Yesterday we were talking about Michael Shermer’s new book on Truth, but only insofar as I disagreed with his podcast characterization of free will. Now, however, while promoting his book on the radio, Shermer encountered some misleading “progressivism” about sex from one of public radio’s most well-known announcers and on NPR’s biggest station: Brian Leher on WNYC in New York. You can read about what happened by clicking on the sceenshot below at BROADview News. And below that you can hear the whole 35-minute interview of Shermer by Lehrer by clicking on the black screenshot and then on the “listen” arrow. You might want to start about halfway in (see below).
First, some excerpts from the article:
Like so many liberals, I grew up with NPR as my soundtrack: BJ Leiderman’s thumping theme songs in the background, or the soothing voice of the late great Susan Stamberg. I loved NPR.
It became difficult to listen to starting in 2016, as the mission changed from reporting to making sure that we all had the same opinion. Then, once Katie Herzog mentioned a game in which you turn NPR on at random times and see if they’re talking about race, NPR started to seem like a joke. But also: it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny when they reported on gender—because they often reported activist talking points about the medical interventions as facts, and labeled truths as disinformation.
We’ve seen shifts in other mainstream media outlets, even a kind of two-steps-forward, one-step-back movement in The New York Times’ reporting on gender. But NPR is more dug in than ever. I assume this is in reaction to the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. To admit that they were so biased that they didn’t deserve public funding was to retire their pitch for more funding from listeners—although what they should have done was pivot, to do a better job and argue that they deserved the funding.
All this is background for what happened yesterday on WNYC, the most-listened-to public radio station in the country. Journalist Brian Lehrer has hosted a weekday news call-in show for some 35 years, and was widely admired as one of the best out there—fair-minded and willing to engage with different voices. Like many others in the media, he changed.
You can see the change when “Mabel” calls in at 16:23. Mabel apparently didn’t tell the call screener what she wanted to say on the air, because she actually got through to the broadcast. Mabel then emphasized that there were two biological sexes and members of one cannot become members of the other. As you’ll hear, Lehrer pushed back, saying that biological sex can be changed through “transgender’ hormones and surgery. (Lehrer apoparently doesn’t know the difference between sex and gender.) More from the article:
Mabel likely didn’t tell the screener what she really wanted to say, because it started with how America is becoming a third-world country and complaints about the lack of affordable housing. But then she said “The Democratic Party has let me down,” because they’ve also been untruthful. “Now they’re saying that men can become women and I feel that you are just discounting women as a species,” she said. Dems were “trying to make us believe that you can turn a male into a female.” She added that women were more than their anatomy; they were also shaped by their experiences.
That last part allowed Lehrer to make his case that “trans women would say they had their experience of being a woman before they had any hormone replacement therapy or surgery.” Amazingly, he added: “Maybe you’re just biased against a segment of society who you don’t like.”
Actually, you don’t have the experience of being a woman before you transition; you have the feeling that you are a woman and want to change aspects of your body to conform to that. More:
This was absolutely shocking—to hear Brian Lehrer, the former Voice of Reason, tell a caller that because she feels lied to about this issue she’s hateful was astonishing, and just incredibly unprofessional.
Shermer, on the other hand, handled it like a champ. He went into the difference between subjective truths—I feel like I was born in the wrong body—and objective ones: we cannot change sex, which is binary and based on gametes. Shermer said he worried about the future of the Democratic Party because it cannot distinguish between objective and subjective truths.
Lehrer himself seemed to be in shock, having hermetically sealed his studio to protect against any facts that interrupted the narrative he’d constructed. “This is what the right wing says, that it’s gender ideology,” he retorted. WNYC has worked hard to exclude liberal dissident voices, which has allowed them to maintain that left/right framing.
But Shermer pushed on. He explained the difference between the vanishingly rare occurrence of childhood-onset gender dysphoria and rapid-onset, the theory of social contagion, the poor evidence base, the shift in several European countries. “The facts matter,” he said.
Lehrer: “It sounds like you’re being very dismissive.” He said doctors would disagree that you can’t change sex, or that sex is binary. And finally, when Shermer came back with reasonable answers, Lehrer said: “You’re here supposedly representing science.” That is: Lehrer believed Shermer had lost all credibility by applying the same lens to youth gender medicine that he applied to everything else.
Most shocking about this whole exchange was what happened after it ended. Lehrer invited people who were offended to call in. After Shermer was gone! “Equal time,” he said—as if they’d ever given a minute to any of us wanting to share another side of the story.
And so, the parents and grandparents and uncles of trans kids rang up. . . .
Shermer did handle it like a champ, acknowledging that biology is binary but gender is an “internal, subjective state.” If you want to just hear the relevant exchange, start the podcast at 16:23.
At the end of the piece, author Lisa Davis gives the emails of the segment’s producers in case readers or listeners want to write them, but you can go to the site above and complain if you wish. Regardless, Lehrer shows how fully NPR has bought into the theory that humans can change from one sex into another. Shermer does a great job correcting Lehrer, emphasizing that gender is an internal, subjective state and, as far as biological sex goes, we are not clownfish: humans can’t change from one sex to another.
“Ideological subversion [..] or psychological warfare [..] change(s) the perception of reality [..] to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country. It’s a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow [..] ”
-Yuri Bezmenov
Interview
1983 or 1984
Many copies and excerpts available, e.g this excerpt :
https://youtu.be/0fx1BYwCwCI?si=Bqd5UmnnBlRMxrGq
One of the people on X commenting about the Shermer interview wrote:
It’s another illustration of an inability to distinguish the subjective from the objective.
I heard the Shermer interview & couldn’t believe what a buffoon Lehrer sounded like. (I was relieved, however, to look him up & confirm he was no relation to Jim Lehrer, a lovely man we knew.) Anyway, re the “parents of Trans-children” comment, here’s a very good interview on this very topic with Helen Joyce, a personal hero of mine on this issue with whom we have mutual good friends. She gives another perspective on the views of parents: https://x.com/LozzaFox/status/1887027151255257119
And here’s another good one by Mia Hughes, on the whole social contagion aspect: https://x.com/_CryMiaRiver/status/2015893450093109739
Thank you! And even after transition, a person may know what it’s like to be treated as a woman, but how do they know whether they actually feel like a woman, and how would we know if they do?
NPR is dead to me.
I also enjoyed listening to Susan Stamberg.
But I agree with Michael Schermer. Wish he had stayed with Sci Am as a voice for reason.
They more or less fired him; he had no ability to stay on–as I understand it.
This issue is like the reverse of a lever for the Democratic Party. A lever is a force multiplier, you apply force to it and you get 10x output for example.
In social and political policy, a good lever is something that requires a certain effort (but not unreasonable), has broad support, and results in a much greater societal benefit. The GI Bill or Title IX are good examples of this.
With this trans issue, the Democrats seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time and political capital on an issue that affects a very small portion of the population, and has led it into circumstances where Democratic leaning medical professionals claim publicly that men can have babies. A position that sounds insane to the most of the population.
So, a lot of effort for almost no payoff. Is there no one at the party doing these kind of cost/benefit calculations?
Makes one wonder how many true believers, cowards, and personal opportunists populate the party’s leadership and consultant ranks. On a number of issues, the leadership no longer represents the majority of even its own voters—and still they vote.
The Democrats seem to be focusing on avoiding the trans topic by arguing that the Republicans are “spending an inordinate amount of time and capital on an issue that effects a very small proportion of the population” and quickly changing the discussion to something else which is presumably more important. Nothing to see here.
Of course, if it’s such a silly, pointless, minor distraction which nobody serious really cares about then they ought to be fine with just letting the Republicans do whatever they want with it. Turns out that no, it’s a molehill they’re willing to die on.
“It’s a molehill they’re willing to die on.”
Perfect. Thank you!
Respectfully disagree. Nobody knew what trans was until very recently. The thought of a young man claiming to be a young woman and insisting being on the girls swim team would have been met just a few years ago with a) flat refusal and b) a suggestion that he needs some kind of counseling.
The entire pro-trans insanity and attendant denial of reality emerged like a slimy creature entirely from the bowels of the far left. The Republicans attention to this is therefore a response, and a response that happens to track with what most Americans think. None of us were really cheering the “bravery” of a giant young man pummeling young women on a sports field.
The GOP has their own monsters, but this one is entirely on the Left.
Au contraire: trans-activism negatively affects just about everyone, especially women and gay kids…and the Democrats don’t care. (I know what you meant though.)
I was virtually a charter sustaining subscriber to NPR and listened to WNYC here in NYC for decades. I gave up on it years ago, and their getting rid of Leonard Lopate was the last straw. Now I have not supported or listened to NPR stations for decades and I experience no loss in abstaining. Thank you for reinforcing my sense that my opinion was the correct one.
The false narrative about being able to literally change sex and so on had its day, and it was growing by scaring into silence the majority of dissenting voices, which unfortunately forced admixture between the middle left and the right. But that narrative is being walked back in our institutions whether NPR likes it or not. This might blow up on them. We shall see.
I have noticed that NPR has changed since they lost federal funding. It’s like they are less inhibited, not that they were very inhibited before. I play it mainly when working in the basement shop, but I so much miss Car Talk and Lake Wobegon! They still do Science Friday, though.
On the harm the commitment to trans issues has done to the Democratic Party, compare also the harm the commitment has done to the Scottish National Party. It is still apparently incapable of shedding its commitment to putting men who identify as women into women’s prisons.
Seems pretty clear that woke ideology isn’t even close to being vanquished.
I used to listen to Brian Lehrer every single day. But what was once an evenhanded informative news and culture program that really did cater to all sides of an issue (especially in local news) became a mouthpiece and champion for every progressive issue that made its way down the pike. At a certain point I no longer felt that I was being informed. I felt that I was the recipient of propaganda. It’s very sad, but foreseeable. I grew up on NPR and cannot for the life of me envision donating to them ever again. At least PBS still has some good stuff. Though the word “some” is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence.
Brian Lehrer is employed by WNYC, not NPR.
Yes, I fixed that so there’s no confusion. But WNYC is an affiliate and member station of NPR.