Carole Hooven has a new book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. I’ll be honest and admit I was only vaguely aware of the book until yesterday when a social media controversy erupted over her “transphobic comments” on Fox & Friends. You can watch the clip yourself, and see that she’s not transphobic at all.
I assume though the accusation will be enough to open some Title IX complaints. Unless her colleagues step up I assume she’ll be hounded out by the bureaucracy, though I hope I’m wrong.
Hooven has been all over the media, just see what she’s RTed on her Twitter account. She makes it pretty clear she’s not going to back down on the scientific questions and answers. Which is how it should be, but that sort of stance is far less common than groveling obeisance before the new red guards.
I wish conservatives could get over their Trump crush and vaccine skepticism because this would be a great issue to argue with the left.
I just finished Helen Joyce’s book Trans. I have read several books on the subject and I think Joyce’s is the best. She mentioned Darwin’s idea of sexual selection makes no sense if you don’t believe sex is binary as many trans activists assert. Will Harvard replace Darwin’s sexual selection with Judith Butler’s queer theory?
Kathleen Stock’s book also has some interesting takes about the subject: the history and different meanings of gender identity and the concept of trans people having an identity based on fiction. Ryan Anderson’s book, which is banned by Amazon but available elsewhere, mentions different reasons children have given for thinking they are trans. Among the reasons are a boy who says teachers yell at boys so if he became a girl he would not get yelled at. A girl whose mother was murdered and thought if she was a boy she would be stronger and could have prevented her mother’s death.
I got Charles Murray’s Human Diversity when it was on sale at Amazon but have not read much of it. Is there much in his latest book that is not in Human Diversity?
Re; testosterone, couple to related UKBiobank things from last month and year, looking at correlations of genetic variants related to testosterone (seems like lots of Biobank studies on this recently);
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-93360-z – July 2021 – “Investigating the association of testosterone with survival in men and women using a Mendelian randomization study in the UK Biobank” – We applied published genetic instruments for testosterone to obtain inverse variance weighted estimates of associations with survival to (i.e., age at) recruitment, in 167,020 men and 194,174 women. We similarly obtained estimates for a positive control (smoking initiation), and a negative control (absorbate), a marker of vitamin C metabolism. Testosterone was associated with poorer survival (0.10 years younger at recruitment per effect size of testosterone, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.004 to 0.20). (Survival means earlier death from all causes, not survival under any specific conditions. Consistent with slower epigenetic aging in castrated sheep – https://elifesciences.org/articles/64932).
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/31/eabf8257 – July 2021 – Testosterone and socioeconomic position: Mendelian randomization in 306,248 men and women in UK Biobank – Using the identified variants, we performed Mendelian randomization analysis of the influence of testosterone on socioeconomic position, including income, employment status, neighborhood-level deprivation, and educational qualifications; on health, including self-rated health and body mass index; and on risk-taking behavior. We found little evidence that testosterone affected socioeconomic position, health, or risk-taking.
https://elifesciences.org/articles/58914 – October 2020 – Effects of lifelong testosterone exposure on health and disease using Mendelian randomization – Nevertheless, genetic variants associated with testosterone consistently replicated known effects of testosterone on established outcomes, such as body fat, body fat-free mass, and hematocrit (Table 1). (also “Heel bone mineral density” at statistical significance and “Accelerometer-based physical activity and Handgrip strength” at positive but non-statistically significant levels).
Some suggestion in one of the papers that fluctuating levels of testosterone may have positive associations because respond to status, exercise etc, but genetic variants don’t do much causally for SES as such. Within *sex* of course.
But maybe number of offspring would have an association. I think the preprint by Mathieson and collaborators last year (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.19.104455v1.full.pdf+html) found Number Ever Born (NBE) or p of childlessness was associated with some variants, some of which had some association with testosterone. One of these was the FADS1/2 variant that is under constant selection since the neolithic and associated with adaptation to higher level of fat intakes from plants, which was associated with higher SHBG and thereby higher testosterone in men. But on the other hand many of their identified variants were associated with lower circulating testosterone in males in Figure 2 (even within the cluster associated with earlier sex and first child), and FADS1/2 variant was neutrally associated with bioavailable T. (Is there selection for greater T in males or not?)