Malcolm Gladwell backtracks on men in women’s sports

Actually Voltaire did.

I still find it mildly reassuring that these guys are now all ‘no no of course not’ in public about the most bonkers manifestations. It’s a good thing, and tbh a good idea. Salami slice tactics.

Thanks Red, that's interesting. So does that mean that Jesse Singal's articles don't reflect Guyatt's views at all, Guyatt just signed something he didn't believe y not reading it?
Either way, it's a good thing if Guyatt is disavowing his previous statement, as discussed here
Page 2 | Jesse Singal on the furore over Systematic Reviews of Gender Medicine | Mumsnet

So he's identified that there is a real life 'tipping point ' then has he? So ironic. He won't be remembered when one day all this gets documented, apart from being a weak man who despite writing his books depicting social changes, either was so blind that he didn't see this one coming or if he did, was too cowardly to use his hugely influential position and write about it. Neither of which are great as a so called forward thinking social historian.

Nah, sod him. He’s just ensuring the receipts are there for when the wheels come right off the bandwagon.

Mia Hughes
Today on Beyond Gender we interviewed Dr. Gordan Guyatt—the “godfather” of evidence-based medicine—who recently signed a statement calling paediatric gender medicine “medically necessary” despite knowing there is no good quality evidence that it is safe, beneficial and effective.

This particular clip is INCREDIBLE. When I asked him about it, his response was nothing short of astounding. He confessed he hadn’t bothered to read the statement he signed!

Guyatt is one of the most respected, distinguished doctors of our time, and his name carries tremendous weight. That he could so carelessly put his name to an activist talking point—one entirely unsupported by evidence—is not only bitterly ironic, but also profoundly damaging. It undermines the work of those of us fighting to counter the flood of misinformation spread by activists, WPATH, and the medical associations that have endorsed this scandal.

Ah we've had Gladwell.

I'm not going to raise you with this gem

Dr. Gordon Guyatt revolutionized modern medicine. As a professor at McMaster University, he coined the term "evidence-based medicine" in 1991, created the hierarchy of evidence that every medical student learns, and wrote the User's Guide to the Medical Literature that taught physicians worldwide how to critically evaluate research. For 48 years, he's been the gold standard for rigorous scientific thinking in healthcare.

https://x.com/_CryMiaRiver/status/1965155081038561553?t=xxzxyDCvHxseyeLDIWKXbQ&s=19

Mia Hughes AT _crymiariver
Me: You signed a statement calling “gender affirming care” for youth medically necessary.

Guyatt: WHAT!? That’s RIDICULOUS. I would never say that.

Me: *produces the receipt

Guyatt: Oh, I didn’t read that part. I’m a dope.

Unbelievable.

Bev Jackson AT BevJacksonAuth
Have you ever seen a more blatant example of someone lying and then squirming in embarrassment?
Guyatt’s reputation is in shreds.

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.

No-one does put-downs quite as well as JKR.

https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1963927077213602131

Yes it is incredibly frustrating and disorientating to know that your views would get you ostracised from every academic common room, pub restaurant and canteen in the country, plus putting you on a performance improvement plan or gardening leave at work, when if you overhear the non-ostracised talking to each other, they believe exactly the same things as you do, but are willing to make a contradictory statement. Like the many vicars who remain in their jobs despite losing their faith years ago, as long as they are prepared to lead their congregation in the Nicene Creed.

The Gladwell thing is interesting in the sense that he's decided now is the point at which it's safe to speak. Because as far as I can see, in the US and Canada, the so-called "liberal" viewpoint is still completely in thrall to gender ideology. Look at Amy Hamm, for starters. So if Gladwell thinks he won't get hounded for speaking out now, perhaps that tells us something.

Victoria Smith's piece was very good. Significant that she mentions Ronson, whose stance has been breathtaking in its hypocrisy. I wonder when, if ever, he'll admit he backed the wrong horse.

I read somewhere - it might even have been something by Smith herself - that Mary Daly, in one of her books, pointed out that not a single one of the famous male Enlightenment thinkers ever wrote a word condemning the witch trials of the early modern period. That gives you pause for thought, doesn't it?

Ah that explains it Exquisite. I’m sure MG has been a guest on Cautionary Tales as well.

Tim Harford’s excellent Cautionary Tales podcast is produced I believe by Pushkin Industries which was cofounded I think by Malcolm Gladwell.

It'll be forgotten in about two seconds.

It's an irrelevance to his circle.

https://thecritic.co.uk/why-malcolm-gladwells-trans-retraction-wont-ever-be-enough/

For a couple of years, whenever I tried to talk to “outsiders” about what was really going on, the problem was not that they disagreed with me. It was that they thought I was making it up. I’d be told that no one, apart from a handful of totally mad people, thought that biological sex wasn’t real or that children were born in the wrong body. No one thought that male rapists should be in women’s prisons or that male bodies belonged in female sports! No one thought a person should be able to switch genders at random, simply on their say-so! Where had I got such crazy ideas?

Trans activist demands were so obviously insane that most people’s natural response was to think you were inventing them in order to make trans people look bad (so no wonder trans people hated terfs!). While this reaction was both frustrating and isolating, it offered a degree of reassurance. All the people you’d believed were on your side in their opposition to sexism and homophobia were still on your side — they just hadn’t yet accepted that this iteration of bigotry was real. Once they did, they’d be right there with you.

“Decent, smart people recognize who the villain is when a misogynist attacks a feminist writer,” wrote Ronson. “Hurry up, decent, smart people,” I’d think. “Time to give us feminists a bit of a hand!” Only it never happened. We waited, as it became more and more obvious that no, we hadn’t made anything up. Yet all of these supposed deep thinkers – all of these speakers of truth to power, these brave challengers of online bullies, these people who had already made it clear that they would have found it all insane if only it was real – sat back and said nothing, or even threw their lot in with the mob. The switch from “this would never happen (and thinking it could makes you a bigot)” to “this is happening and it’s great (because only bigots worry about it happening)” was remarkable. Remarkable, and profoundly damaging in ways that go far beyond ‘the trans issue’ itself.

AND

Until this issue arose, I had no idea how many self-styled “good” people will support bad things on the basis that other, less important people can take all the hits. Maybe I was incredibly naïve, but I thought of my political opponents as people who believed different things to me, not people who believed the exact same things but considered themselves much more special and exempt from responsibility than their fellow believers.

I have a personal connection with Gladwell's former teacher. It pisses me off no end that he characterised himself as a free thinker and something of a rebel (like his teacher) only for this to show up just how much of a fraud he ultimately is in that sense.

He was more bothered about conformity than free thinking and being unafraid to say or do something out of step with the mainstream. He wanted to 'stay safe' in his thoughts and wisdom rather than to actually ask questions and to critically think.

If you have made a career out of supposedly critically thinking, only to be exposed as a fraud, why should you be welcomed back with open arms.

You've betrayed the very thing you are supposed to have promoted.

In real life, I haven't shyed away from trying to have those deep and difficult conversations, and I think it's probably benefitted a lot of my good friends. Those who dismissed it weren't friends anyway. Im capable of reading the room and knowing when it was inappropriate or going to lead to conflict too but there's no point in avoiding the subject completely.

Gladwell's position, the way he'd built his career and cast himself, was not as part of the establishment but just outside it. It is something of a unique position to be in - on the edge but also respected and valued. It put him ideally placed to put down those seeds of doubt and crucial questions which could really have aided preventing things from spiralling to the extreme it has. He didn't.

And that's why he'll never be forgiven by many.

I don't know if anyone else has picked up on this but Douglas Murray has got two things wrong: Malcolm Gladwell was born in England, not Canada, and the airport police who arrested Graham do routinely carry guns.

Other than that, it's a good piece.

Let's see if Gladwell suffers in any way. Anyone willing to place a bet?

I know, right? That hit me too.

Thank you @NecessaryScene, that transcript really put into words how I feel about mainstream media currently.

Often they don't see it themselves. I read an article a while back taking the line that alternative media aren't really anti-establishment, "don't you know GB News is owned by a billionaire" etc etc, which had some fair points, but then I noticed the author was using the term "establishment media" to mean everything except the BBC.

And then I thought of RFK Jr's confirmation hearings, and I'm sure RFK has all sorts of eccentric ideas, but the spectacle of Bernie Sanders of all people barking at him that you can't question Big Pharma.

And then I got a flashback to that scene in Kingpin where Randy Quaid tells Woody Harrelson that smoking is unhealthy and Woody just looks at him in pity and asks who has done more research on this than the good people of the American tobacco industry...

We talk about institutional capture, but it also works the other way round.

They make you homeless, and then they charge you with being dirty.

😶

I find Mike Finch infuriating on this topic, he always seems to add one line that makes me want to scream when they talk about it. But Tucker is so so good I keep listening.

Going to post a bit of transcript from Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn discussing this on their podcast (paywalled, sorry!), where he was the counterpoint to the heretic Graham Linehan.

They discussed Graham at length to start with, including this bit:

Walter Kirn: I watched that little clip of him talking, and you know you’re not looking at an ideologue and you know you’re not looking at a bully. You’re looking at a comedy writer with messy hair. How can I put it?

Matt Taibbi: In a goofy sweater, yeah.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, a guy who’s been bullied. Not some uber mensch Nietzsche fascist who wants to get down on the poor weak outsiders of society, but someone who is in a sense one of the outsiders, because that’s where comedy comes from.

Matt Taibbi: And so he’s sort of exiled to the wilderness now.

Then they went on to cover Gladwell, and showed his performance at the Munk debate. Some of the following discussion:

Walter Kirn: Because all Malcolm Gladwell represents, as I say, is a mid-wit weathervane on top of the barn of The New Yorker and The Atlantic issues that go unread, and he is signaling at that point that this is the discourse which will appeal to the largest audience. He didn’t quite realize that he was in Canada and that he was dealing with a kind of higher level of, I don’t know, verbal and rhetorical athletics than he’s used to. He thought he could do what you can do at a party for The New Yorker in Manhattan.

Matt Taibbi: And just bully people.

Walter Kirn: And just bully people. But now having reached his other tipping point, he now realizes that it’s time to do a tactical retreat in order to hold the audience. But once again, what I can’t stand and what I think is your point generally, is that when you drive people out of the spaces in which they feel they’re not being told the truth, you generally drive them in a sense down market. Okay.

If the elite groups don’t police themselves, and if they start not telling the truth, and if they start becoming subject to ideological fashion and self-censorship, you drive people to new places. Those places tend to be less elite. They tend to care less about passing in high society. You go from The New York Times to the New York Post, you go from the New York Post to the Daily Mail, then they come after you with the social opprobrium, that your populist, that you’re deplorable, that you’re hanging out with the unwashed and the stupid and the uneducated and the less expert because they drove you out of those spaces, and now they can demean you for being less socially, intellectually exalted ones, and that’s always how it works.

Matt Taibbi: It’s absolutely like a two-step, right? First, they broadcast their non-factual version of reality that over time people can’t accept. They want to. Right. This is one of the things you learn in media is that people, if you have a big organization behind you, people want to believe you. They tune in and they want to trust you. They were used to that instinct once upon a time, but when they can’t anymore, as you say, they’re driven out. Now, I showed that clip because this is what happens when you leave the nest, is they start throwing ick on you. You are a racist. You are a conspiracy theorist. You lack standards. You’re not good enough for the prestigious institutions. That’s what the whole thing about mispronouncing my name was about. Right.

Walter Kirn: Right. And mostly what you are, mostly what you are is a class traitor. Mostly what you are is someone who has abandoned the world of the educated, the expert, the thoughtful, the good, the moral, the liberal, whatever their synonyms are for virtue. Mostly what you are is somebody who took all the good things from that world and hung out and passed in it and made money in it, and now have betrayed it like it was a fucking team sport, which you didn’t realize. You thought it was a principled vocation, if not a profession, journalism, I hesitate to call it a professional, a habit.

Matt Taibbi: Right.

Walter Kirn: But now you are the black sheep. Now you’re the person who took the goodies, went to the schools, hung out at the parties, and spat it all out in favor of stupid people.

Matt Taibbi: In favor of stupid people with backward beliefs. Right.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Who are so unconscious that they’re controlled by foreign dictators without knowing it.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Right. Right. They’re not even aware of what dupes they are for the foreign manipulation, and so having kicked you out of the prestigious institutions, that’s what Malcolm calls them, you’ve now moved down market. You’re now online, and now that place, that cesspool is what becomes heavily policed. Right.

Walter Kirn: They make you homeless, and then they charge you with being dirty.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Right. I mean, the metaphor works. It’s like being kicked out of the high class neighborhood in New York, and suddenly you’re in the place where broken windows policing actually happens.

Walter Kirn: Yes.

Matt Taibbi: And-

Walter Kirn: And they’re the police.

Matt Taibbi: And they’re the police, and so it’s a no-win situation. You are in this world where all you want to do is just not lie, right, but for that, at the extreme end of that, you end up like Graham Linehan. You end up with no job, no friends and arrested, right, but for other people, there’s lots of other consequences too. Politically, their point of view isn’t expressed anywhere.

Walter Kirn: Malcolm Gladwell will never have trouble in an airport anywhere in the world.

yeah I think that was a bit of the price of going mainstream and becoming successful wasn't it, slowly the left became part of the establishment

This brings up something I've noticed about progressive politics. Despite the fact that they often seem to see themselves as counter-cultural, and breaking down institutions, they seem to have become massively wedded to maintaining them at all costs. Government institutions in many cases, huge NGOs and lobby groups like SW, what they consider to be the mainstream accepted scientific community, and even Big Pharma and Big Ag.

It's kind of an interesting phenomena.

Has he said whether he believes that women deserve single sex spaces? Or is it only sport that he agrees with? I'd have some respect for him if it were single sex spaces, that arguably affects women more, it affects 100% of women after all, arguably far more than the small amount that play sport.

I'm not saying sport isn't important for those who play it, and for womens rights as a whole, it certainly is. But I think change rooms, toilets, prisons etc would hold more weight.

Thanks for linking to this.

I think he was more than just being cowed. If he didnt really believe, and didnt want to be cancelled, he could have avoided the whole thing. My interpretation of Gladwells postion is that he was protecting the institutions, or maybe trusting the institutions to deliver the best outcomes. And the best outcome is including men.

He knows enough about sport to know performance isnt just about testosterone. He knows intellectually that it doesn’t its not just a few men and women.

But he thought that a path could be found where men didnt have an advantage, but always be represented in womens sport? And if we support institutions they would eventually achieve this. Basically, womens sport became a vehicle for inclusivity, not the best women at sports.

Yes he’s really well known. I’ve enjoyed his books and some of his podcast episodes, though I would take Tim Harford over him any day who is much more careful about the accuracy of what he says ( why am I putting them together?? Maybe I’ve just listened to episodes of their respective podcasts in sequence). It is noticeable that although I would definitely not call Tim Harford GC, he has said some perfectly sensible things about the impact of sex in reality.