Throwing Like a Girl: Is Biology Allowed to Explain Anything?

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."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steven Pinker’s ‘The Blank Slate’ Was a Warning We Ignored

Steven Pinker’s ‘The Blank Slate’ Was a Warning We Ignored

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.

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.

On Youth Gender Care, Medical Associations Hurt Their Credibility (Trans)

There're a lot of parallels to how the left destroyed science during covid, including censorship of dissenting views because they went against the allegedly clear consensus (not mentioned in this article)

Opinion | On Youth Gender Care, Medical Associations Hurt Their Credibility - The New York Times

American advocates for youth gender medicine have insisted for years that overwhelming evidence favors providing gender dysphoric youth with puberty blockers, hormones and, in the case of biological females, surgery to remove their breasts.

It didn’t matter that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared and that they were more likely to have complex mental health conditions than those who had come to clinics in years earlier, complicating diagnosis. Advocates and health care organizations just dug in. As a billboard truck used by the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group GLAAD proclaimed in 2023, “The science is settled.” The Human Rights Campaign says on its website that “the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary youth and adults is clear.” Elsewhere, these and other groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, referred to these treatments as “medically necessary,” “lifesaving” and “evidence-based.”

The reason these advocates were able to make such strong statements is that for years, the most important professional medical and mental health organizations in the country had been singing a similar tune: “The science” was supposedly codified in documents published by these organizations. As GLAAD puts it on its website, “Every major medical association supports health care for transgender people and youth as safe and lifesaving.”

But something confounding has happened in the last few weeks: Cracks have appeared in the supposed wall of consensus.

After expressing concerns about the evidence base in 2024, on Feb. 3, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major American medical group to publicly question youth gender medicine since its widespread adoption. The organization published a nine-page “position statement” advising its members against any gender-related surgeries before age 19 and noting that “there are currently no validated methods” for determining whether youth gender dysphoria will resolve without medical treatment. (The document also acknowledged a similar level of uncertainty surrounding blockers and hormones, though that’s less directly relevant to the practice of plastic surgeons.)

The next day, the American Medical Association — which has long approved of such procedures — announced that “in the absence of clear evidence, the A.M.A. agrees with A.S.P.S. that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”

These statements were released days after a woman named Fox Varian became the first person to win a malpractice case after undergoing gender transition care and later regretting it. Ms. Varian and her lawyer argued that her psychologist and plastic surgeon in suburban New York, despite her serious mental health problems and apparent ambivalence over her transgender identity, failed to safeguard her by going forward with a double mastectomy when she was 16. (Many gender medicine practitioners and advocates believe that to carefully scrutinize or even explore claims of a transgender identity is to engage in de facto conversion therapy.) The jury’s $2 million award will most likely give pause to hospitals and clinics that continue to provide these treatments without substantial guardrails.

The science doesn’t seem so settled after all, and it’s important to understand what happened here. The approach of left-of-center Americans and our institutions — to assume that when a scientific organization releases a policy statement on a hot-button issue, that the policy statement must be accurate — is a deeply naïve understanding of science, human nature and politics, and how they intersect.

At a time when more and more Americans are turning away from expert authority in favor of YouTube quacks and their ilk — and when our own government is pushing scientifically baseless policies on childhood vaccination and climate change — it’s vital that the organizations that represent mainstream science be open, honest and transparent about politically charged issues. If they aren’t, there’s simply no good reason to trust them.

The most striking finding of the Cass review, a 2024 British inquiry that found “remarkably weak” evidence to back up the practice of youth gender medicine, was the shoddy quality of the professional guidelines for this treatment.

Researchers at the University of York, who provided underlying work for the Cass review, found that rather than being linked to careful, independent evaluations of the evidence, these guidelines relied heavily on other organizations’ guidelines. The authors wrote that this “may explain why there has until recently been an apparent consensus on key areas of practice for which evidence remains lacking.”

A 2018 policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics provides a useful example of how these documents can go wrong. At one point, it argues that children who say they are trans “know their gender as clearly and as consistently as their developmentally equivalent peers,” an extreme exaggeration of what we know about this population. (A single study is cited.) The document also criticizes the “outdated approach in which a child’s gender-diverse assertions are held as ‘possibly true’ until an arbitrary age” — the A.A.P. was instructing clinicians to take 4- and 5-year-olds’ claims about their gender identities as certainly true. It’s understandable why the Cass reviewers scored this policy statement so abysmally, giving it 12 out of 100 possible points on “rigor of development” and six out of 100 on “applicability.”

Policy statements like this one can reflect the complex and opaque internal politics of an organization, rather than dispassionate scientific analysis. The journalist Aaron Sibarium’s reporting strongly suggests that a small group of A.A.P. members, many of whom were themselves youth gender medicine providers, played a disproportionate role in developing these guidelines.

Dr. Julia Mason, a 30-year member of the organization, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, with the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir, that the A.A.P. deferred to activist-clinicians and stonewalled the critics’ demands for a more rigorous approach. Dr. Sarah Palmer, an Indiana-based pediatrician, told me she recently left the A.A.P. after nearly 30 years because of this issue. “I’ve tried to engage and be a member and pay that huge fee every year,” she said. “They just stopped answering any questions.” This is unfortunate given that, as critics have noted, in many cases the A.A.P. document’s footnotes don’t even support the claims being made in the text.

The shakiness of the guidelines didn’t matter, though — they were cited numerous times in news accounts and court documents as evidence that the most important pediatric association in the country supported youth medical transition.

In 2020, Republican-led states began pushing in earnest to tightly restrict or ban youth gender medicine. In response, the professional organizations — including the A.M.A., the A.A.P. and the American Psychological Association — wrote a flurry of letters to legislators, amicus briefs and sciencey-sounding documents opposing the bans. These documents routinely exaggerated the evidence base for the treatments in question. There was more talk of consensus: “Every major medical association in the United States recognizes the medical necessity of transition-related care for improving the physical and mental health of transgender people,” explained the A.M.A. in a letter from 2021.

During this same period, a sea change occurred in Europe. Finland, Sweden and Britain conducted systematic evidence reviews of youth gender medicine — a much more transparent and regimented process designed to attenuate the influence of human bias. Every such review revealed deep uncertainty about the evidence base, and as a result, the countries that conducted the reviews began more tightly regulating youth gender medicine. (Denmark has since followed suit, and there are some signs France and Norway may as well.) Which science, then, should be trusted? The confident American professional organizations or the skeptical European health care systems? What about when even the professional organizations start to schism?

I’ve been covering this controversy for about a decade from a left-of-center perspective, and I’ve found that anyone who questions these treatments, even mildly, is invariably accused of bigotry. It would be shocking if the professional organizations chiming in on these issues — which, like all such organizations, exist in part to increase the esteem of their members and to enhance their own influence — were immune from such influences. And now that the political winds have shifted radically, with the Trump administration launching an all-out assault on both the practice of and research into youth gender medicine, it seems some of them are realizing they would benefit from appearing a bit more moderate.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. But it’s impossible to know, because these organizations are quite opaque about the processes that give rise to their public statements. They’ve tried to have it both ways: They’ve presented themselves as representing “the science” while sometimes violating science’s traditional norms of transparency and open debate. (Neither the A.A.P. nor the A.M.A. would grant me an interview. The American Psychological Association responded to some of the questions I sent the organization via email.)

The A.P.A. presents a particularly striking case of why transparency is important. In 2024 it published what it hailed as a “groundbreaking policy supporting transgender, gender diverse, nonbinary individuals” that was specifically geared at fighting “misinformation” on that subject. But when I reached out to the group this month, it pointed me to a different document, a letter written by the group’s chief advocacy officer, Katherine McGuire, in September in response to a Federal Trade Commission request for comment on youth gender medicine.

The documents, separated by about a year and a half (and, perhaps as significantly, one presidential election), straightforwardly contradict each other. The A.P.A. in 2024 argued that there is a “comprehensive body of psychological and medical research supporting the positive impact of gender-affirming treatments” for individuals “across the life span.” But in 2025, the group argued that “psychologists do not make broad claims about treatment effectiveness.”

In 2024 the A.P.A. criticized those “mischaracterizing gender dysphoria as a manifestation of traumatic stress or neurodivergence.” In 2025 it cautioned that gender dysphoria diagnoses could be the result of “trauma-related presentations” rather than a trans identity and that “co-occurring mental health or neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorder) … may complicate or be mistaken for gender dysphoria.” It seems undeniable that the 2025 A.P.A. published what the 2024 A.P. A. considered to be “misinformation.” (“The 2024 policy statement and the 2025 F.T.C. letter are consistent,” said Ms. McGuire in an email, and “both documents reflect A.P.A.’s consistent commitment to evidence-based psychological care.”)

Along those lines, how did the American Medical Association go from arguing that “forgoing gender-affirming care can have tragic consequences” for “pediatric patients” in its 2021 letter to its present stance that one such treatment, surgery, should be delayed — potentially for many years — as a general matter of course?

If, as I suspect, political forces are the culprit, that would lead to an inescapable conclusion: You cannot automatically trust what these organizations say at a given moment. Not unless they provide a lot more information about their decision-making processes.

Should we trust the science? Sure, in theory — but only when the science in question has earned our trust through transparency and rigor.