New York Times best-selling author and elite liberal Malcolm Gladwell announced on The Real Science of Sport podcast that he has changed his position on trans-identifying men participating in women’s sports
“If we did a replay of that exact panel at the Sloan conference this coming March, it runs in exactly the opposite direction,” Gladwell said this month. “And it would be, I suspect, near unanimity in the room that trans athletes have no place in the female category. I don’t think there’s any question.”
“I’m ashamed of my performance at that panel because I share your position 100 percent and I was cowed,” Gladwell continued. “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 real howlers pass without comment.”
In short, the 62-year-old writer confessed that he was lying about his own position because he was “cowed” – although he stops short of admitting who he was cowed by. The reality is that Gladwell was cowed by LGBT activists demanding that he lie to show his loyalty to their agenda, with the threat of severe professional consequences if he did not.
Indeed, Gladwell gets close to saying it. He refers to the panel as “stacked” with a “trans athlete and a trans advocate” and called it “one of those strange situations where my suspicion is that 90 percent of the people in the audience were on your side, but 5 percent of the audience was willing to admit it.”
“What the trans movement is not asking for – they’re not asking for, you know, a place at the table,” Gladwell stated. “They’re not asking to be treated with respect and dignity. What they’re asking is for no one to question the considerable physical, physiological advantage they bring to the sport, and no one to question – if they’re gonna win these races by five seconds, suck it up! That’s what they were asking, right?” He added:
If a really good Caster Semanya (South African middle-distance runner) comes along, who can run 147, what they’re saying is you just have to like – so they win by ten meters. So, they win by 15. Well, I mean, you would win by almost 100 meters, right? What they’re saying is you should have to live with that. And that when I heard that, I was like, “This is nuts.” And yet I didn’t say anything.
Gladwell’s comments are significant for several reasons. Benjamin Ryan, a New York Times contributor, noted that his frank admission of being “cowed” could serve as a social “tipping point” – a phrase Gladwell famously coined – on trans-identifying athletes in female sports. This issue is currently still being hotly debated as blue state governors face off with the Trump administration over the issue, and Gladwell’s comments certainly make things more difficult for trans activists.
“Like him or not, Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most influential and financially successful journalists of the last 30 years,” journalist Michael Shellenberger wrote on X. “For him to say he was too scared to say men don’t belong in girls’ sports shows both how totalitarian the [mainstream media] is and how chicken s**t MSM journalists are.”
For nearly a decade, those willing to break from the LGBT activist establishment narrative on the transgender agenda were demonized, cancelled, and subjected to vicious threats both online and off. As it turns out, many of the elite figures backing the agenda agreed with those maligned truth-tellers – but sided with their persecutors as they were savaged in the public square. They were cowards, and they knew it. Now, some are finally speaking out – because those truth-tellers stayed at the barricades, the political winds shifted, and now it is finally safe to say it: We never believed it, either.
