The Science and
Politics of Sex and Gender

Alex Byrne

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Alex Byrne is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT. He is the author of Trouble with Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions (2024) and is a co-author of the 2025 Health and Human Service Review of treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria.

Carole Hooven

American Enterprise Institute

Carole Hooven is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an associate in Harvard’s Department of Psychology. She earned her PhD at Harvard in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, where she went on to teach for over twenty years and co-direct the undergraduate program. She is the author of T: the Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us (Henry Holt, 2021), and she is working on her next book about the science underpinning characteristically male struggles. She writes and speaks often about the evolutionary basis of sex differences and why this is fascinating and important science that we should all be able to talk about freely.

Tomás Bogardus

Pepperdine University

Tomás Bogardus is a Professor of Philosophy at Pepperdine University. He earned his BS in biology at UC San Diego and his PhD in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He works mainly in metaphysics and epistemology and is interested in the nature of sex and gender. He has published papers evaluating arguments for the sex/gender distinction, exploring problems with revisionary gender concepts, and considering why the so-called trans inclusion problem cannot be solved. In 2025, he published The Nature of the Sexes: Why Biology Matters with Routledge, which argues against social constructionist and complex views of biological sex and develops an account on which the sexes are biological functions grounded in gamete production.

Jay Nordlinger

Moderator and Journalist-in-Residence

Jay Nordlinger is a journalist-in-residence at the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona. He is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor to RDI’s publication, The Next Move. He is the music critic of The New Criterion. He writes on Substack at Onward and Upward. He is also a contributing writer for The Dispatch. A native of Michigan, he has long lived in New York.