.
Throwing Like a Girl: Is Biology Allowed to Explain Anything?
"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...
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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."
