Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates it's safe for very very brave liberals to say men don't belong in women's sports and that they always believed that

The hallmark of transgenderism, and the means by which it has steamrolled every single aspect of our society, is fear. Quivering, rank sweating, heart pounding, bowel loosening fear like no other. Marginalized, my ass. As a sports journalist back in the pioneer days, at first I thought the story was men in women’s sports, but very quickly I realized the real story was the overwhelming, palpable fear of every media outlet and every sports organization of even saying the word transgender, much less asking questions. It was bizarre. Doping, sexual abuse, cheating—this was THE only topic that elicited this knee-knocking response. From everyone. Hard-boiled editors, presidents of sports organizations, communications directors who were used to being screamed at, who were used to getting their way, they all smiled and nodded along meekly to the most nonsensical garbage, adopting absurd ideological language that they knew to be absurd ideological language. Another weird feature? Even now, most, if not all of the people who are literally soiling their drawers in fear of saying utterly uncontroversial things like men are not women and have no place in women’s sports, will deny the stench coming from their nether regions up, down, and sideways.

Malcolm Gladwell, well known author, journalist, columnist, and all-around influential person, both in the sports world and beyond, came clean on that front, and my goodness, hasn’t it created a stir. Gladwell was recently the guest on the Science of Sport podcast, a production of sport scientist Ross Tucker and sports journalist Mike Finch. Gladwell was not brought on with the intent of talking about transgender athletes or spilling his guts, but in the first few minutes of the show, the three were talking about the last time Gladwell and Tucker were together, which was the fairly prestigious 2022 Sloan Sports Analytics conference. Gladwell was the moderator, and Tucker was a panelist, the only one backing up his arguments with scientific fact. The other panelists were trans-identified male scientist Joanna Harper and nonbinary-identified activist/writer Katie Barnes.

I strongly urge you to listen to the first ten minutes of the podcast, but here are the key parts:

Gladwell: My suspicion is that 90% of the audience was on your side, Ross [which is that men do not belong in women’s sports], but only 5% were willing to admit it.

Tucker: My recollection of it is that everything I said was met with deathly silence and everything the other two said was met with cheers.

Gladwell: That moment is past. If we did a replay of that exact panel this upcoming March, it runs in exactly the opposite direction. And it would be, I suspect, near unanimity in the room that trans athletes [he can’t bring himself to say male athletes] have no place in the female category. I don't think there's any question….The reason I’m ashamed of my performance at that panel is that I share your position 100 percent and I was cowed. The idea of saying anything on this issue — I was, I believe in retrospect, in a dishonest way, I was objecting in a dishonest way [??]. I let a lot of howlers pass without comment. …[Gladwell still uses the “preferred pronoun” for male Joanna Harper] And there was that moment when she, they, turned to you and said, “Ross you have to let us win.” It was at that moment that I realized this position, this argument has gone to the furthest extreme. The trans movement is not asking for a place at the table. They’re not asking to be treated with respect and dignity. What they’re asking is for no one to question the considerable physical and physiological advantage they bring to the sport. And if they win these races by five seconds, suck it up. That’s what they were asking!…You [of course, that’s women] should have to live with that. I thought This is nuts! And yet I didn’t say anything.

Gladwell quickly moved past that bombshell—that he knew back in 2022 that what these trans activists were saying was “nuts” but that he was “cowed” into not challenging it; that he agreed with what Tucker was saying but did not say so or ask the trans panelists to respond to the science; and that he’s “ashamed” of his actions—without ever reflecting on how a person whose job it is to tell the public the truth could be “cowed” by a couple of activists talking nonsense, or how his failure to speak up until now, three years and a cultural epoque later, affected women. He did not utter the word “women” at all. While he wanted to appear contrite to Ross Tucker for letting him twist in the wind on that panel, he never apologized to women for his complicity in allowing the fundamental violation of women’s human rights to continue.

Gladwell fancies himself a thought leader, and he is accorded status and speaking fees as an influential person in our society. If he is those things and was those things in 2022, imagine the power he could have exerted by simply pushing back on trans activist ideas he knew to be “nuts.” Imagine how much good he could have done for women, women’s rights, and women’s sports. But he made a decision in the moment (what was that book he wrote on intuitive thinking? Blink?) to cover his ass instead. Fine. But after that conference, he had three years to speak up for women’s sex-based rights. But he didn’t. Again. Even now, during the podcast, he had trouble identifying who was really harmed by his failure to speak up. He seemed to think it was Ross Tucker, or maybe his own self-regard. No. It was women. The group he pointedly did not mention (Suck it up? You should have to live with that? Those were not general statements. Women have to suck it up. Women should have to live with that).

Immediately after the words “ashamed” and “cowed” had exited his mouth, Gladwell started stammering and hatching justifications, beginning with what is already right up there with Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns—”I was objecting in a dishonest way.” If this was said by a dude in a bar, okay. But if it’s said by a “thought leader” who takes large sums of money to talk sense, he should hang for it.

A few minutes later, he noted how the whole world went crazy during Covid for two or three years—was he blaming Covid for his crazy cowardice?—and that now the world has returned to “normal.” So, that’s apparently why it’s okay for him to say he always believed what his good buddy Ross was saying, and the whole trans thing is more or less over. For him. Now that he’s got this off his chest. No acknowledgement that women have been trying to claw back rights that were taken from them for more than two decades, well before Covid, that they did not take the two-to-three years of Covid off to go crazy, and that, possibly due to his vacation from duty, there are more men than ever in women’s sports. And their fight continues.

Gladwell’s next gambit is to align himself with Ross Tucker by saying, “You and I made a little bit of an error by focusing on elite sport.” As if they were ever remotely the same. The difference between Gladwell and Tucker is that Tucker has balls and Gladwell does not. Tucker has been speaking out on the harm males are doing in female sport since at least 2018, and has received plenty of vitriol and pushback for it. Gladwell has been going to celebrity parties, was late to this party, and when all he had to do was say Hold on a minute, he couldn’t do it. And continued to hide his bravery very very well for the next three years. I want to stress this—yes, when face-to-face with trans activists saying kids will kill themselves if they can’t compete on the girls’ team, it’s surprisingly difficult to remind them that girls are humans too and really deserve their own sports. BUT, in three years’ time, Gladwell could have found a less volatile, less confrontational but equally impactful moment to say men do not belong in women’s sports. But, again, he didn’t.

And finally, oddly, Gladwell brings up the 2018 case of two boys in Connecticut who won a slew of girls’ state track titles as proof that the tides have turned because parents got involved. He’s desperately misinformed. The female track athletes were forced to file an expensive lawsuit to claw back their own Title IX rights, and this case is still ping ponging back and forth in the courts now. Gladwell was under the false impression that this case is a done deal and all is happiness. “It’s a parent in the stands. That’s what’s changing things.” I’ve talked to a lot of parents in the stands, and they’re gutted because they’re not able to change things. They’re mad at influential people who know men should not be in women’s sports but are too afraid to say so.

THERE ARE A LOT OF DIFFERENT THOUGHTS ON GLADWELL’S ADMISSION. I STARTED WITH MINE BECAUSE I RUN THIS SHOW.

Tucker anticipated how this would play with women because he’s been in the trenches with women for a long time. He took to X immediately after publishing the podcast to, in essence, beg for mercy for Gladwell. “I totally understand why women are angry and frustrated that people were cowed and 'abandoned' them when they needed the support. But my message is basically don't be too hard on people who speak out about this issue a bit later than would've been ideal,” Tucker wrote. “I hope this doesn't come across as soft - those who deny women's rights (with my bias on sport) should be criticized. I just think that given that we're still in the "fight" (eg Khelif at CAS), it's counterproductive to continue to condemn contrition & sincere apologies like this.”

Obviously Tucker read Gladwell’s words differently than I did, because as I said above, I saw neither contrition nor apology to women.

The reaction to Gladwell’s words was so intense, Tucker and Finch put out a special podcast the next day titled Follow Up: Did Malcolm Gladwell Need to Apologize for Trans Stance. The basic justifications they put forth for Gladwell’s ass-covering silence were that there’s no shame in changing one’s mind when presented with new information, and that Gladwell was never in a position to actually affect sports policy. Those things are true and valid.

But they don’t apply in this case. To reiterate my saw, Gladwell was clear, he did not change his mind in response to new information, he believed in 2022 that men (or trans athletes, as he calls them, because he doesn’t really understand the issue) did not belong in women’s sports, but was too afraid to say so. It’s true Gladwell is not on the IOC sports policy committee, but he is a high-profile person whose positions bear weight with the public.

This idea was echoed by professor of exercise science and frequent contributor on this topic Greg Brown who responded in an email: “I don’t have any reason to doubt Gladwell’s sincerity in admitting he was wrong, though I’m still hesitant to say, ‘all is forgiven, welcome to the fold.’ That said, it’s significant to have such a high-profile voice acknowledge how pressure from trans-rights activists and cancel culture led him to act as he did back in 2022. My hope is that his admission will embolden others to resist that kind of pressure and speak honestly as well.”

I know I’ve been cagey about my stance on this, but I’m just going to come out and say right now, if you are being handsomely paid to be a journalist, a columnist, a thought leader, a panel moderator at a prestigious physiology conference, outing with and defending your position on contentious issues comes with the territory. If you fail to do that job, knowing that women will suffer because of your failure, do not, on top of your original cowardice, expect to be handled gently once you deem it safe to come out. I will grant leniency to currently competing competitive athletes, especially women, because A) none of them have one-tenth the following, influence, or salary of Gladwell, and B) they would absolutely have lost even that, everything, their entire career, had they spoken out.

Speaking of high-profile people who did not go crazy during Covid, JK Rowling had some harsh words for Gladwell on X. It’s so good, I’m compelled to reprint it all:

Non-famous people, mostly women, girls and gay people, have genuinely had their careers and indeed lives destroyed for saying what Gladwell was too pusillanimous to say, and Gladwell didn’t lift a finger in their defence. Like many well-known liberals, he was happy to watch members of the great unwashed bullied, traduced and defamed, fine with the erosion of freedom of speech, comfortable with young women being robbed of sporting honours and facing serious injury, because he valued his own standing and security more highly than acting on the feeble promptings of his conscience. A rash of condescending men will swarm my mentions when I post this to tell me I should be pleased about Gladwell’s cautious backtracking. No. He hasn’t changed. He’s merely sensed a shift in what it’s acceptable to say and feels safe to align himself with the new consensus, excuses for his previous behaviour to the fore. He isn’t an ally, he’s a weathervane. Changing sides years late, and only after you’ve realised the non-elite opposition is winning, isn’t a mark of integrity but of arse-covering. Those whose overriding focus is remaining in good odour with the in crowd can never be trusted. Gender identity ideology has been the modern arts world’s McCarthyism, and all Gladwell’s done is reveal himself as a man who’d have named names, but felt a bit uncomfortable about it afterwards.

Fear of saying men don’t belong in women’s sports right out loud still grips the US, but luckily high school girls have made it safe for high-profile people to come out of hiding and remember that they always supported women. In their hearts. They’re not totally safe, though, from other people who’ve been in this fight for a long time, who also have a pretty good memory.