Weekly Roundup
Dec 15– 21, 2025
LEADING ARTICLE
How we cured DEI at the National Institutes of Health
The Spectator
Scientists no longer have to mouth DEI shibboleths to garner funding.
THE NUZZO LETTER IN THE NEWS
New Report Reveals Exponential Increase in Woke Concepts in Medical Research Papers
Critical Therapy Antidote
ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
Sex/Gender
The Illustrated Empathy Gap
In His Words
U.K. Aims to Pathologize Boys by Introducing Struggle Sessions in Primary and Secondary Schools
In His Words
Employer cut men’s salaries to solve its gender pay problem
Financial Review
(*My brief comment on this article is available on X here.)
Changing the Norms to Fit the Narrative: CMNI
Men Are Good
First Things
Equal But Separate: How the Gender Divide Is Rewiring America
American Enterprise Institute
No Bones About It: Sex Is Binary
Archives of Sexual Behavior
Abstract: Anthropologists have led the way in formulating techniques that reveal skeletal differences between males and females. Understanding of physical differences in the pelvis related to childbirth, hormonal impacts on bones, and extensive comparative studies have provided anthropologists with an array of traits and measurements that help them estimate sex using just bones. Forensic anthropologists and bioarcheologists are improving their ability to differentiate males and females by increasing research on a variety of postcranial bones and through the use of molecular data, especially new methods called proteomics, to identify sex in prepubescent juveniles. As remains from more cultures and time periods are studied, sex identification will continue to improve, because skeletal sex differences are in large part biologically determined. Yet, anthropologists have also been at the forefront of arguing that sex lies on a spectrum. Anthropologists who view sex as on a spectrum may deter sex identification progress; from their perspective, an individual of an undetermined sex may just be a nonbinary individual. Anthropologists who consider sex is on a spectrum are coming to this conclusion in part because they are looking for anatomical ideals, mistaking pathology for variation, and confusing independent variables with dependent variables. Nonetheless, anthropologists need to continue to improve sex identification techniques to reconstruct the past accurately, which may reveal less strict sex roles than previously presumed and help with the identification of crime victims. Forensic anthropologists should also increase their efforts to identify whether individuals have undergone medical procedures intended to change one’s gender due to the current rise in transitioning individuals.
Education
The APA and Its Quest to Deconstruct Psychology
Critical Therapy Antidote
Reality’s Last Stand
How activists are emptying our museums in the name of “repatriation.”
USC professors promote ‘drag pedagogy’ for K-12 teacher prep programs
The College Fix
Zero Republican professors found across 27 academic departments at Yale: research
The College Fix
Epidemiology
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2023/2024 Sexual Violence Data Brief
CDC
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2023/2024 Stalking Data Brief
CDC
Politics
The Massacre at Bondi Beach Was Inevitable
City Journal
Australia has long tolerated the proponents of such mayhem and silenced those who raise the alarm.
HISTORICAL ARCHIVES
The variability is in the sex chromosomes
Evolution (2013)
Abstract: Sex differences in the mean trait expression are well documented, not only for traits that are directly associated with reproduction. Less is known about how the variability of traits differs between males and females. In species with sex chromosomes and dosage compensation, the heterogametic sex is expected to show larger trait variability (”sex-chromosome hypothesis”), yet this central prediction, based on fundamental genetic principles, has never been evaluated in detail. Here we show that in species with heterogametic males, male variability in body size is significantly larger than in females, whereas the opposite can be shown for species with heterogametic females. These results support the prediction of the sex-chromosome hypothesis that individuals of the heterogametic sex should be more variable. We argue that the pattern demonstrated here for sex-specific body size variability is likely to apply to any trait and needs to be considered when testing predictions about sex-specific variability and sexual selection.
Exposing Worry’s Deceit: Percentage of Untrue Worries in Generalized Anxiety Disorder Treatment
Behavior Therapy (2020)
Abstract: Theories of cognitive therapy have long proposed that those with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) have inaccurate expectations. By challenging them with objective evidence, symptoms are thought to decrease. To test these premises, this study used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) during the Worry Outcome Journal (WOJ) treatment to determine the percentage of GAD worries that did not come true. We then analyzed the association between participants’ untrue worry percentages and GAD symptom change across treatment. Twenty-nine participants with GAD recorded worries when prompted for 10 days, reviewed them online nightly, and tracked their worry outcomes across 30 days. These recordings were then coded by independent raters. Analyses applied bias-correct bootstrapping path analysis on slopes extracted from longitudinal linear mixed models. Primary results revealed that 91.4% of worry predictions did not come true. Higher percentages of untrue worries significantly predicted lower GAD symptoms after treatment, as well as a greater slope of symptom reduction from pre- to post-trial. Participants’ average expected likelihoods of worries coming true were much greater than actual observed likelihoods. The most common percentage of untrue worries per person was 100%. Thus, worries in those with GAD were mostly inaccurate. Greater evidence of this inaccuracy predicted greater improvement in treatment. As theorized, disconfirming false expectations may significantly contribute to treatment’s effect.
RUBBISH BIN
Boys in the Digital Wild: Online Culture, Identity, and Well-Being
Common Sense Media
(*My brief comment on this article is available on X here.)
Toward a decolonial psychology: Recentering and reclaiming global marginalized knowledges
American Psychologist
Abstract: Because colonialism was tailored to local geographies, any vision of decolonial psychology also needs to address the legacies of particular colonial histories. One of the central questions addressed in this special issue, “Toward a Decolonial Psychology: Recentering and Reclaiming Global Marginalized Knowledges,” is what it means to create possible futures that are rooted in Indigenous cultures, place, people, and land and disentangled from colonialism and coloniality. Contributors from different countries and cultural contexts provide readers with a useful mapping of the granular, place-based decolonial research that has flourished in psychology over the past 10 years. We foreground scholarship that speaks to the lives of the majority world and to those whose lives continue to be marginalized within settler–colonial states such as the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. We highlight six distinct but related overarching themes that focus on retrieval and reclamation of global marginalized knowledges: (a) psychology’s colonial past and present; (b) transnational decoloniality: beyond the binary of Global North and South; (c) race, racism, and colonial domination: psychology, materiality, and identity; (d) beyond individualism: community, relational agency, and collective liberation in decolonial psychology; (e) settler colonialism and Indigenous psychologies: reclamation of land, culture, spirituality, and ecology; (f) decolonizing psychological health: beyond resilience, neurocolonization, and biomedical approaches to well-being.
(*My brief comment on this article is available on X here.)
The discomfort of thought: Towards a pedagogical model of discomfort
Equity in Education & Society
Abstract: Pedagogies of Discomfort (PoD) emphasise teaching and learning that take place outside of ‘comfort zones’. Discomfort is not ‘pedagogised’ for the sake of discomfort; instead, it is a means to prompt transformative experiences. Embracing discomfort is a means to address fixed assumptions and move beyond ‘surface-level exploration’ (Faulkner and Latham, 2013; Nolan and Guo, 2019; Robinson, 2021; Sumara, 2002). While PoD have been extensively explored in scholarly literature, the diversity and breadth of this work are obstacles for educators and scholars seeking practical strategies and an overview of the ‘discomfort’ literature. To address these obstacles, this article curates the ‘discomfort’ literature to develop a model of practice for practitioners to adapt to their contexts. This model is a novel contribution that extends beyond what existing literature offers. Moreover, this model’s faithful curation of the ‘discomfort’ literature attempts to demarcate a specific body of knowledge on PoD.
Journal of Gender Studies
Abstract: Tradwives have been the thorn in feminism’s side ever since they exploded onto the social media landscape in 2013, attracting considerable media attention post-COVID. With their growing popularity in the online influencer space, the movement has been a critical focus of feminist academic discourse, given their promotion of ‘traditional’ values. Adopting a black feminist lens, this article traces the construction of the tradwife as anti-feminist populism and given the complexity of defining tradwives, offers a typology to better understand sub-types of content creators. Three clear sub-types of tradwives are identified: 1) the nostalgic tradwife, 2) the former feminist and finally 3) the Southern Belle. It also examines the unassuming hyperfeminine aesthetic within the tradwife persona that allows tradculture to perpetuate alt-right ideology to an everyday audience. This article argues that some tradwives bury their heads in the sand by failing to consider how nostalgic constructions of ‘traditional’ femininity reproduce colonialist discourses, as well as modes of oppression through gendered, ethnic and class lines.
(*My brief comment on this article is available on X here.)
Queering the Classroom: The Lived Experiences of Drag Queens in a Public Educational Space
Social Lens
Abstract: Drag performance, while often seen as entertainment, serves as a transformative and political act within academic settings. This study investigates the lived experiences of drag queens in a public university, focusing on the socio-educational effects of their visibility. Grounded in Queer Theory, the research explores how drag intersects with identity formation, resistance against institutional norms, political expression, and the need for community and institutional support. Utilizing a qualitative descriptive-phenomenological method and online written interviews, four major themes emerged: engaging in drag for personal development, challenging restrictive academic structures, using drag for cultural and political advocacy, and seeking peer and institutional support. Drag is more than performance as it is a tool for empowerment, activism, and educational inclusion. This research highlights the need for academic institutions to move more than just symbolic gestures toward genuine structural change. When drag is embraced within educational institution, it transforms schools into inclusive spaces that affirm gender diversity and challenge oppressive norms. The literature to date offers a start, but strong evidence is required for a full understanding. This research gap calls for an in-depth study to fill the absence of empirical data and the population gap in this field. The specific lives of drag queens demand in-depth research to appreciate their challenges and contributions to society properly.
Queer Misfits: An interrogation of higher education design
Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.
Abstract: The purpose of this article is to consider the complexities of queer misfitting in relation to higher education policy and practice. Drawing on Garland-Thomson’s (2011) “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept,” this article uses the critical concept misfit to reveal the obstructions and potentialities that arise when queer bodies, that is, queer faculty, staff, and students, rub up against the cisheteropatriarchal design of higher education institutions. Using our own collective narratives of queer misfitting, we interrogate how institutions create misfits through policies, practices, and structures. Our narratives ask scholars to consider “in what ways can queer misfitting be educative, and how might it serve as potential sites of insurgence for critical scholars?” The article is an invitation to the reader to witness our collective interrogation and to think with us and more deliberately about queer misfitting in their own.
“My body is the universe!”: expansive fat presence in contemporary Indigenous literature
Fat Studies
Abstract: Not enough critical and creative work focuses on fat bodies and expansive fat presence in contemporary literature by Indigenous people. In the personal narrative “Desirability as Access: Navigating life at the intersection of fat, Black, dark and female” from The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies, after sharing the joys and pains of her lived experiences, Nomonde Mxhalisa surmises: “You have to believe in your own magic; in your own wildness; in your own wanton wonderfulness” (2021, p. 209). Drawing on Mxhalisa’s first-person call for “magic, wildness and wanton wonderfulness,” this essay reads Indigenous fatness through personal narratives of fat, Indigenous expression regarding the textile banner “WHENUA” by Marama Salsano (Ngāi Tūhoe, Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Wairere). The essay then traces fatness and defiance in the poem “Fat Queer Colony” by Andrew Farrell (Wodi Wodi) and in the poem “Big Fat Brown Bitch 1” from the collection Big Fat Brown Bitch by Samoan writer Tusiata Avia, before contemplating human and beyond-human fat presence in the short story “Maggie Sue” by Chelsea Vowel (Métis). By bringing together contemporary Indigenous literature in different literary forms from across the world, this essay celebrates the “magic, wild, wanton wonderfulness” of expansive fatness, and simultaneously seeks to expand the waistline of critical and creative writing about fat Indigenous bodies in creative and literary studies.
SUPPORT THE NUZZO LETTER
If you appreciated this content, please consider supporting The Nuzzo Letter with a one-time or recurring donation. Your support is greatly appreciated. It helps me to continue to work on independent research projects and fight for my evidence-based discourse. To donate, click the DonorBox logo. In two simple steps, you can donate using ApplePay, PayPal, or another service. Thank you!
If you prefer to donate to a specific project, please see the Go Fund Me page for my current research on sex differences in muscle strength in children.
Thanks Jim This is a massive collection of info. Wow!
Solid roundup, the NIH DEI piece is particularly timley given how research funding criteria have evolved. I've watched firthand how compliance frameworks shift actual scientific priorities at institutions, and the lag between policy change and cultural adjustment is always messy. That worries-untrue stat from the anxiety research (91%!) really underscores how much our threat perception systems overshoot reality in systematic ways.