Malcolm Gladwell’s trans mea culpa is too little, too late

The success of Malcolm Gladwell has always been somewhat suss. His books improbably claim to hold the key to alleviating many of life’s difficulties. They can make you smarter, more empathetic and physically healthier – invariably, in 300 pages or less. He also has the rare (some would argue dubious) knack for uncovering hidden patterns in disparate and unrelated events, the knowledge of which can supposedly change your life or the society around you, if only you’d let his insights in. Now it seems that those of us who have held firm against the Gladwell mania of recent years have had our misgivings justified.

That’s because Gladwell, 62, has more or less just admitted that he is a craven opportunist. In 2022, he appeared as a guest speaker at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The subject he was there to address was ‘transwomen’ (ie, men) competing in women’s sports. Gladwell – whose books have sold more than 25million copies, and who is a longstanding staff writer at the New Yorker – maintained that it is perfectly legitimate for people born male, who underwent male puberty and who possess the distinct biological advantages of being a man, to compete in women’s sports.

Three years later, at a time when this view has become distinctly less popular, Gladwell has changed his tune. Speaking to the Real Science of Sport podcast last week, he said that letting men compete against women is ‘nuts’, regardless of whether the man identifies as a woman or not, adding that he had been ‘cowed’ by the audience at the MIT event. ‘The reason I’m ashamed of my performance [in 2022]… is because I share your position 100 per cent’, Gladwell told podcast host Ross Tucker, who happened to be the lone gender-critical speaker at the conference. ‘I let a lot of real howlers pass without comment’, he admitted. Touching on the ‘vibe shift’, Gladwell said that ‘if we did a replay of that exact panel at the Sloan conference this coming March, it runs in exactly the opposite direction… And it would be, I suspect, near unanimity in the room that trans athletes have no place in the female category.’

Gladwell’s mea culpa leaves plenty to be desired. ‘I was objective in a dishonest way’, he said at one point on the podcast, articulating his own unique interpretation of the Cretan Paradox. But perhaps the most revealing comment was this: ‘My suspicion is that 90 per cent of the people in the audience were on [Tucker’s] side, but five per cent of the audience were willing to admit it.’

A book – and a longer one than Gladwell’s usually are – would be needed to appreciate the scale of his hypocrisy. He has made millions of dollars celebrating the virtues of authenticity and independent thinking. He literally wrote a book about it: the 2014 best-seller, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants. One feels an even greater sense of injustice when a thought is spared for the gender-critical intellectuals and writers who did show critical, independent minds, and whose careers were destroyed by the liberal establishment Gladwell was busy milking.

Yet again, the name Graham Linehan is impossible to ignore. Gladwell and Linehan are of a similar age and work in similar professions (Linehan as a comedy writer). For most of their lives, both men would have identified with the political left. Linehan, however, had his life effectively destroyed by trans activists. Last week, he was arrested for some of his punchier trans-sceptical tweets by British police. Gladwell, by contrast, kept quiet on the trans issue and waited until the Overton window had shifted before saying what he really thought.

If there is a silver lining to Gladwell’s admission, it is that society is returning to a more rational perspective on transgenderism. That a staff writer at the New Yorker can say that men should not be allowed to compete against women is progress, albeit from an incredibly low bar.

His admission is welcome, but it certainly should not be celebrated, given the high price much more courageous people have had to pay for telling the truth all along.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.