Why media men fell hard for trans ideology

Give men a straightforward threat and they will confront it, often with genuine bravery. Give them something murky or psychological or slow-burning and many slip straight into avoidance. When a situation refuses to make sense, their instinct is to laugh it off; when the laugh fails, they roll their eyes; when that still does not work, they declare the whole thing too trivial to bother with.

This pattern has shaped the entire male response to the trans issue. It happened so reliably that it deserves a name – the Great Eye Roll.

Men are notoriously squeamish about the idea of genital removal. I have seen their faces turn pale as they beg me to stop talking. They will agree to almost anything to end the discussion – yes, yes, transwomen are women, drag queen story hour, whatever you say, just stop talking about this gruesome subject. Castration anxiety is real, and many men assume that any man willing to remove his own genitals cannot truly be a man, so perhaps he must be something else.

It is notable that one of the few men who spoke out early was comedy writer Graham Linehan, who had already confronted this reality in a deeply personal way after having a testicle removed. By the time he challenged gender ideology, he had already faced the very reality that makes so many men wince and avoid the subject.

Of course, the trans issue seemed harmless to almost everyone at first. The whole spectacle looked ridiculous. Slogans, badges, pronouns, rainbow lanyards… men quickly filed it under silly nonsense that was unsettling to think about. Many men believed women were overreacting. The feminists annoyed them (was it too many high-pitched voices?). They thought teenagers were going through a phase. They assumed it was a culture-war triviality.

But silly things can be deadly serious, and while men were rolling their eyes, they missed the scale of what was unfolding. The alarm should have sounded in 2019, when journalist James Kirkup in the Spectator exposed the extent of institutional capture in the UK. That was the moment to wake up. ‘Be Kind’ had become the perfect cover for a takeover happening in plain sight.

This extraordinarily effective coup pushed broadcasters such as the BBC and RTÉ into obscuring and distorting the truth through an acceptance of so-called gender self-ID – so male sex offenders and paedophiles were reported as female in a wave of activist-driven groupthink.

It also normalised a kind of mandated perjury, with people expected to use she / her pronouns, thereby making a mockery of the idea of telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

It was also in 2019 that 35 clinicians quit the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), after seeing autistic and same-sex-attracted children fast-tracked on to harmful medical pathways. Journalist Hannah Barnes’s 2023 exposé, Time to Think, helped lead to GIDS’s closure in 2024. That same year Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, stepped down under growing pressure over her promotion of the trans-rights agenda.

And still the coverage was muted. By then many men in the media felt out of their depth. Women were captured too, but here I’m interested in the male response.

British satire showed the pattern clearly. Have I Got News For You studiously avoided the trans topic for years, ignoring a national scandal involving children, medicine, prisons, law and safeguarding. Ian Hislop, Paul Merton and a rotating cast of panellists joked about everything else while pretending this was not happening.

Private Eye did the same. Sharp and confident, it should have led the charge. Instead it barely touched the story until very late. It’s doing better now, but it should never have taken so long.

The media men, whose job was to spot danger early, now feel exposed and afraid. Most minimised the trans issue because it unsettled them and they did not know how to engage with it.

They were meant to ask hard questions, yet they came off as weak and compliant. Few have admitted, or even realised, the tangle that begins the moment a journalist chooses she / her for one person and not another, because he then becomes the arbiter of who counts as a woman.

Many are now scrubbing old social-media posts, deleting the jokes and eye-rolls that reveal their complacency. Some are mortified they mocked the women who tried to warn them. Others have remained silent.

Irish journalist Matt Cooper, for instance, energetically defended the right of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, reported to be biologically male, to punch women at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. And he dismissed anyone who questioned Khelif’s participation in the women’s category, as a far-right bigot. Cooper, who prides himself on being well informed, simply did not do the work here. He got it wrong and has yet to say so.

A few, like James O’Brien, continue like the Japanese holdouts who stayed hidden in the jungle long after the war had ended. They cannot admit defeat now, because that would require admitting they were catastrophically wrong. So they cling to the position they took years ago, even as the evidence overwhelms them.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who works with parents of trans-identified children. At first the fathers laughed it off, assuming their bright, quirky child could not possibly believe any of this. Then came the eye-rolling stage, as the mother grew frantic and the father insisted it would all blow over. After that, many fathers fell silent. They saw the seriousness but could not face it. At Genspect, an organisation I founded, we run online support meetings for parents of trans-identifying children every day of the week. More than 90 per cent of the parents who participate are mothers.

Finally the fear set in. The fathers realised they had misjudged everything and that the situation was already out of their hands. I have seen too many marriages buckle under this strain, with mothers left to fight for their child entirely on their own.

The cost of male avoidance is that women end up carrying the load. More men are paying attention now, but the work required to undo institutional capture and uproot embedded language and ideas is infuriating. None of this was necessary. It all happened in plain sight while too many men sniggered and pretended the whole thing was too silly to matter. How wrong they were.

Stella O’Malley is the director and founder of Genspect.