🚨NEW: Our critique of a major "brain sex" study is now published. @AdamRochussen, @NeuroSGS, and I evaluate a central premise of gender activism and medicine: that trans-identifying people have brains that are shifted away from their sex and toward their "gender identity." The "brain sex" concept is so central because it purports to provide an empirical scientific basis for the notion that a child can be "born in the wrong body" and would therefore benefit from body-altering medical procedures to align their body with their mind/brain. The problem is that this concept is pure pseudoscience and propped up by deeply flawed methods and badly misinterpreted data. One of the most prominent studies is Kurth et al. (2022), published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, which claimed that the brains of transgender women are shifted away from their sex and toward their "gender identity." The paper became one of the journal’s most accessed articles and has been cited in major media outlets, scientific papers, legal arguments, and policy discussions involving pediatric gender medicine and sports. We point out that the paper's headline conclusion rests on a series of serious methodological problems. Each group contained only 24 participants. The authors used poorly justified parametric methods, one-tailed post hoc tests, made no correction for multiple comparisons, and omitted important robustness checks. Once accounted for, the main finding is no longer statistically significant. An even more glaring failure of the study was that it failed to account for sexual orientation, despite its known association with neuroanatomical variation and despite the authors having the relevant participant data needed to examine it! We each repeatedly requested the anonymized participant-level data from the paper's lead author so we could independently evaluate the findings. We received no response. The evidence simply does not justify the sweeping "brain sex" conclusion for which this study has become famous. Our full critique in @Theory_Society is open access. Read it at the link below, and please cite it and share it whenever you encounter the false claim that trans people have brains that more closely resemble the sex they identify than their own sex. 🔗link.springer.com/article/10…

I'm surprised yet encouraged to see the Cornell Daily Sun, a typically very woke student newspaper, mention my legal action against Cornell in terms so critical of the university. They call Cornell's actions "blatant and unlawful DEI-driven faculty hiring discrimination." My case is still ongoing. The legal process is just incredibly slow!

Unsolicited tens of thousands of dollars. The horror!

Tom Cruise: I do my own stunts Bug: hold my beer bitch

"We're spending at least $11 billion a year on just Medi-Cal for illegal immigrants, but on top of that, we have everything from housing, food, and cash, and other benefits they can claim on behalf of themselves and their U.S.-born children. California's created a shadow welfare state to get around prohibitions on federal dollars going to illegal immigrants, and they're funding it 100% with California taxpayer money." @kennethschrupp on his investigation exposing California's shadow welfare state for illegal aliens:

“Vivek is a Hindu!” His political philosophy is pure Anglo-Protestantism. And his opponent is a psychotic communist. This isn’t a hard decision. Vote Vivek and save Ohio.

“Gender studies” is a pseudo-discipline that deserves zero taxpayer support

NEW: California Democrats are trying to bring back racial discrimination in education. A new referendum would entirely remove Proposition 209—which prohibits the state from giving preferential treatment based on race, sex, or ethnicity—from the kindergarten to 12th grade level. MI senior fellow @GailHeriot's latest in @realDailyWire ⬇️ dailywire.com/news/californi…

holy shit i asked claude to make a video on western civiization

FYI: the truth of Darwinian evolution does not hinge on whether they find boat remains at this site.

A new form of trauma is gaining popularity among female-dominated professions, including therapy, social work, nursing, and teaching. “Secondary traumatic stress” or “vicarious trauma” describes the apparent “trauma” one experiences simply by interacting with others who have experienced trauma. When researchers look at male-dominated professions, including policing, where officers frequently encounter victims of crime, they find much lower rates. One study of police officers found 90 percent scoring in the low range. Apparently trauma is highly contagious, but somewhat selective about its host. cityjournal.substack.com/p/t…

Meta-analytic evidence shows that women exhibit greater jealousy in response to physically attractive rivals, while cross-cultural research finds that men are more distressed when rivals surpass them in financial prospects and physical strength." realityslaststand.com/p/the-…

Btw, if you're a Harvard student attending this class, send me an email at chrisrufo@protonmail.com. I would love to see what the "scholar's scholar" is saying now.

Insane stuff from the @ACLU’s @ChadAaronMarlow at @SenJudiciaryGOP/@JudiciaryDems hearing on Flock Cameras. Complete fiction in re the idea that these cameras can track your every movement and reveal all the intimate details of one’s life. Same with @IJ’s Mr. Whitney on the ability to reconstruct the “granular” movements of someone over time. @CharlesFLehman explain why in our new paper on this: manhattan.institute/article/… Perhaps someone on the panel can ask these witnesses to tell us all how many standing cases there are finding that ALPRs (Flock or otherwise) violate the Constitution or constitute searches under the Fourth Amendment (zero), and how many times the use of this tech has been upheld by both state and federal courts across the country (a lot).

You don't have to spin a story or make a clickbait headline about some woke phenomenon to draw readers in. Dryly reporting the facts and quoting woke activists verbatim is inherently funny and mind-bending due to its naturally absurdist nature. This has been the business model of my substack for many years!

Here's California proudly advertising welfare for illegal aliens: "No Social Security number? No problem!"

Notice a pattern? My coauthors and I reached out to the lead author of an extremely influential "brain sex" paper to request the data. They were also invited to respond to our critique. No response. A Boston Globe reporter reached out to the HRC's lead researcher for a response to my report debunking their "Epidemic of Violence" narrative. No response. Do you need any more evidence that we've thoroughly won the argument? I don't think so, but I'll keep providing it.

In @CityJournal, MI alum @NoraKenney_ reviews a new book on why recess and unstructured play matter. It draws on decades of research showing that recess supports physical health, attention, learning, social development, emotional regulation, creativity, and conflict resultion, per Nora. Judge this book by its great cover: a rubber ball. In the aughts and 2010s, gym class "elimination" games like dodgeball, kickball, and tag were villanized as bullying, traumatic, and "undermin[ing] positive school climate." The CDC discouraged those types of activities. Between 2000 and 2014, schools with required PE that taught dodgeball fell from two-thirds to fewer than half, according to CDC data. Now, social-emotional learning is more likely to come in the form of a branded commercial curricula sold to schools, rather than practiced by kids through free play, competition, and, yes, sometimes getting picked last. Many kids don't get much time to run around at all. Only five states required at least 150 minutes of elementary PE per week as of Dec 2024. Kids can benefit immensely from reccess and play. Give 'em some rubber balls and let 'em smash each other! And if they don't want to spend their time that way, that's fine, too! Unstructured time lets those who don't want to kick around a rubber ball enjoy other activities, too. city-journal.org/article/why…