In July 2021, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard went on a US morning television show and defended the words male and female.

Eighteen months later, after a public attack from her own department’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force, the loss of close professional friendships, a major depression diagnosis, and a campus environment in which graduate students would no longer agree to teach with her, Carole Hooven retired from the 20-year career she had assumed she would hold until the end of her working life.

Two years after that, when the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania were called before Congress to answer for their handling of campus antisemitism, Carole Hooven was the case a Republican congressman would use to ask Harvard’s president why a call for violence against Jews was protected speech but a statement that sex is biological and binary was not.

This is what actually happened.

The Fox News appearance

On 28 July 2021, Hooven appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss an article in The Free Press by the journalist Katie Herzog. Herzog had reported that medical school professors were moving away from clear scientific terms — male, female, pregnant woman — in response to student complaints. Hooven was quoted in the article. On Fox, she defended the terms.

The substance of her position took less than a minute to state. Biologists use the words male and female because the categories they describe are real and meaningful. Respecting people’s gender identities does not require abandoning the language of biology. As she put it on air: “Understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect. We can respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns.”

She also said that educators were increasingly self-censoring for fear that using the wrong language could result in being shunned or fired.

Within 24 hours, the Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force in Hooven’s own Harvard department, Human Evolutionary Biology, tweeted that she was “appalled and frustrated by the transphobic and harmful remarks made by a member of my dept in this interview with Fox and Friends.” The tweet attached a clip of the segment.

The Twitter exchange and the Crimson coverage

Hooven responded by quote-tweeting the original post: “I appreciate your concerns. Could you let me (and the Twitterverse) know exactly what I said that you consider transphobic or harmful to undergrads? I think you know that I care deeply about all of my students, and I also care about science. How about a discussion?”

The exchange went viral. Hooven received support from a range of public figures including the journalist Glenn Greenwald. The graduate student received supportive responses too, some attacking Hooven. International coverage followed, including in the Daily Mail, the New York Post and The Australian.

The Harvard Crimson then ran an article on the dispute. The Crimson piece included a statement from the graduate student saying she respected Hooven as a scientist and a colleague. It also linked to a “Statement of Harvard Graduate Student Union Members in Solidarity” that claimed the graduate student had suffered a “multi-day deluge of personal harassment, racist abuse, and threats of physical harm” after Hooven’s quote-tweet amplified her original post.

Hooven would later write in The Free Press that Harvard administrators told her they could not publicly support her because the “optics” of the situation prevented it.

The escalation

A few weeks after the Fox segment, Hooven was advertised as a speaker for an on-campus talk about her newly published book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us, which had been favourably reviewed in the Wall Street Journal and in academic journals.

A graduate student on the Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging committee of a different Harvard department then circulated a complaint about the talk. The complaint, which was forwarded to faculty across multiple departments, characterised Hooven as having “some history of speaking against the interests of transgender and gender diverse people.” It listed quotes from her podcasts and articles, drawn out of context. It announced that a “brave space for discussion” would be held after her talk.

When Hooven sought a public defence from her department’s leadership, two emails were drafted in response. The first contained what she described as a “robust defence” of her academic freedom. The second was an apology for any harm her remarks had caused. The first email was never sent. The second one was.

She sought a meeting with the Dean of Science, who wrote to her about her “turmoil” and proposed forming new task forces. When she interrupted to ask what would be done about her specific situation, she was given what she has described as a stern lecture on not interrupting.

A close faculty colleague, when she explained that she was struggling with her mental health, told her to “put your head down, grit your teeth, and be professional.” Hooven describes losing the friendship.

She was eventually diagnosed with severe major depression, including persistent suicidal thoughts. She began medication and therapy. She reduced her teaching load to half-time so she could continue to teach her flagship course, Hormones and Behavior. The following spring, no graduate student would agree to serve as a teaching fellow for the course.

In January 2023, aged 57, Hooven retired from Harvard.

What Hooven actually said on Fox News

It is worth pausing here on what the substantive scientific claims were, because every later moment in this story turns on whether they were correct.

Hooven said that biological sex is real, that the categories male and female refer to two reproductive classes that exist across organisms, and that erasing the language of biology in medical training would harm the people that training was meant to serve. None of this is contested among evolutionary biologists. Hooven’s department at Harvard — Human Evolutionary Biology — is one of several where these claims are taught as standard course content. Her own course, Hormones and Behavior, was for years voted by graduating Harvard seniors as one of their favourite classes and was named in the Crimson as one of the university’s top ten “tried and true” courses.

The dispute was not over the science. It was over whether the science was permitted to be stated.

The aftermath outside Harvard

Hooven’s departure was not the end of her work. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker offered her an unpaid associate position in his lab, which she accepted. The American Enterprise Institute appointed her anonresident senior fellow, where she now works on issues of sex, gender, and academic freedom in higher education.

Her case also became the impetus for the formation of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, an organisation founded by Harvard faculty members in response to the pattern her experience represented. Hooven is an active member.

In January 2024, she published her own account of the cancellation in The Free Press. The essay was widely reposted, including by the AEI and Minding the Campus. It is the most detailed first-person account of the events available, and it is the primary source for much of the chronology above. Hooven, a self-described lifelong Democrat, observed in the essay that her supporters had tended to come from the right.

The congressional hearing

On 5 December 2023, the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania appeared before the House Committee on Education and Workforce in a hearing on the rise of antisemitism on US college campuses. The hearing did not go well for them. Within days, the University of Pennsylvania’s president had resigned. Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, would resign weeks later.

In the course of the hearing, Republican congressman Tim Walberg of Michigan asked Gay a question that named Hooven specifically. Walberg first established that Harvard had recently been ranked last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression‘s annual free speech survey. He then cited two cases of Harvard faculty who had been pushed out for views the university found inconvenient. One was Tyler J. VanderWiel. The other was Hooven.

“In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech,” Walberg asked Gay, “but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?”

Gay’s response, recorded in the official transcript, did not address Hooven’s case directly. The exchange was widely circulated. Hooven became, in her own words, “a poster child for how the growing campus DEI bureaucracies strangle free speech.”

What this case is and isn’t

Hooven’s experience is not unique. Other Harvard faculty have been pushed out for stating positions outside campus orthodoxy — Roland Fryer and Ronald Sullivan are two cases she has cited herself. The pattern is broader than Harvard. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has documented similar cases across dozens of US universities.

What makes the Hooven case useful as an explainer is that the scientific question is settled. There is no contested empirical literature she was on the wrong side of. There is no outlier interpretation she was promoting. She defended the standard course content of her own field on national television, and the institution she had served for two decades did not defend her right to do so.

Unfiltered’s editorial position is that this matters beyond Hooven. The premise of academic and journalistic institutions is that they will defend the people doing the work of finding and communicating the truth, even — especially — when that work is unpopular. When those institutions stop doing so, the cost is not borne by the institutions. It is borne by everyone whose understanding of the world depends on the work continuing to be done.

Hooven herself spoke about all of this in an extended conversation with Unfiltered editor Joe Warner, in autumn 2023. The full Q&A — covering her account of the cancellation in her own words, her work on testosterone and sex differences, her position on biological language, the toxic-masculinity backlash and her concern for boys, and the trans-in-sport question — is available here. The original three-part video series is also available: the cancellation episode, sex difference denial, and the anti-masculinity movement.

The cost was Hooven’s. The question Walberg asked Gay is the one that remains.