Harvard Official Accuses Lecturer of Making ‘Transphobic and Harmful’ Comments on Fox & Friends

Jackson RichmanJul 30th, 2021, 5:25 pm
 
Harvard

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS – MARCH 23: The Harvard University campus is shown on March 23, 2020 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Students were required to be out of their dorms no later than March 15 and finish the rest of the semester online due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)

A Harvard official accused a lecturer on Friday of making “transphobic and harmful” comments on Fox News’s Fox & Friends

In a segment on the morning show on Wednesday about medical students challenging the definitions of male and female, Carole Hooven, a lecturer and co-director of undergraduate studies at Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, said that there are “sex differences” between males and females.

“That’s something I’ve always been really enthusiastic about, the science of sex and sex differences,” she said. “And part of that science is teaching the facts. And the facts are that there are, in fact, two sexes. There are male and female.”

“The ideology seems to be biology isn’t really important as how somebody feels about themselves or feels their sex to be,” added Hooven. “But, you know, we can treat people with respect and respect their gender identities and use preferred pronouns. So understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect.”

In a Twitter thread, Laura Simone Lewis, a PhD student at Harvard and director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force in Hooven’s department, condemned Hooven’s comments.

“As the Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force for my dept @HarvardHEB, I am appalled and frustrated by the transphobic and harmful remarks made by a member of my dept in this interview with Fox and Friends,” she tweeted, including a link to Hooven’s appearance.

Hooven retweeted Lewis’s thread and added, “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?”

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