This X thread was in response to Malcolm Gladwell being criticised for saying he was 'cowed' into silence (on trans identifying men in women's sports):
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1963238799149859281.html
'People were terrified to be publicly critical on this issue. It had the biggest gap I've ever seen between public and private opinion. That gap was maintained by the fear of a vicious backlash from activists for saying anything even mildly critical. Nor was that fear unfounded.
Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, to name just two people, were effectively blacklisted from journalism and lost a lot of friends merely for noting that detransition existed. Saying that transfemale athletes shouldn't compete with women was many leagues beyond that, and by 2020, social justice activists had a lot more power.
When I was covering the Lia Thomas story, I had to do an interview on how swim meets work on background because the guy was terrified my name would end up in his story explaining timing rules. He said "If it was just me, I might risk it, but my kids are in swim clubs and I can't risk their lives getting upended."
I skulked around meeting parents and swimmers in alleys. When a parent said something critical to Suzy Weiss on the record, his wife called Suzy and frantically begged her not to print their name.
Schuyler Bailar, meanwhile, a transmale former Ivy League swimmer, sent me his press kit and sat openly with me in the bleachers while we watched Thomas swim.
It was very easy to get the idea from the media that this was an 80/20 issue for Thomas, because no one except pretty extreme conservatives would go on the record against. Moreover, this created space for the activists to make some pretty wild denials of the existence of transfemale athletic advantage
Because people were terrified to talk, those claims went largely unrebutted for a long time, even though they were at odds with the research (I think I wrote the first major media column on the topic, in 2022).
Which of course made it even harder to contest transfemale participation, because if you hadn't personally trawled through the research papers, you'd be beset by angry people denying any advantage existed. Scientific American said they had no real advantage (!!) What are you, some kind of crank who thinks they know better than Scientific American?
Yet when I told people I was writing about Thomasnot expressing an opinion myself, because I didn't really have one (I was annoyed by the junk science being passed around, not the prospect of Lia Thomas winning a medal)I got an earful.
I always told people verrrrrry neutrally (I was afraid too). I just said I was going to cover the race. People absolutely unloaded--not conservatives, who just rolled their eyes, but nice liberals who donated to Planned Parenthood and HRC. They would unleash unprompted rants about how unfair it was.
But none of them would ever say that publicly. They figured I was safe, because right-leaning columnist. They didn't want to be quoted, they were hiding it from a lot of their friends, and they were both afraid, and furious that they were afraid to state the utterly obvious fact that males have an athletic advantage.
The magnitude of the preference falsification left it ripe for what @timurkuran calls a preference cascade--when people start realizing that they're in the silent majority, not the outlying minority, true opinion manifests rapidly, like one of those chemical reactions where a liquid just sits there for a while and then suddenly everything crystallizes.
So I find it entirely plausible that these guys harbored doubts they were afraid to express publicly. They rationally calculated it was not worth losing friends over, or wasting time managing a public freakout when they had other stuff to do. They're not in the "fearlessly stating their opinions on everything under the sun" business like @Timodc and I are.
And even there ... I wasn't fearless, I was terrified, I almost talked myself out of writing the first column on Thomas (which just ran over the research, but did not oppose her participation), people I talked to suggested I would soon be looking for another job, and I barely slept the night before it published.
Maybe that makes me a coward, though I think my career falsifies any notion that I have a compulsive desire to be loved. But after watching what happened to Katie and Jesse, not to mention James Bennet, the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, etc, it seemed pretty rational at the time. '