Thread by @HeatherEHeying

This continues to happen. Masculinity is attacked, gleefully, while the occasional nods to “science” get it hopelessly, terribly wrong.

Also, GQ and Harvard would appear to be in cahoots on a project to deny reality. So there’s that. 1/13

https://twitter.com/HarvardUPLondon/status/1184388257980866562

I haven’t read the book in question (“Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography”), but if it claims to “debunk the…idea that testosterone and masculinity are connected,” then it is full of confirmation bias, and has zero evidence of evolutionary or statistical thinking. 2/

In light of this dangerous nonsense, I went back to a paper that I wrote in college, in which I reviewed the hypotheses and evidence for behavioral effects of Testosterone (T) across vertebrates, including humans. As an undergrad in the early ‘90s, I wrote this in the intro: 3/

In 1991, I failed to predict that people who believed that sex & gender are cultural constructs would gain power in the academy, which would then leak into media, tech, K12 schools, more.

I wouldn’t have believed it if you had told me. Nonsense isn’t supposed to be ascendant. 4/

Here’s one extract from this undergraduate paper from the early ‘90s, which puts the lie to the claims from [checks notes] Harvard University Press’s newest release.

(Testosterone is the androgen that is most familiar to most people.) 5/

I was intrigued enough, after researching that paper in college, to pursue a related topic early in grad school. My review paper for preliminary exams, in 1994, was titled: 6/

Oh lordy. Does the fact that androgens—the most famous of which is Testosterone—are a) present in females, and b) correlated with particular behaviors in females, mean that androgens aren’t linked to male-specific behaviors? Uhhh…no. No it does not. 7/

And yet, this terrible argument is at the heart of the reasoning invoked by a co-author of the new Testosterone book. This is bait-and-switch, social science edition.

Yeah actually: T is a male sex hormone. And it is present in all females. This isn’t a contradiction. 8/

The first paragraph of my 1994 paper on behavioral correlates of androgens in female vertebrates reads: 9/

Luckily, in a biology department in the mid-90s, declaring that “females and males behave differently” and are assumed to have “assymetrical interests” was not yet a cancellable offense. 10/

And yet here we are, in 2019, with esteemed university presses publishing garbage-y pseudo-research and glossy magazines jumping on the “let’s hate on all that men are and might be” bandwagon. 11/

If this subset of women really thinks that female-dominated leadership and ways-of-being are the right way to move into the future, how about they model awesomeness in that realm?

Instead, what we get is some mix of hateful, uninvestigated, juvenile, snarky pap. 12/

Hey, here’s a thought: Perhaps we can all, all of us, women and men, play to our strengths, work together, and build ourselves and each other up rather than seeking the humiliation and destruction of whole demographic groups. Let’s be kind. Let’s be adults. /end

Remarkably, Harvard University Press deleted the tweet that I quote-tweeted to begin this thread. Will they disavow the book as well? Maybe be just a little smarter in the future about what to choose to publish? We can hope.

Here’s a screenshot:

https://twitter.com/greatgarett/status/1185039804108591105?s=20