The Power of the Powerful: Blame the Editors
A tiny cabal of editorial gatekeepers at liberal outlets like the New York Times, the New Yorker, the CBC, and the Daily Show is more responsible than anyone else for the transgender catastrophe.
I. Blame the Editors
The UK press is years ahead of its North American counterpart in its reckoning with the cultural car crash of “transgender”. It’s by no means perfect — the Brits still have much work to do before the scandal is behind them — but already, reading the overseas coverage feels surreal, like seeing into the future. I’m reminded of the ‘90s comedy-fantasy-drama TV series Early Edition, in which tomorrow’s newspaper arrives on Kyle Chandler’s doorstep a day early.
Consider this piece from the Telegraph. Compared to the North American press, Michael Deacon sounds as if he’s not just in another time zone a few hours ahead of us, but in another time a few years ahead of us, with an assessment that will sound shocking to North American readers, but shouldn’t:
How did something as self-evidently bonkers as trans ideology gain such a powerful grip over our society? Over our politics, our universities, the BBC and countless other institutions? Funnily enough, the people I blame most are not the fanatics who actually believe in this nonsense — for the simple reason that there are, in reality, very few of them.
No, I think the real blame lies with a group of people who are rather more numerous. That is: the cowards who just went silently along with it all, or even pretended to believe in it, because they didn’t dare speak out.
Deacon’s right to point a finger at the ordinary people who went along with the transgender phenomenon. They saw where the conversation was heading and didn’t see much personal benefit in pushing against it. So they kept their mouths shut.
But laying the blame squarely on the crowd stops at the symptom, not the cause.
Compliance of that scale has a psychology. People gauge the social temperature. They pay attention to the tempo of a room — how a raised eyebrow can close a topic, how an awkward silence tells you to move on, how a single off-key remark can mark someone as difficult.
Such customs and taboos don’t originate in the crowd. They’re shaped by cues issued from farther upstream — cues that signal what’s respectable, what’s fringe, and what’s unsafe to say out loud. Once those cues settle, responsibility disperses. People tell themselves they’re just keeping the peace, when in fact they’re helping to cement norms whose validity they never seriously examined — the kind that are later seen as obvious mistakes, even disasters, once the consequences come due. Each individual assumes it’s someone else’s problem, until one day it’s everyone’s.
Right now, the institution that sets the beat is the media. There’s feedback, of course — applause and indifference matter — but tempo and selection still run downward, as they do from a DJ to a dancefloor. What gets played, what gets skipped, and what never makes it onto the floor at all reflects the judgment of those controlling the sound system. Follow the transgender beat and you arrive at the liberal legacy press — and above all at the editorial heads of its North American institutions.
Even today, with information flowing freely, the power to interpret it, to separate the signal from the noise, to make meaning out of it, remains highly centralized. The public may gather facts on its own, but it still looks to a few institutions to decide which ones matter — and what story they add up to.
To see how that authority came to shape the trans debate, it’s worth stepping back to get our bearings.
The origins of “gender identity”
The media didn’t invent transgender ideology. Its doctrines emerged from the performative language games of liberal-arts academia — postmodern queer theory — which drew many fetishistic transvestites into its orbit. Within that framework, the notion of an innate “gender identity” served as a pseudoscientific reframing of a sexual paraphilia — a persistent and intense sexual urge or fantasy. It replaced the uncomfortable reality of autogynephilia with a more accommodating narrative — one that redirected attention away from atypical sexual proclivities and toward identity, shielding cross-dressing men from embarrassment and from serious scrutiny.
Within the academy itself, queer theory operated as a kind of parlour game: clever, transgressive, and insulated from real-world consequences. The rules were tacitly understood, at least at first. This was wordplay and provocation, a way to signal sophistication and score points within a narrow intellectual milieu. Nobody said it out loud, but most of the players understood that none of it was meant to be taken literally.
The trouble began when those ideas escaped that context and entered the real world, where they hardened into truth claims, then moral imperatives, and eventually into a sprawling medical and bureaucratic apparatus built around real human bodies, with real and irreversible consequences.
That spread was greatly accelerated following the invention of the iPhone. Millions of teenagers were handed smartphones and left to congregate largely unsupervised on social media platforms like Tumblr and Reddit, where ordinary adolescent anxieties about sex and identity collided with the abstractions of queer theory. En masse, young people began to ruminate over their supposedly “wrong” bodies, coalescing into a patchwork of online tribes with competing interpretations of sex, sexuality, and what came to be called “gender identity”. They adopted names — like tucute (pronounced “too cute”), truscum (“true scum”), transmaxxer, enby (N.B., or non-binary), genderqueer, and countless more — that didn’t reflect aesthetic styles, but doctrinal positions.
Unlike earlier subcultures from the pre-digital age — rock-and-roll rebellion, punk, goth, or emo — this new, online-centred cluster of movements did not primarily signal alienation through clothes, music, or attitude. It signalled it through belief — more religion than fashion. A digital counterculture almost has to take this form. In a culture mediated entirely by text and screens, belief is the most legible form of identity. After all, online life is not organized around shared physical spaces or visible styles, but around discourse: arguments, assertions, moral claims, and theories that attempt to make sense of an increasingly disembodied social world. These movements’ adherents have not merely opted out of mainstream taste; they have rejected material reality as an authority, treating the biological constraints of the human body as obstacles understood to be literally surmountable through rhetoric, dedicated activism, and increasingly, medical intervention. They took the queer theorists’ writings as religious texts, read with deadly seriousness and without irony.
By now, estimates range from roughly 1.5% to 5% of Americans and Canadians under 30 identifying as transgender, with far higher concentrations in certain liberal enclaves. In some liberal-arts institutions, reports suggest that a majority — sometimes nearly the entirety — of a student body now claims to have “discovered” that they are trans.
A vast medical infrastructure has risen to cater to this new market. “Gender clinics” have sprouted across the continent, generating billions in revenue by prescribing lifelong drug regimens and performing surgeries that permanently alter healthy bodies and frequently result in sterility. These interventions involve the irreversible removal, reconstruction, or chemical suppression of normal human organs, often in patients who are young, distressed, and highly suggestible.
Physical and psychological harm has been done to tens of thousands of vulnerable young people — quite possibly more than a hundred thousand by now.
At the same time that transgender identification emerged as a novel mass phenomenon among young people, the original adult male population from which transgender ideology first emerged — men with an eroticized internal self-concept of “womanhood” — underwent an explosive expansion into public life. Men who had previously kept cross-dressing practices in private began, in numbers never before seen, to demand recognition not merely as transgender, but as actual women in law and material fact — a categorical shift in how sex itself was defined and enforced. The consequences have been far-reaching, particularly for women’s rights, gay rights, and freedom of speech, as private self-conceptions were elevated into public, legal, and institutional demands.
The media’s responsibility
That brings us back to the main question: who’s chiefly responsible for the trans craze? Universities generated it; social media amplified it; the medical-industrial complex capitalized on it. But it was legacy media that normalized it.
In the editorial boardrooms of print and broadcast media, a consequential decision was made: to treat the transgender phenomenon not as a volatile, internet-borne social trend demanding careful scrutiny, but as a moral cause to be endorsed and advanced. Editors chose to frame it not as a mental-health crisis or cultural contagion — akin to the 1990s Multiple Personalities craze, or the 1980s Satanic Panic that preceded it — but as the next chapter in progressive liberation politics, a successor to earlier civil-rights narratives that their audiences already revered. Something like Gay Rights 2.0. Once that framing was set, long-standing tribal allegiances locked in. Dissent became incomprehensible, and healthy skepticism registered as ignorant bigotry.
That decision right there is what inflated trans into a full-blown pandemic, when it could have otherwise been contained while it was still just a concerning outbreak.
Those most responsible1 are:
David Remnick, longtime Editor of The New Yorker
Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn, the former and current Executive Editors of the New York Times, respectively
Edith Chapin and Thomas Evans, former and current Editors-In-Chief of NPR, respectively
Brodie Fenlon, General manager and Editor in chief of CBC News
Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Trevor Noah of late-night liberal “comedy news”. Though not editors by title, these television hosts consciously accumulated audience trust and came to function as de facto editorial authorities shaping the liberal news narrative.
(Honourable mention goes to Kath Viner, longtime Editor-In-Chief at The Guardian — which is technically a British outlet, so I’ll leave it off the list because this is about North American media. But it’s clear that The Guardian’s editorial stance caters to an American liberal readership.)
Over in the UK, there are signs that a long-delayed reckoning in the legacy media may finally be beginning. In November, the BBC’s top brass — Director-General Tim Davie and BBC Head of News Deborah Turness — resigned following the leak of an internal memo that was sent to the Board of Directors, alleging serious bias in the BBC’s reporting on transgender politics, among other issues. The memo, and subsequent media reports following its release, uncovered an organized faction of trans activists inside the Beeb who schemed to systematically suppress news that was unfavourable to their cause and to advance puff pieces that were favourable to it. Since the departures at the top, the BBC has vowed it will take concrete steps to correct its biased reporting on trans-related issues.
But this side of the pond, there are as yet no known course-corrections afoot at any of the major liberal media outlets.
What matters most here is not just that these editors made the wrong call, but that their institutional authority allowed them to make it stick.
Old Media vs. New Media: The Lords vs. the Commons
I’m inclined towards a Malcolm Gladwell-ian view of the editors’ role in perpetuating the trans craze, borrowing some of his ideas from The Tipping Point.
I’m generally ambivalent about the “airport nonfiction” genre — pop-sociology tomes like Freakonomics or Blink — but Gladwell’s Tipping Point does contain a useful insight into how trends form and persist. I don’t necessarily buy his typology of “mavens,” “connectors,” and “salesmen” in the particulars, but the underlying idea holds: certain well-positioned actors exert outsized influence in establishing, legitimizing, and sustaining ideas.
In that sense — as a small set of well-positioned actors exerting disproportionate influence — the legacy liberal media still wields enormous and excessive power over mainstream liberal politics. People continue to treat institutions like The New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, and the CBC, along with quasi-institutions like The Daily Show, as arbiters of legitimacy, using them to gauge the “baseline temperature” of liberal society. The digital landscape has splintered and reorganized how people consume information, but these legacy outlets remain the final word on what counts as respectable discourse. And because their authority is so entrenched, their misjudgments can have outsized consequences.
The New York Times’s credulous reporting in the lead-up to the Second Gulf War, for example, wasn’t just a mistake in hindsight; it was a failure that legitimized a manufactured consensus at the moment it should have been interrogated. The U.S. invaded Iraq over a lie about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction — a claim presented as settled fact rather than an extraordinary assertion requiring extraordinary scrutiny. Once the Times waved it through, much of the liberal media ecosystem followed, and this played no small part in the years of bloody Middle East conflict that ensued.
Trans ideology is, in this sense, the Iraqi W.M.D. boondoggle all over again: a fictitious claim laundered into orthodoxy by elite media institutions — the same cycle, only we have not yet reached the turn back toward reality, nor the difficult reckoning that follows, at least in North America.
There’s a loose structural parallel here to the UK Parliament’s two chambers. The House of Lords acts as a staid moderating chamber to the more impulsive House of Commons. Legacy media plays a comparable role in relation to the sprawling new-media ecosystem — not because anyone designed it that way, but because decades of accumulated cultural authority make it an unofficial upper chamber of liberal discourse. It acts as a brake, a filter, a certifying body. New ideas, analyses, and political shifts don’t truly enter the “official” conversation until they’ve been sanctioned by these institutional voices. The problem is that when this self-appointed upper chamber errs, its mistakes reverberate through our entire society. Its stabilizing function can become a distorting one.
In principle, editorial curation serves truth. It exists to exclude claims that deny reality, reject evidence, or falsify history. Holocaust denial belongs outside respectable discourse for exactly this reason: it repudiates settled fact and attempts to erase reality through assertion. The distortion begins when that gatekeeping function is inverted — when curation stops serving truth and starts serving ego: in this case, a self-flattering mythology cultivated by an editorial class convinced of its own historical nobility. With respect to the transgender debate, editors stopped weighing claims against evidence and instead enforced a preferred narrative, allowing sympathy for people caught up in the trans subculture to outrun careful editorial judgment.
Transgender ideology is uniquely suited to this inversion because it frames participation in its narrative as a moral obligation rather than something to be tested against reality. Institutions are expected to treat self-declaration as more authoritative than observable facts. Disagreement is no longer examined or argued with; it is treated as a kind of moral contamination.
The “gender-critical” position — which I subscribe to, and which liberal media elites decidedly do not — does not deny reality; it insists upon it, pointing to biological sex as an observable constraint that self-selected “gender identities” cannot simply will away. Treating reality-denial and reality-insistence as morally equivalent is not moral seriousness. It is the abdication of editorial judgment in favour of ideological loyalty.
Every upper chamber justifies its authority with a story about restraint, wisdom, and historical responsibility. The editorial class is no different. Liberal media editors fancy themselves sage guardians of the long, centuries-spanning civil rights project — defenders of the steady march of progress against the capricious “commons” which occasionally threatens to steer us off course. It is this self-image that has driven the editors to deliberately sideline the gender-critical perspective, pressing their thumbs on the scale so hard against it that everyday liberals take the cue and treat criticism of trans ideology as unmentionable.
Having assumed this upper-chamber role, legacy media no longer merely reports on reality. Its judgments are meant to guide downstream behavior. They function as instructions for how reality should be treated.
A fork in the road: defect to the right or stay silent?
As the public slowly comes to its senses about the scale of what’s been allowed to unfold, it’s become obvious that the legacy media completely botched the transgender story. It misreported, moralized, and then insisted everyone pretend otherwise.
As trust erodes, liberal audiences have begun to respond in two distinct ways. Some leave loudly, exiting the ecosystem altogether. Others stay put and learn to keep quiet, suppressing views they suspect are widely shared but officially disfavoured.
For those who leave, loss of trust doesn’t remain confined to a single issue. When a trusted outlet is seen to misrepresent reality on an issue this fundamental, its credibility collapses wholesale, as disillusioned audiences begin to question its reliability in general. They seek alternatives they believe will speak candidly about trans issues, and they shift their allegiances toward “heterodox” new-media outlets (e.g., Substack), or to right-wing outlets — podcasts, mostly — that are willing to challenge liberal orthodoxies on “gender identity.”
By speaking honestly about the trans issue in a way legacy outlets refused to, the heterodox Substack middle earned its credibility on the merits. The right and far-right, by contrast, acquired an unearned credibility surplus — a trust windfall created by the trans issue — and it was promptly spent beyond its warrant. Right-wing podcasts used that surplus to legitimize claims about public health, geopolitics, and democratic institutions as a whole, that ranged from shaky to outright indefensible. In this way, the liberal media’s mismanagement of the transgender beat hasn’t merely driven audiences away; it has effectively subsidized new forms of misinformation. By forfeiting trust where it mattered most, legacy outlets created the conditions under which credibility could migrate — and be misused.
Its extreme editorial bias has alienated moderates, centrists, and even many dyed-in-the-wool liberals (myself included), accelerating its own decline. There’s a bitter irony here: in trying so hard to appear hip to a social-media-driven fad, legacy media only succeeded in making itself seem even more out of touch.
Not everyone has defected to right-wing podcasts or the heterodox new media ecosystem. The liberal legacy media’s audience remains large and influential. But among those who stay, a substantial number are privately skeptical of the more extreme claims of trans ideology.
Because they don’t see their views reflected in the pages of The New York Times or the monologues of late-night television, they begin to doubt themselves. Perhaps they’re mistaken; perhaps they’re alone. And so they keep quiet — among friends, family, and colleagues.
More than any other factor across society, the liberal media’s hostile editorial stance toward the gender-critical perspective has sent a clear signal: views critical of transgender orthodoxy should be treated as germinal, fringe, and career-limiting. Not to be aired in public. Not to be defended aloud. Not safe for work.
This is despite the overwhelming scientific evidence on the gender-critical side — not to mention the overwhelming evidence that ours is the majority view, even among liberal progressives. Poll after poll shows that trans ideology is broadly unpopular once respondents are asked about its concrete claims rather than vague expressions of sympathy for “trans people” in the abstract. When questions turn to specifics — males in female sports, or the medicalization of children — support collapses.
What results is a classic case of preference falsification: a majority view that appears marginal because those who hold it have been trained to believe they are alone, and to behave accordingly. Such equilibria can persist for years. But they are inherently brittle. When the gap between public conformity and private belief grows too wide, the illusion of consensus tends to collapse abruptly — as in East Germany in 1989, when decades of enforced public compliance with the state gave way, almost overnight, to open defiance and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Common sense: the enemy of the people
Not only have we got the weight of science plus a decidedly non-vocal majority behind us, our view is also overwhelmingly backed by basic common sense. But, you see, in the minds of many liberal elites, that’s a minus, not a plus.
In fact, it’s because transgender ideology runs counter to common sense that it’s been embraced and zealously guarded by liberal media gatekeepers. Common sense is the domain of the great unwashed. The boondocks. The Bible Belt. If an explanation is simple enough for the masses, the thinking goes, it can’t be the whole story. A more intricate theory must be closer to the truth. Complexity is often right, after all. During the Scopes Monkey Trial, creationists clung to a blunt certainty — “We’re made in God’s image” — while the scientific account of natural selection was more complex, counterintuitive, and intellectually demanding. But the lesson of Scopes is not that complexity always wins, only that sometimes it does. The danger lies in turning that observation into a rule. Many liberals have absorbed the pattern as a heuristic: the more thinky, the more true. Complexity becomes its own credential, and certainty in the simple view is dismissed reflexively, whether justified or not.
Applying that logic to trans ideology, the liberal gatekeepers sided with the people selling them postmodernist dreck about sex being an unknowable, mystical spectrum rather than a material, biological binary because, hey, that’s such an abstract, intellectual idea, it must be more true than the sex binary that’s so plainly visible to the commoners.
This reflex has a history — one rooted in how liberals have long understood their moral and intellectual relationship to conservatism. Since the Progressive Era, when reform movements made social betterment a mass moral project rather than a niche philosophical concern, liberals have framed the liberal–conservative divide on social issues (setting economics aside) as a struggle between high-minded, reasoned, abstract thinking and low-minded, gut-level, emotional reaction. By the mid-20th century, that framing had become the dominant template: anti-Black and anti-gay biases were cast as instinctual flaws — primal fears surrounding racial and sexual minorities. The African American Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Rights Movement were framed as correctives to these flaws: appeals to people’s higher faculties, meant to override their baser impulses.
Progressivism, in this telling, becomes a collective effort of moral and intellectual elevation — a joint undertaking by the enlightened to shepherd society toward a higher plane. It follows, then, that liberal media gatekeepers imagine their role as pulling the majority up and away from its irrational anxieties and fears about minorities, for the betterment of all mankind.
It’s not that this story is wrong, broadly speaking. On many social questions, progressivism really was right and conservatism really was wrong. The mistake is treating that historical pattern as a law of nature. Even if liberals’ abstract, intellectual arguments have usually beaten conservatives’ knee-jerk reactions in the past, there’s no guarantee this will always be so. Sometimes common sense is genuinely sensible. And sometimes the supposedly high-minded, intellectual take is a mirage — not wisdom, but a bout of toxic, neurotic overthinking.
Thinking ourselves into knots
Transgender ideology is nothing if not an epic bout of overthinking about sex. Clarence Darrow, who defended evolutionary biology against religious dogma at the Scopes trial, would spin in his grave to see that today’s elite liberals have effectively switched sides — they cling to a new superstition and lash out at biology.
What changed isn’t the science, it’s the political psychology. Progressive politics began to run out of enemies. Gay rights was a genuine and deeply cherished victory among liberals, and after equal rights were secured in law — quite literally, following the Supreme Court’s Obergefell and Bostock rulings — the movement faced an uncomfortable question: what now? Rather than declaring victory and standing down, it expanded. New letters were added to the Alphabet Soup, the whole enterprise was rebranded as “queer,” and its mandate widened dramatically. When the movement eventually turned its pitchforks on biological sex itself, it was likely because biology is an opponent that can be reliably depended on to stick around forever. A war against human nature is a war that never ends — and, subconsciously, that permanence seems to appeal to some. It offers a reliable psychological payoff: perpetual struggle supplies meaning, while an ending would force a reckoning with what comes next. Thus, the movement is spared the difficult work of inhabiting a moral landscape without obvious villains, where triumph would require restraint rather than escalation.
Moments like these are reminders of why common sense still matters. It’s a necessary counterweight to our tendency to think ourselves into knots.
Without that knot-tying, the verdict is straightforward: transgender ideology does not withstand scrutiny. The science is clear, and the principles underlying so-called “trans rights” collapse under even minimal examination. At its core lies a false premise: that there exists a special category of people who are somehow exempt from the material facts of biology — or who must be treated as if they are — and that the rest of society is therefore obligated to refrain from making ordinary, accurate references to their biological sex.
That premise isn’t just wrong; it’s fundamentally illiberal. It conflicts with secularism — by forcing people to assent to a metaphysical belief about identity; with freedom of speech — by enforcing compelled language and prohibitions on plain description; and, once it enters the medical realm, with the Hippocratic obligation to do no harm. Everything built on top of this axiom inherits its incoherence. What’s marketed as a civil-rights framework is, in practice, a repudiation of the liberal norms it claims to extend.
It also opens the door to predictable and ugly boundary violations. Declaring an identity is increasingly treated as sufficient to override sex-based distinctions that exist for good reason. We see this most clearly in women’s and gay people’s spaces — dating scenes, sports, prisons, changing rooms, shelters — where some individuals wield the label “trans” as carte blanche to bypass reasonable — liberal — scrutiny. In practice, this often means aggressive, entitled men — sometimes profoundly unwell, to put it delicately — demanding access and deference, while everyone else is told to suspend judgment.
What else would we expect? That’s what you get when self-declaration is fetishized above reality, evidence, and every other social cost.
This is all the more striking given that the transgender theory of “gender identity” is far more complex, abstract, and freighted with postmodernist sophistry than the simple, common-sense view of sexual dimorphism. But complexity is not a proxy for truth. It’s not how complex an idea sounds that makes it true; it’s how true it is that makes it true.
If you rely on crude pattern recognition, matching trans to the nearest historical analog, usually gay rights, by way of the trans movement’s deliberately imitative surface script, all the po-mo Judith Butler wafflepuffery that it rests on can start to look like evidence of depth rather than obfuscation. The thinking goes: this is complicated, therefore it must be right. But a moment of honest scrutiny collapses the illusion. Sex really is simple, because the science is simple. Humans come in two sexes, which are identifiable with remarkable reliability. Sex cannot be changed or transcended by clothing, hairstyles, hormone regimens, or cosmetic surgery — except at the level of superficial appearance. And the differences are not incidental; they matter profoundly to the organization of human society — especially where sexuality and female safety are concerned.
Here’s one example, drawn from human sexuality. Feminine gay men do not become straight “women” through surgery, and almost everyone involved quietly knows it. Post-transition, their dating pool remains tiny — largely limited to a narrow niche of bisexuals and fetishists. The vast majority of heterosexual men, including many who loudly style themselves as allies, are not interested.
Yet the liberal media’s endless insistence that “trans women are women” is framed as kindness — as affirmation, as care, as protection for vulnerable people. In reality, it does harm. It sells distressed gay men a false promise: that there exists a genuine escape hatch out of the gay dating market and into heterosexual male desire. There isn’t. And by repeating that lie from positions of authority, the media nudges vulnerable men toward irreversible medical interventions in pursuit of a fantasy that never materializes.
It also signals to parents that if their children’s behaviour deviates too much from sex stereotypes, their bodies ought to be “corrected” through “gender affirming” medical interventions as early as possible. In practice, this is effectively gay conversion therapy by another name: we’ve known for a century that very gender-nonconfirming children are more than likely to grow up to be gay — not “trans” — if left to develop naturally. I know this firsthand, because I was one such boy: naturally feminine, more attuned to girls than other boys, and for a while, distressed about being a misfit boy. If I had been raised in the current cultural climate, I would almost certainly have been encouraged to believe I was a “transgender girl” trapped in the “wrong” body and I would have ended up a lifelong medical patient. Countless gays and lesbians who came of age before the trans craze express relief that we weren’t psychologically and surgically steered toward an artificial opposite-sex identity.
Here’s another example about the importance of biological sex, this time about female safety. Men do not become women by declaration, costume, or self-description. Full stop. Pretending otherwise does not erase the risks associated with male bodies and male behavior — a fact reflected in the criminological data, which consistently shows that male-pattern offending does not disappear with a change of identity. When sex-based boundaries are replaced with identity claims, the result is predictable. Women’s prisons, shelters, changing rooms, and sports are places where sex differences matter. Ignoring that reality in the name of “inclusion” does not make women safer. It exposes them to risk. Suppressing inconvenient facts to preserve a moral narrative does not protect anyone — it shifts the cost onto women and girls, who are then expected to absorb it quietly.
Common sense isn’t the problem here. It’s the safeguard. When it’s dismissed as unsophisticated and pushed aside in favor of ideology, the costs don’t disappear — they’re simply deferred, and paid by someone else.
These facts have largely escaped liberal media editors. They defaulted to the heuristic instead — thinky equals liberal equals true; common sense equals conservative equals false — and that shortcut explains why they latched onto transgender ideology so quickly, despite the mountains of evidence that it represents a wrong turn away from the liberal values they claim to steward. In their eagerness to stay on what they assumed was the right side of history, they stopped doing the most basic reality checks.
This time, the Commons is right and the Lords are wrong. It wasn’t the masses who rushed into something foolish; it was the elites. They were hasty, credulous, and easily flattered — seduced by a fashionable, dangerous pseudoscience because it made them feel smarter and more virtuous than everyone else. They bought into this nonsense — I’ve taken to calling it gender Scientology, only half in jest — precisely because it reassured them of their own moral and intellectual superiority. They fell for the Emperor’s new clothes.
II. The Power of the Powerful
Perhaps earlier I was too hard on poor Malcolm Gladwell. He was subjected to an online mobbing recently, because he did an about-face on some of his earlier, public endorsements of transgender nonsense. I admire Gladwell’s principled, if belated, honesty: he confessed that, with respect to men in women’s sports, he’d previously “given lip service to the idea of trans ‘inclusion’ … because he’d been ‘cowed’ by activist talking points” as Jon Kay put it at Quillette.
Gladwell isn’t alone. When the ground beneath a prestige narrative starts to rumble, the first shifts come from the people trained to notice such cultural tremors — the thinkers who can feel when their own class is defending a story past its expiry date. Gladwell’s move is one of those early tells.
Which is really saying something, since Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker — a publication I would describe as the poisoned well at the heart of the plague. Under David Remnick, The New Yorker has been especially zealous in its embrace of transgender extremism. The wider significance of that embrace lies in its position at the apex of the liberal prestige hierarchy. Among the most influential liberals, The New Yorker remains the most trusted source; what it reports and endorses is treated as presumptive truth. From there, its judgments trickle down through elite networks, shaping the discourse the way fashion spreads: by prestige cues, like the infamous cerulean blue sweater in The Devil Wears Prada.
Take this disgraceful New Yorker piece from a few years ago about Lia Thomas, a male athlete who joined his college’s female swim team, which I subjected to a thorough fisking at Graham Linehan’s Substack. The piece makes a mockery of The New Yorker’s famed fact-checking department, at one point equivocating on the easily-fact-checkable question of whether or not men can radically reshape their pelvic bones by popping estrogen pills. It’s shocking how willing they’ve become to throw facts out the window the minute anyone whispers the word “trans”.
Even The New Yorker’s daily crossword puzzle — recently introduced — is but another sewer outlet where the magazine’s once-vaunted credibility drains away. One of the magazine’s first crosswords offered the clue “Acronym for a certain prejudiced individual,” with the answer TERF. For those who don’t know, TERF stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist — a member of a broadly liberal activist movement for women’s justice and equality that rejects transgender pseudoscience. Evidence-based feminists are not “prejudiced individuals” unless you define prejudice as a synonym for dissent, or you’ve chosen to side openly with misogyny and quackery. This is not the sort of error a serious editorial culture permits.
This is the same magazine, it bears remembering, that originally published Eichmann in Jerusalem — Hannah Arendt’s landmark meditation on the banality of evil, and the clearest account ever written of how ordinary institutions and respectable people become accomplices to authoritarian systems. Arendt’s great insight was that evil often arrives draped in procedure, moral certainty, and professional conformity — carried out by people who believe themselves virtuous, enlightened, and “just doing their jobs.” It doesn’t always wear jackboots; sometimes it wears lanyards.
To go from publishing Arendt’s warning to exemplifying the very pathology she described isn’t just ironic. It’s horrifying.
A few weeks ago, The New Yorker published an essay by Adam Gopnik that sent me into a small spiral of outrage. This is awkward, because I’m a Gopnik devotee. He’s one of the finest writers alive. And the essay itself is no exception: it’s exquisitely written and, taken on its own terms, unimpeachable in both craft and content. What bothered me was the hypocrisy of The New Yorker publishing a piece that so eloquently articulated principles the magazine itself does not uphold. I found myself thinking: does David Remnick even read his own magazine?
Gopnik’s piece, titled How to Endure Authoritarianism, reflects on Eastern Europeans’ long familiarity with authoritarian pressures, from both the left and the right. Writing from Poland, he recounts conversations with people who lived under Nazi occupation and Soviet rule, and who learned through experience how power is enforced in everyday life. From those histories, Gopnik draws a line to the present American moment, suggesting that the dissident tradition offers lessons for societies trying to preserve liberal democracy. As he puts it:
“They were trying to become a liberal democracy in the face of tyranny and illiberalism, while we are trying to save one in the face of the same forces.”
Crucially, Gopnik stresses that this struggle does not take place only within formal politics. It unfolds in what he calls the “pre-political” realm — in everyday life, speech, and conduct:
“This is not to suggest for a moment that our struggle is even remotely comparable in scale to theirs. But the essential insight of the dissidents, in Poland particularly but not in Poland alone, was that resistance against authoritarianism begins as much in the pre-political or nonpolitical arenas as it does in politics.”
To illustrate this, Gopnik turns to the great Czech dissident Václav Havel, and his famous 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless, in particular Havel’s argument about “parallel structures” — informal cultural and social spaces that arise in response to ideological domination. Havel’s point was that authoritarian systems are sustained just as much by their subjects’ participation in known falsehoods as they are by state-sanctioned violence. People repeat slogans they don’t believe, display signs they don’t endorse, and perform loyalty they don’t feel, simply to get by. Resistance begins when people refuse to play along — when they try to live, as Havel put it, “within the truth.”
Gopnik summarizes the idea succinctly:
“By living ‘within the truth,’ Havel meant simply refusing to participate in what are known to be lies or to be easily intimidated by the intensity of the liars.”
All of this is exactly right — as far as it goes. What Gopnik does not ask is whether some of the institutions most eager to warn about authoritarianism have themselves become instruments of the kind of conformity Havel described.
In the here and now, The New Yorker operates squarely within the oppressive system Gopnik describes. The magazine is no longer merely observing pressures toward conformity; it is one of the institutions that helps enforce them. And the proliferation of heterodox new media outlets — most notably the rise of Substack — is best understood as the emergence of new parallel structures in precisely Havel’s sense, rather than a descent into chaos or extremism, as it’s sometimes characterized by the old media.
Havel described such structures this way:
“For what else are parallel structures than an area where a different life can be lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims and which in turn structures itself in harmony with those aims? What else are those initial attempts at social self-organization than the efforts of a certain part of society to live — as a society — within the truth?”
That description fits the present media landscape uncomfortably well. Independent writers didn’t flee legacy institutions because they rejected truth, professionalism, or liberal values. They left because those institutions stopped tolerating open disagreement on foundational questions — including sex — and began demanding ritualized assent instead. When any kind of authority enforces a moral line that many people privately reject, parallel structures inevitably arise. That’s a natural human response.
Pronouns are the new greengrocer’s sign
One response I often hear is that this is all being overblown — that transgender politics simply isn’t important enough to warrant this level of concern. There are bigger issues, after all: inflation, war, climate, democracy itself. Why fixate on something so marginal?
(Setting aside, for the moment, the rather revealing assumption that medical harms disproportionately borne by gay, autistic, and gender-nonconforming people — along with women’s concerns about their rights, dignity, and safety — can be treated as marginal in the first place.)
But that objection misunderstands the point. This is where Havel’s most famous example becomes indispensable. In The Power of the Powerless, he asks us to imagine a greengrocer living under communism who places a Party slogan in his shop window: Workers of the world, unite! The greengrocer doesn’t believe the slogan. He isn’t trying to persuade anyone. He hangs the sign for one reason only: because failing to do so would mark him as suspect. It would invite scrutiny, harassment, or professional harm. It is a mark of compliance with the tribe — a small act of public conformity that signals one’s willingness to participate in a lie if the group demands it.
It looks trivial. That’s the point. Its apparent triviality is precisely what makes it such an effective test of tribal loyalty.
The contemporary parallel should be obvious. Today, pronouns function as a new kind of greengrocer’s sign. They’re presented as a trivial courtesy — a small linguistic adjustment, easily made. But like the sign in the shop window, their significance lies in what they demand: public participation in a contested metaphysical claim about sex and identity. To comply is to signal one’s moral alignment. To refuse is to invite suspicion, sanction, or exclusion. It’s compelled affirmation, dressed up as politeness.
This is why the question of transgender ideology can’t be dismissed as marginal. It isn’t about how many people “transition” — though that’s a not-remotely-marginal scandal in its own right. It’s about whether institutions demand assent to propositions many people privately know to be false — and whether declining to participate in that ritual is treated as a moral failing. That’s the dynamic Havel was diagnosing. Once you see it, it becomes impossible to unsee.
Once upon a time, The New Yorker played the role of dissident — a legacy Adam Gopnik treats with obvious reverence. Today, in practice, it functions as an enforcer of the conformity Havel described.
Transgender ideology sits at the psychological core of the contemporary culture war because it operates through the logic Havel identified: enforced signalling of allegiance. It pushes people into a moralized us-versus-them framework, activating primitive instincts around loyalty, threat, and expulsion. That dynamic corrodes trust far beyond the issue itself. It doesn’t persuade; it alienates. And alienation, not persuasion, is what destabilizes democracies.
I’ve argued before that the transgender mess carries real political risk for liberals. That was not alarmism. Gender ideology is not converting large numbers of people in its favour; rather, vast numbers are being repelled by it — especially when it’s enforced through schools, workplaces, law, and the media — by institutions that claim moral authority while refusing honest debate.
Here the historical comparison with Havel’s Czechoslovakia needs careful handling. In his case, the authoritarian left held power outright. It ruled through slogans and institutional enforcement. The United States today is obviously not that. But the mechanism Havel identified — compulsory belief, public performance, and the slow destruction of legitimacy — isn’t unique to one country or one era.
In the American case, gender ideology has not produced left-wing authoritarian rule through the government itself. Instead, it’s led to a backlash that helped clear the path for the authoritarian right to take control of the federal government. The backlash emerged in response to the left’s illiberal excesses across institutions that once claimed to stand for liberal values: universities, NGOs, and above all the press. When liberals are told, over and over, that obvious falsehoods must be affirmed and common sense suppressed, they disconnect from the tribe: they become angry, cynical, and politically homeless — easy prey for demagogues. And behind the privacy of the voting booth curtain, when an opportunity finally presents itself to express dissent without direct personal consequence, they take it.
They took it in great numbers in 2024. During the election, analysts found that Republican attack ads focusing on Democrats’ extreme positions on transgender issues resonated strongly with voters, particularly in battleground states where they ran relentlessly. These campaigns likely contributed to a measurable shift in the popular vote. Ultimately, Donald Trump took the White House by a margin of roughly 1.5 percent. In a contest that close, cultural issues dismissed as “marginal” can prove decisive. This one likely was.
That’s why the greengrocer’s sign matters — because it’s small. Because it reveals whether institutions still care about truth, restraint, and legitimacy, or whether they’ve drifted into enforcing belief for its own sake. That’s what the left’s variety of authoritarianism tends to look like: slogans, taboos, and compulsory affirmations couched in the language of progress. Ignore the red flags beneath the virtue-signalling, and the consequences arrive later, in far more dangerous forms. Political excess on the left has a way of empowering the right. There’s a vivid example in modern political history: the far-left communist activist Marinus van der Lubbe’s burning of the Reichstag in 1933 didn’t create the far-right Nazi regime, but it gave it the pretext required to consolidate power.
Legitimacy is power
Which brings me to the real subject of this essay: legitimacy. Havel wrote about the power of the powerless — the courage of dissidents to live within the truth. But there’s also the power of the powerful: the ability to define what counts as truth in the first place. That’s what legitimacy is. In authoritarian systems, legitimacy is enforced by the state. In liberal democracies, it’s mediated by the press. It is the mechanism through which societies decide what is serious, what is fringe, what is respectable, and what is mad. And in modern liberal societies, that mechanism still runs through the legacy media. They don’t just tell people what’s happening, but what to make of it.
Editors confer legitimacy outward, and they cultivate legitimacy inward. They earn authority by behaving like honest brokers — reality-based, restrained, trustworthy — and then they spend that authority to guide public judgment. That’s the deal. It’s not written into law, but it’s one of the foundations of liberal pluralism. Without it, you lose a sense of shared reality. Without shared reality, tribal warfare takes the place of democratic disagreement.
Legitimacy is fragile. It can be accumulated slowly and squandered quickly. When legacy media behaves like the upper chamber of liberal society — careful, serious, skeptical — it earns the right to arbitrate between competing claims. But when it trades reality-testing for moral preening, or confuses activism with analysis, it spends down its legitimacy at an alarming rate.
And a legitimacy vacuum never stays a vacuum; it gets filled. In recent years it’s been filled by the only force in American politics that still knows how to turn alienation into power: the authoritarian right. It didn’t need to persuade; it only needed liberals to embarrass themselves loudly and refuse to stop.
The transgender debate exposed all of this. By demanding public assent to propositions that were visibly untrue, legacy outlets spent legitimacy they hadn’t realized was finite. The public noticed. A substantial portion of it peeled off — first quietly, then electorally. They pulled the lever for Trump not out of devotion but because they wanted someone — anyone — to stop insulting their intelligence. It was a self-inflicted wound: in endlessly berating the public, the liberal media didn’t birth an enlightened left, but an empowered right, which happily converted cultural alienation into political authority.
Ultimately, this has nothing to do with the metaphysics of sex. It’s entirely to do with legitimacy. Shared reality is the substrate of liberal democracy. The press is the institution tasked with maintaining it. When the press loses interest in describing the world as it is, and becomes obsessed with instructing the public on how it ought to be spoken about, legitimacy collapses. And when legitimacy collapses, reactionary politics quickly follow. The civic sphere becomes a kind of Lord of the Flies contest over who can offer a sense of order: Ralph, who believes in rules and cooperation, falls to Jack, who promises order through force, fear, and spectacle. In American politics today, Trump is Jack.
Repair, not dismantle
But the answer isn’t to abandon authoritative media institutions or pretend they no longer matter. They do matter — and not just out of nostalgia. Liberal democracy needs a functioning fourth estate for the same reason it needs independent courts or competitive elections: there has to be some institution capable of maintaining a shared frame of reference. Without that, disagreement devolves into factional psychodrama instead of democratic dispute.
Humans aren’t epistemic free agents, much as we like to pretend otherwise. No man is an island, and no society functions as a federation of lone researchers. Cognition scales through trust — we pool judgment, defer to referees, and lean on institutions to sort seriousness from noise. Authoritarian systems force that role onto the state; liberal democracies delegate it to the press. The point is, there’s a basic human need for someone to adjudicate what counts as real.
This feels counterintuitive, because the past decade has trained people to celebrate decentralization — a thousand Substacks, a thousand podcasts, a thousand channels of dissident analysis. Much of that’s been healthy. Fragmentation broke the monopoly of legacy institutions and exposed their failures in real time. But fragmentation alone doesn’t solve the problem legitimacy used to solve: integration. A society can surface truths through a dispersed media ecosystem; it can’t orient itself through one.
When legacy outlets implode or forfeit credibility, the gap is filled by rumor, resentment, and the loudest faction willing to claim certainty. Thoughtful pluralism recedes. That’s how a culture loses its bearings.
This is why repair matters. The problem isn’t that liberal media institutions have authority; it’s that they’ve misused it. Some institution has to play the role of integrator — a place where claims are tested against reality, weighed against competing values, and presented back to the public in a form that allows disagreement without disintegration. The task is to bring the existing institutions back into alignment with the standards that once made that possible: truthfulness, restraint, intellectual honesty, and tolerance for dissent without moral panic.
We need central, authoritative voices that can speak to the whole populace and channel the zeitgeist honestly. We need our private narratives to be compared against a shared one, or we lose any sense of common culture.
In other words, the digital ecosystem still has use for an upper chamber. The question is whether the current occupants are willing to behave like one again.
The Washington Post’s slogan — Democracy Dies in Darkness — is right, even if its editors don’t fully grasp why. Darkness doesn’t come only from state censorship. It also comes from respected institutions that stop telling the truth while convincing themselves they’re acting nobly. Liberal societies don’t withstand that indefinitely.
The hard road ahead
What comes next for liberal media editors won’t be easy, but it can’t be avoided.
First, they have to admit error — plainly, without euphemism, and without quietly shifting emphasis as though nothing fundamental went wrong. Editors will have to acknowledge that they failed in their most basic duty: to test claims against reality rather than enforce them as moral obligations. That will upset audiences and provoke internal resistance, which is why it’s been avoided. But this is just the sunk-cost fallacy on an institutional scale: deferring the reckoning doesn’t prevent it; it only ensures the eventual cost is greater.
There’s also real human damage to contend with. Many people underwent transgender medical interventions believing they were acting on a deep inner truth, when in reality their self-conception of “being trans” had been shaped by powerful social dynamics and cultural incentives, and reinforced by institutions they trusted. As the narrative begins to crack, regret will surface. Some of it already has. And when it does, the harm will reveal itself for what it was: a product of good intentions, professional incentives, and the quiet belief that someone else must have checked the facts.
Editors can’t undo what has already happened. But they can stop adding to it — and they must. They can make clear that reality is not negotiable, that disagreement is not abuse, and that liberal societies do not demand assent to metaphysical claims. They can reopen questions that were prematurely closed, and report honestly on outcomes that were previously waved away as inconvenient.
None of this will be painless. Once trust is lost, it doesn’t regenerate on demand. But the alternative — continuing to enforce a story that no longer holds — guarantees further collapse.
The editors seem to think they’re choosing comfort over chaos. They’re not. The chaos is already here; the only open question is who gets to govern it. The real choice is between a hard course correction now, led by institutions that still remember how to be liberal, or a slow displacement by parallel structures — some responsible and serious, others trading in misinformation and resentment.
There is still a window. Not a wide one. But wide enough. The issue was never merely about sex. Transgender ideology is the mechanism; media legitimacy is the medium; and the future of liberal democracy is what’s at stake.
Only connect
In the end, the matter is simple. It’s about telling the truth: in the shared civic sphere, trans women are men; trans men are women. In private life, people can arrange their social world as they like, and although there may be some friction around courtesy at the boundary between private and public life, it’s not an unsolvable problem. We do this with people’s private religious beliefs all the time. It’s basic pluralism — liberal democracy 101.
The transgender controversy matters for the same reason the media matters, and for the same reason democracy matters: reality has to be shared, and sharing reality depends on everyday honesty. When institutions demand polite falsehoods in small things, people stop trusting them in serious ones. Shared reality collapses. Liberalism can’t survive that.
I’ve always believed that liberalism, at its best, is a humanist project — the kind my literary hero E. M. Forster captured so concisely in his epigraph: Only connect. It’s a reminder that liberalism begins with ordinary human dealings — how people speak, listen, and relate truthfully to one another, even when honesty is inconvenient or costly. Václav Havel’s injunction to “live within the truth” asks for the same thing: not allegiance, not slogans, but honesty.
That standard applies to institutions no less than to individuals. And it leaves liberal media editors with a question they can no longer evade: are they prepared to meet it?
Jeffrey Goldberg, helming The Atlantic, has done slightly better than his peers, green-lighting the occasional mildly skeptical piece (Chait, Lewis, Singal). But he has yet to publish a full-throated gender-critical essay of the kind that now appears routinely in the UK press — at The Times, UnHerd, The Critic, Spiked, and similar outlets across the political spectrum. Conditional pass — for now.
Hi, Arty. This is a barn-burner of a piece. What strikes me most about it is how it points to both the recent failures and the ongoing necessity of institutions.
To be in favour of institutions, but insist on FUNCTIONING institutions (as opposed to simply burn 'me all down) is to take the truly rational approach. It is countercultural in these days of emotivism and subjectivism leading to authoritarianism.
Many, many thanks.
Such a helpful and clear contribution - thank you!