At a neuroscience conference in 2024, a researcher was presenting data on how puberty blockers harm brain development in rodents. I asked about possible neurological side effects in human children with gender dysphoria receiving similar interventions. The expert, who’d been answering audience questions in detail and with enthusiasm, suddenly became evasive. We don’t know, they said. We can’t generalize our findings to humans.

But modern neuroscience rests on the assumption that animal models tell us something meaningful about human brains. We justify human trials for nearly every psychiatric drug on the strength of animal data. The researcher in front of me had built a career on precisely these extrapolations. To suddenly disclaim them wasn’t science. It was politics. I left that conference having made up my mind: I would give up my position on the Human Connectome Project, an initiative that maps the brain, and study gender dysphoria instead.

Transgender issues fascinated me because they spanned so many disciplines — psychiatry, endocrinology, bioethics, social policy — and because the politicization of the topic had left so much basic research neglected. The polarization was especially striking given how much quiet consensus existed. According to Pew Research Center surveys in 2022 and 2025, most Americans believe gender is determined by sex at birth. Most favor requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams matching their biological sex. Most support protecting transgender people from discrimination. But most also draw a line at irreversible medical interventions on minors. These aren’t fringe positions. Yet for years, many academics apparently hesitated to say such things out loud.

The study I ended up conducting tracked more than 11,000 American children in a nationally representative sample, documenting changes in gender identity and mental health from ages 8 to 15. In 2016, less than 1 percent of the sample identified as transgender or nonbinary. By 2023, that number had risen to nearly 10 percent of females. The vast majority identified as nonbinary rather than transgender and re-identified as cisgender within a year.

The pattern looked less like an inborn mismatch between brain and body and more like a symptom of the broader turbulence of puberty. Children already struggling with depression or anxiety were more likely to later identify as transgender, but gender incongruence did not predict later mental health. Kids who spent more time on screens were also more likely to identify as transgender. The profiles of those who would later identify as transgender resembled those at risk for eating disorders and self-harm, which also spike in adolescent females. But in the prototypical case, “she/​they” rarely met diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria, let alone medical sex reassignment. For most of these adolescents, this appeared to simply be identity exploration during a time of stress.

That did not stop my work from becoming controversial. Most graduate students in Harvard’s Psychology Department would not associate with me when I became outspoken about this issue. Formal complaints were made against me at the university, not for any specific act of harm but because my research was considered a form of hostility.

Yet for all of the deserved criticism higher education has recently faced, these were mere social frictions. After Steven Pinker, a psychology professor and longtime champion of academic freedom at Harvard, agreed to oversee my dissertation when no other faculty member would, I was able to do exactly the work I set out to do. My research proposals passed ethics reviews. My committee provided constructive feedback. Academic freedom is only as strong as the people who uphold it, but our institutions themselves are robust.

That is worth stating plainly in the aftermath of the Trump administration freezing more than $2 billion of Harvard’s federal grants over allegations of discrimination and lack of viewpoint diversity. My own National Institutes of Health fellowship — which had funded the very type of research that conservatives had celebrated as a corrective to progressive orthodoxy — was among the casualties.

Ironically, the Republican movement that eagerly cited the possibility that some gender dysphoria involves social contagion and prior mental health issues was now defunding the science that tested those very hypotheses. Meanwhile, the progressives within the academy who made my daily life difficult never actually stopped my work. The liberal institution of Harvard protected my right to do it.

The easy interpretation — that both sides are full of hypocrites who only support free inquiry when they like the answers — is too cynical to be fully satisfying and too accurate to be dismissed.

What my research actually showed, and what neither side wants to hear, is that both are partly right. Most adolescents with gender dysphoria are going through a turbulent period of identity exploration that will resolve on its own. But a small minority of people have a biologically grounded experience of gender misalignment. The only way to support them is individualized care, guided by evidence rather than ideology.

I became a scientist because I believed that science was about finding the truth. That belief has been tested from every direction over the past four years: by activists who thought my questions were harmful, by colleagues who thought I was putting my career at risk, by a government that decided the whole line of inquiry was expendable. But the fact that I was able to pursue this work at all, when the incentives pointed overwhelmingly toward silence, is itself a kind of evidence. Academic freedom is embattled but alive.