Malcolm Gladwell backtracks on men in women’s sports

[WimbledonWhites]

https://nypost.com/2025/09/04/opinion/malcolm-gladwell-admits-he-lied-about-trans-athletes-because-telling-the-truth-destroyed-careers/

A sign of the times?

It doesn’t sound like JKR will be rolling out the golden bridge
https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1963927077213602131

I agree with JK here:

'Such people’s only usefulness is as weathervanes. When craven conformists start coming over, you know the wind has truly changed.'

I imagine that there will be others. There has to be.

I think it's quite clever on his part. He gets it all done and dusted now, and his reversal will soon be forgotten (or even forgiven as he did it so early), and he now gets to look down at everyone else who is still drunk on the ideology.

Malcolm Gladwell is the archetype of male privilege. Great that he has realised the truth belatedly but why anyone thought he was in a position to comment on elite women's sport is beyond me. I've not listened to the podcast but am imagining Ross Tucker must have been listening open mouthed.

As someone on X said, it's ironic that it has taken us getting to a Tipping Point for him to feel able to speak out!!

I’d like this to be the moment when Helen Joyce’s prediction proves out.

Even tho’ it will mean men being applauded for saying things that cost women their livelihoods. We shall have to mumble, “golden bridge, golden bridge” as we listen to the men pontificate about it being our high squeaky voices, and the tone of what we said that was the problem.

Bring out the best metal polish, set out the welcome mat and tea service.

There's going to be a lot of this.

Its hard. I know we should be welcoming them all into the fold, golden bridges and all that. But he was a craven coward when others lost a lot to stick to their principles.

How much credit will I give him for being slightly ahead of the tsunami?

She's not wrong. And I have to admit to being pathetically ... grateful? relieved? when anyone comes to their senses for any reason on this subject. So maybe it's just the desperate need for nods to truth speaking, but part of me wants us to be, um, kinder about admissions like Gladwell's.

It's not easy saying 'I was wrong' and 'I was a stupid coward.'

Of course, when such people do another aboutface with the next change in the weather, the forbearance feels totally wasted.

Malcolm Gladwell had an English teacher who greatly inspired him...

But whatever brought the two together, what matters is the invaluable lesson that Gladwell took away from their in-class time. “He taught me that words can be and, in fact, must be used with specificity. He believed that sloppiness was the enemy of clarity and insight. He paid a tremendous attention to detail and that has been the basis of all my writing. I thank him for that.”

Irony.

Fck off Malcolm

What pisses me off was Gladwell liked and admired this teacher because he was an eccentric and didn't feel a need to conform. His early books owed a lot to this particular teacher because he was encouraged to think out of the box.

Gladwell then has done the very opposite to everything he wrote in these early books on this subject, preferring to knowingly lie until he felt it safe to comment - after the tipping point.

It is a case of hypocrisy of the very highest of orders.

Wow, Murray doesn't hold back.

When you think that this cowardly grown man has hidden and left it to teen girls to fight - it disgusts me.

What gets me is how self-righteous he was about the whole thing, he didn't seem reluctantly drawn in at all.

I am often team golden bridge, but not here.

Agree. Streeting has actually put some effort in post his golden bridge, this feels expedient for Gladwell rather than a genuine apology.

What was the prediction and what's the golden bridge thing about please? Asking as you are all much better informed.

I don't know why people like Gladwell didnt just keep quiet.

Yes that's the issue right there.

They were in a debate together and Gladwell was not only bad but but mean and vindictive about another debater, deliberately mispronouncing his name.

He is such a coward! No chivalry from him, he just left women and girls to be injured and cheated by male players. To say something you don't believe in because you are afraid of reactions from other men is really low. It's just throwing an already vulnerable sex to the wolves.

Could you be persuaded to say something you not to be true, asks the article. That's the question isn't it. I could never. Whether it be pronouns, or anything else. No matter how much abuse and flack I get, I won't ever compromise my deeply held principles. God himself couldn't make me.

Helen Joyce made several variations on the ‘men will sort it and say they couldn’t hear women because of our high-pitched voices’ etc. comment in webinars and interviews. This is from 2021 when she was talking about her forecast for ‘the way this ends’. This time stamp starts there and is followed by ‘being strategic’ that elaborates on the idea.

HJ writes about the golden bridge here: https://thecritic.co.uk/sorry-is-the-hardest-word/

In exactly the same way as he enjoyed looking down on those who were too unenlightened to support gender identity 🙄
There’s a common thread running through his positioning, and frankly, it’s not very edifying

Ross Tucker thinks Gladwell's change of heart should be welcomed.

Yes, I was thinking of this Munk debate in the other thread, where the OP had mentioned that she was surprised to discover that Douglas Murray was not a moron as she had been led to believe. Gladwell did so poorly a lot of people who were fans of his were surprised, and he later wrote an article saying that he had not realised when he went into the debate that Douglas had been a member of the Oxford Union and therefor was an expert debater.

I think he's just been so used to everyone being so enamoured of his books (which are frankly full of questionable material,) and in progressive Canadian circles he counts as an oppressed minority despite his class advantages, that he assumes he will easily beat out a guy like DM.

The topics in that NY Post piece and this thread are adjacent to preference falsification, Havel’s greengrocer, Solzhenitsyn’s Live Not by Lies etc. so I’m linking to a thread that quotes some of these.

https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4382551-Live-not-by-lies-Solzhenitsyn-no-tambourines-involved?