Category: sex and gender issues

Jesse Singal’s op-ed in the NYT: A turning point in “affirmative care”?

February 25, 2026 • 9:30 am

For two reasons I think that Jesse Singal‘s long op-ed (really a “guest essay”) in today’s NYT will mark a turning point in public and professional attitudes towards “affirmative care.”  First, the NYT saw fit to publish a piece showing that many American medical associations have promoted “affirmative care” of gender-dysphoric adolescents, despite those associations knowing that there was little or no evidence for the efficacy of such care.  Indeed, it seems that some of those associations lied or dissimulated about it, all in the interest of pushing a “progressive” ideology. As we know, left-wing “progressives” have been in favor of immediately accepting a child’s self-identification as belonging to its non-natal gender, so that teachers, parents, therapists, and doctors have united to start such children on puberty blockers and, later, surgery and hormones.

The NYT, while it has published pieces questioning the evidence for affirmative care, has been reluctant to come out as strongly as Singal does in the essay. That America’s Paper of Record deems this worthy of publication is news in itself.

For a number of reasons, most concerned with recent evidence (e.g., the Cass Review), the rah-rah affirmative therapy treadmill is grinding to a halt.  As Singal relates, recently two American medical associations—the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) and now the powerful American Medical Association (AMA)—have admitted that we don’t know whether a gender-dyphoric child will “resolve” as gay or non-trans without medical intervention, and also that there should be no surgical intervention aimed at altering the gender of minors.

Singal has long called attention to these problems, and for his troubles he’s been branded a “transphobe,” shunned and blocked on social media.  There was even a petition to ban him from the site Bluesky, though, thank Ceiling Cat, it didn’t work.  Now, at long last, his views are getting a respectful airing, and society is coming to realize that the American zeal for “affirmative care”—not shared so much in Europe—is not only misguided but harmful.

The second reason is that the author ID says this about Singal:

Jesse Singal is writing a book about the debate over youth gender medicine in the United States and writes the newsletter Singal-Minded.

Although he’s already written one book. The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, this is his first book on gender medicine, and if it expands on the theme of this article, it will be a landmark work with the potential to create big changes in gender medicine and how we view it.  Yes, it’s true that gender ideologues will oppose the article and upcoming book, but they have long put ideology over science, a strategy that is a loser, as we know from the failures of creationism and intelligent design.

Click on the headlines to read the article at the NYT, or find it archived for free at this site.

A few excerpts:

It didn’t matter that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared and that they were more likely to have complex mental health conditions than those who had come to clinics in years earlier, complicating diagnosis. Advocates and health care organizations just dug in. As a billboard truck used by the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group GLAAD proclaimed in 2023, “The science is settled.” The Human Rights Campaign says on its website that “the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary youth and adults is clear.” Elsewhere, these and other groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, referred to these treatme

. . .The science doesn’t seem so settled after all, and it’s important to understand what happened here. The approach of left-of-center Americans and our institutions — to assume that when a scientific organization releases a policy statement on a hot-button issue, that the policy statement must be accurate — is a deeply naïve understanding of science, human nature and politics, and how they intersect.

At a time when more and more Americans are turning away from expert authority in favor of YouTube quacks and their ilk — and when our own government is pushing scientifically baseless policies on childhood vaccination and climate change — it’s vital that the organizations that represent mainstream science be open, honest and transparent about politically charged issues. If they aren’t, there’s simply no good reason to trust them.

And then Singal documents how organizations representing mainstream science and medicine haven’t been so trustworthy. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has been particularly  vocal—and clueless—in relentlessly pushing affirmative care:

A 2018 policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics provides a useful example of how these documents can go wrong. At one point, it argues that children who say they are trans “know their gender as clearly and as consistently as their developmentally equivalent peers,” an extreme exaggeration of what we know about this population. (A single study is cited.) The document also criticizes the “outdated approach in which a child’s gender-diverse assertions are held as ‘possibly true’ until an arbitrary age” — the A.A.P. was instructing clinicians to take 4- and 5-year-olds’ claims about their gender identities as certainly true. It’s understandable why the Cass reviewers scored this policy statement so abysmally, giving it 12 out of 100 possible points on “rigor of development” and six out of 100 on “applicability.”

Policy statements like this one can reflect the complex and opaque internal politics of an organization, rather than dispassionate scientific analysis. The journalist Aaron Sibarium’s reporting strongly suggests that a small group of A.A.P. members, many of whom were themselves youth gender medicine providers, played a disproportionate role in developing these guidelines.

Dr. Julia Mason, a 30-year member of the organization, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, with the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir, that the A.A.P. deferred to activist-clinicians and stonewalled the critics’ demands for a more rigorous approach. Dr. Sarah Palmer, an Indiana-based pediatrician, told me she recently left the A.A.P. after nearly 30 years because of this issue. “I’ve tried to engage and be a member and pay that huge fee every year,” she said. “They just stopped answering any questions.” This is unfortunate given that, as critics have noted, in many cases the A.A.P. document’s footnotes don’t even support the claims being made in the text.

In the face of a lack of studies supporting their preferred ideology, organizations like the American Psychological Association (APA) have waffled, weaseled, and dissimulated, sometimes making contradictory statements.  Here’s one example (the AMA has also changed its stand but wouldn’t give Singal an interview). Bolding is mine:

The A.P.A. presents a particularly striking case of why transparency is important. In 2024 it published what it hailed as a “groundbreaking policy supporting transgender, gender diverse, nonbinary individuals” that was specifically geared at fighting “misinformation” on that subject. But when I reached out to the group this month, it pointed me to a different document, a letter written by the group’s chief advocacy officer, Katherine McGuire, in September in response to a Federal Trade Commission request for comment on youth gender medicine.

The documents, separated by about a year and a half (and, perhaps as significantly, one presidential election), straightforwardly contradict each other. The A.P.A. in 2024 argued that there is a “comprehensive body of psychological and medical research supporting the positive impact of gender-affirming treatments” for individuals “across the life span.” But in 2025, the group argued that “psychologists do not make broad claims about treatment effectiveness.”

In 2024 the A.P.A. criticized those “mischaracterizing gender dysphoria as a manifestation of traumatic stress or neurodivergence.” In 2025 it cautioned that gender dysphoria diagnoses could be the result of “trauma-related presentations” rather than a trans identity and that “co-occurring mental health or neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorder) … may complicate or be mistaken for gender dysphoria.” It seems undeniable that the 2025 A.P.A. published what the 2024 A.P. A. considered to be “misinformation.” (“The 2024 policy statement and the 2025 F.T.C. letter are consistent,” said Ms. McGuire in an email, and “both documents reflect A.P.A.’s consistent commitment to evidence-based psychological care.”)

Behavior like this should anger anyone wedded to evidence-based medicine and science, especially because the APA simply lies when it says that its stand has been consistent all along. And the APA is not alone in its bad behavior.  Other organizations are digging in their heels, maintaining unsupportable positions in the face of counterevidence—all because of the ideology that people can change sex and we should believe them when they say they are really of a different sex than their natal one. This is wedded to the view that surgery and hormones designed to change gender have been proven to be safe.

I should add here that many adults who have transitioned are nevertheless happy with the outcomes of their treatments. But note that Singal’s forthcoming book is about youth gender medicine. This is the focus of the controversy, and few people (certainly not me) would deny adults the right to go ahead with surgery and hormones, though perhaps the public shouldn’t have to pay for it.

Singal’s conclusion, which I hope is the theme of his book, is short and sweet:

Should we trust the science? Sure, in theory — but only when the science in question has earned our trust through transparency and rigor.

  It looks like most medical organizations should not be trusted until they start speaking the truth.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ “woman”

February 20, 2026 • 11:45 am

Here Mo puts on a burqa and asserts that he’s a woman because he feels like one.  Of course this panel is triggering for “progressives,” and, though the strip is six years old and recycled, the artist says this:

A Friday Flashback from almost exactly six years ago. Lost a couple of patrons that day. Let’s see if it happens again.

I suspect it will!

What J. K. Rowling really thinks—in her own words

February 15, 2026 • 11:30 am

I am SO tired of people demonizing J. K. Rowling for being a transphobe and a bigot without ever having paid attention to what’s she said and written.  In fact, she’s sympathetic to trans people, but, like me, thinks that trans rights on occasion clash with the rights of biological women, and in those cases the rights of natal women can take precedence (this occurs in sports, prisons, and a few other circumstances). And, like Rowling, I have been somewhat demonized by taking a stand identical to hers (I was, for example, recently branded “anti-trans” by the head of our department’s DEI Committee, clearly by people who have ignored what I’ve written, too).

But I kvetch. This Substack post by Katie Pinns tries to un-demonize Rowling by actually showing us what she wrote.  Now you know that won’t change the minds of those like Emma Watson who have parted ways with Rowling on no good grounds: gender ideologues are impervious to the facts.  But at least Pinns has Rowling’s statements down in black and white, and I’ve added one important link. Click screenshot to read:

I’ll give some quotes from Pinns (indented) who in turn quotes Rowling (doubly indented). There are several pages worth, so check for yourself if you think I’m cherry-picking.

Few public figures attract as much noise as J.K. Rowling. For many people, the controversy around her name has become so thick with slogans, screenshots, and second‑hand outrage that her actual words have been buried under the reaction to them. People repeat that she “hates trans people,” or that women’s crisis centres are “transphobic,” without ever checking what she has actually said.

So this piece goes back to the source. Not the discourse. Not the memes. Her words.

Rowling’s central point is simple: sex is real, and it matters. She has said:

“If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased… It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”

This is the foundation of her position. She argues that biological sex shapes women’s lives, especially in relation to male violence, discrimination, and safeguarding. She also says explicitly that recognising sex does not erase or demean trans people.

Her concern is that if society stops acknowledging sex, women lose the language they need to describe their experiences. That’s not a fringe view; it’s the basis of decades of women’s rights advocacy.

Rowling has repeatedly said she supports trans people’s right to live free from discrimination:

“I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans.”

She also describes feeling “kinship” with trans people because both women and trans people are vulnerable to male violence. Her objection is not to trans people themselves, but to the idea that acknowledging sex is inherently hateful.

And, as Pinns notes, Rowling makes these pronouncements not to “erase” or demonize trans people, but to prompt a discussion about clashes of “rights” as well as whether there’s a need for affirmative care, including surgery, on people below an age of consent. As Pinns says, “Much of the public anger directed at her is based on claims she never made. Her insistence on correcting the record is part of why she continues to speak.”

There are more quotes from Rowling, and you can read her longer explanations of her views at places like this one.  She has of course been subject to a multitude of threats of violence, but she’s stood her ground, responding with humor and not a small amount of snark, which makes her enemies even madder.  Here’s a quote from her sober and revealing essay linked in the first sentence of this paragraph:

Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.

The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.

The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.

. . . .Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.

I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.

I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.

Finally, I’ll quote Pinns again:

Much of the backlash against Rowling spills over onto women’s crisis centres, rape support services, and safeguarding charities that maintain female-only spaces. These organisations often base their policies on:

– the reality of male violence

– the needs of traumatised women

– legal exemptions that allow single-sex services

– safeguarding obligations

Rowling’s position aligns with these long-standing principles. Calling such services “transphobic” erases the reasons they exist.

Despite the headlines, Rowling has not said that trans people shouldn’t exist, shouldn’t have rights, or are a threat. She has not argued against healthcare for trans adults. She has not advocated discrimination.

As the West starts to realize that it’s unfair for biological men, however they identify, to enter some women’s spaces, or to compete in women’s sports, or that there are dangers in “affirmative care” doled out to adolescents who aren’t of age, I’m hoping that Rowling will no longer be immediately dismissed by ideologues, but that her arguments will be taken seriously and answered.

Nature, ideologically captured, uses “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women”

February 13, 2026 • 9:30 am

Here’s a new article in Nature (click on the title screenshot below to read it); it’s about the dearth of information about the safety of drugs used by pregnant women. Except, to Nature, they refer not to “women” but to “pregnant people,” for in the article, that is about the only term that refers to women who are pregnant.  “Women” is used almost exclusively when it’s in quotations from others.

Here’s my count:

“Pregnant people”:  Used 41 times
“Women”:  Used 5 times, 4 of them in quotes from others

Clearly some bowdlerization is going on here.

The sad part of this article is that it has a lesson worth reading—a dearth of knowledge about how many drugs affect pregnant women—but it’s annoyingly peppered with politically correct and annoying usages. For example:

The first usage of the “pp” term is in fact in the subtitle, which I’ve highlighted below (again, click the article to read it):

Here’s a screenshot with “pregnant people” highlighted. This is only a small sample of the article:

Need I say more? What this means is that Nature is clearly truckling to the language adopted by extreme gender activists, who consider trans-identified men as “women”.  Ergo, the words “pregnant women” are seen as offensive, because “women” include trans-idenfied men who can’t have babies. Voilà:  “pregnant people.” Also, as reader Coel says below, “The main problem is trans-IDing women, aka ‘trans men’, who, being women, can get pregnant, but who they regard as ‘men’. Hence ‘pregnant women’ would exclude them, and so amount to erasure of and thus genocide of those ‘trans men’ who are indeed pregnant.”

Here are the five uses of the word “women”, all but the last quotes from other authors (they can’t sanitize other people’s words):

 

Note that the last usage of woman, not in quotes, is required because they are referring to females who are not pregnant. But the journal still slipped up: they could have used “people with uteruses”, or, like The Lancet, “bodies with vaginas”:

Conclusion: Nature has been ideologically captured. But we already knew that, didn’t we?

The journal should be ashamed of itself.

 

h/t: Schnoid

Another critique of Agustín Fuentes’s claim of a sex spectrum in humans and other species

February 1, 2026 • 11:20 am

Although the view that sex is a spectrum, and that there are more than two biological sexes in humans and other species, is still prevalent among the woke, others are realizing that sex in humans (and nearly every other species of plant and animal) is indeed a binary, with a tiny fraction of exceptions in humans. These include individuals with “differences in sex determination” (DSD) and almost nonexistent hermaphrodites. Estimates of exceptions in our species range from 0.02% to 0.005%.

The rise of the “sex is a spectrum” notion is due solely to the rise of gender activism and to people who identify as nonbinary or transgender.  But gender is not the same thing as biological sex: the former is a subjective way of feeling, while the latter is an objective fact of biology based on a binary of gamete types.

I personally don’t care if someone identifies as a member of a nonstandard gender, but I do care when people like Steve Novella, who should know better, argue that biological sex is not a binary but a spectrum. In fact, there are far more people born with more or fewer than 20 fingers and toes than are born as true intersexes, yet we do not say that “digit number in humans is a spectrum.”

It’s a shame that many of those who claim that sex is a spectrum are biologists who recognize the sex binary and its many consequences, like sexual selection. The misguided folks include the three main scientific societies studying evolution, who issued a statement that biological sex was a spectrum, and further that this was a consensus view. (Their original statement is archived here.) The societies then took down their claim when other biologists pointed out its inanity (see here, here, and here). And it’s not only biologists who recognize the ideology behind the claim that sex is a spectrum; the public does, too.  NBC News reported this in 2023 (note the conflation of sex and gender):

A new national poll from PRRI finds Americans’ views on gender identity, pronoun use and teaching about same-sex relationships in school deeply divided by party affiliation, age and religion.

Overall, 65% of all Americans believe there are only two gender identities, while 34% disagree and say there are many gender identities.

But inside those numbers are sharp differences. Fully 90% of Republicans say there are just two genders, versus 66% of independents and 44% of Democrats who believe the same

Sadly, if you’re on the side of truth in this debate, at least as far as the number of sexes go, you’re on the side of Republicans. So it goes. Further, Americans and sports organizations themselves are increasingly adopting the views that trans-identified men (“transwomen,” as they’re sometimes called) should not compete in sports against biological women. This is from a 2025 Gallup poll.

Sixty-nine percent of U.S. adults continue to believe that transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth sex, and 66% of Americans say a person’s birth sex rather than gender identity should be listed on government documents such as passports or driver’s licenses.

Thus, although wokeness is like a barbed porcupine quill: easy to go inside you but hard to remove, I’m pretty confident that the claim of a biological sex spectrum will eventually decline even more. But there are still some ideologues who twist and misrepresent the facts to argue that there are more than two sexes. (The argument centers on humans, of course.)  One of these is Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes, who has written several papers and a recent book arguing for the human sex spectrum. I’ve pushed back on his arguments many times (see here), and wrote a short review of his book Sex is a Spectrum, a book that should be read with a beaker of Pepto-Bismol by your side. There’s another and better critical review of Fuentes’s book by Tomas Bogardus, here,  which Bogardus has turned into his own new book, The Nature of the Sexes: Why Biology Matters.

This post is just to highlight another critical review of Fuentes’s book and his views on sex, one written by Alexander Riley and appearing at Compact. You can get to a paywalled version by clicking on the title below, but a reader sent me a transcript, and I’ll quote briefly from that below.

A few quotes (indented). I don’t know how readers can access the whole review without subscribing:

Fuentes, an anthropologist who has extensively studied macaques, begins with a primer on the evolution of sexual reproduction in life on the planet. To show how “interesting” sex is, he offers the example of the bluehead wrasse, a fish species in which females can turn into males in given ecologies. The example, he says, is “not that weird” in biology.

But the reality is that species like this one most definitely are weird, not only in the animal kingdom, but even among fish, who are among the most sexually fluid animals. Among fish, the number of species that are sexually fluid in this way is perhaps around 500 … unless you know that there are approximately 34,000 known fish species. In other words, even in the most sexually fluid animals, transition between male and female by one individual can happen in only 1.5 percent of the total species. What Fuentes describes as “not that weird” is certainly highly unusual. [JAC: note that switching from male to female or vice versa does not negate the sex binary.]

This sleight of hand is typical of Fuentes’s handling of evidence. He attacks a classic argument in evolutionary biology that differences in male and female gametes (sperm an eggs, respectively) explain many other differences between the two sexes. In short, because eggs are much costlier to make than sperm, females have evolved to invest more energy in the reproductive chances of each gamete compared to males. This bare fact of the gamete difference means, according to the Bateman-Trivers principle, males and females typically develop different mating strategies and have different physical and behavioral profiles.

The distortion below is typical of ideologues who promote Fausto-Sterling’s data even when they know it’s incorrect:

Fuentes notes that what he calls “3G human males and females,” that is, those individuals who are unambiguously male or female in their genitalia, their gonads (the gland/organ that produces either male or female gametes), and genes, do not make up 100 percent of human individuals. He goes on to suggest that at least 1 percent of humans, and perhaps more, do not fit the 3G categories. This is a claim unsupported by the facts. The citation he links to this claim is an article by biology and gender studies professor Anne Fausto-Sterling. The claim made by Fausto-Sterling about the percentage of those who are intersex has been thoroughly debunked. She includes a number of conditions in her category of intersex (or non-3G) that are widely recognized as not legitimately so classified. One such condition (Late Onset Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, or LOCAH, a hormonal disorder) makes up fully 90 percent of Fausto-Sterling’s “intersex” category. Individuals with LOCAH are easily classed as either male or female according to Fuentes’ 3Gs, and nearly all of them are able to participate in reproduction as normal for their sex. The percentage of those who are actually outside 3G male or female classes is likely around 0.02% percent, which means that 9,998 out of every 10,000 humans are in those two groups.

What’s below shows that trans-identified men do not become equivalent to biological women when they undergo medical transition:

Transwomen are much more likely to exhibit behaviors of sexual violence and aggression than women. A 2011 study showed clearly that even male-to-female transsexuals who had undergone full surgical transition, and who therefore had undergone hormone therapy to try to approximate female hormonal biology, still showed rates of violent crime and sexual aggression comparable to biological males. They were almost twenty times more likely to be convicted of a violent offense than the typical female subject. This is reason enough to keep individuals who have male hormonal biology out of spaces in which they interact closely with semi-clad girls and women.

And Riley’s conclusion:

The fact that Fuentes can make such ill-founded claims without fearing serious pushback is an indication of how captured academic culture is by the ideology behind this book. A healthy academic culture would not so easily acquiesce to political rhetoric masquerading as science.

Yes, anthropology has been captured—especially cultural anthropology—and, as I said, even some biologists have gone to the Dark Side. I have nothing but contempt and pity for those who know that there are two sexes but twist and mangle the facts to conform to the woke contention that the sexes can be made interchangeable. But I should add the usual caveat that, except for a few exceptions like sports and prisons, transgender people whould be given the same rights as everyone else.

Another sign of people rejecting the “sex is a spectrum” claim is that Fuentes’s book didn’t sell well. Despite coming out less than a year ago. it’s now #301,447 on Amazon’s sales list, and has only 25 customer ratings, totaling 3.8 out of 5 stars. It didn’t exactly fly off the shelves.

Here are two Amazon reviews by savvy readers (note: none of the reviews on Amazon are by me):

 

Michael Shermer interviewed on WNYC, sandbagged on the issue of binary sex

January 29, 2026 • 10:30 am

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.

 

This is why Democrats are in trouble

January 15, 2026 • 9:30 am

Here we have a five-minute video that, I think, goes some way towards understanding why the Democrats lost the last Presidential election and have dropped in public approval to the lowest point in several decades. The graph below, which appears in The Liberal Patriot’s post “Why is Democratic Favorability at a 25-year Low?“, shows that both parties have fallen in ratings since 2000,, but as of mid-2025 Democrats have done worse than Republicans. (Note that the latest data might not correspond to this.) But there’s enough unfavorability of “our” party that Democratic strategist David Plouffe argues in today’s NYT that “To win everywhere, Democrats must change everything” (op-ed archived here).

UPDATE: Some more recent data:

Now I’m no political pundit, but I’m not the only person to suggest that the wokeness of the Democratic party as espoused by its more vocal “progressive” wing is hurting the party as a whole. The implicit call for open borders, the explicit claim that biological sex is simply the way one identifies rather than a physical reality (a stand that conflates gender and reality), and the Kendi-an viewpoint criticized in John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism—all of this seems to me to turn off centrist voters or the more sensible Republicans who aren’t firm MAGA-its.

The video below, which I found on YouTube after someone sent me a clip, instantiates the kind of view that alienates reasonable people.  Here we have Dr. Nisha Verma refusing to admit that men cannot get pregnant. She is clearly conflating gender (sex-identification) with biological sex, which involves the ability to produce either large, immobile gametes (females) or small mobile ones (males).  Only biological women can get pregnant, for they have the reproductive apparatus evolved to produce eggs and carry fetuses. (Note that removing that apparatus, as during a hysterectomy, does not suddenly change a female into a male).

This is part of a Senate hearing on the safety of abortion medication.  AcademyHealth gives Dr. Verma’s credentials this way:

Dr. Nisha Verma is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and complex family planning subspecialist. She currently serves as Senior Advisor for Reproductive Health Policy & Advocacy at ACOG. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Emory University School of Medicine and provides clinical care in Georgia and Maryland. She has testified in front of Congress on the harms of abortion restrictions and currently has a research grant to explore the impact of Georgia’s six-week abortion ban on people with high-risk pregnancies in the state. Dr. Verma has traveled the country training physicians on building evidence-based skills for effective conversations about abortion and has spearheaded ACOG efforts to support physicians and their institutions post-Dobbs.

Take five minutes to hear Verma’s masterpiece of equivocation as Hawley drills into her asking if men can get pregnant. Verma refuses to answer the question with a straightforward “no,” because she doesn’t want to get into trouble by denying that trans-identified women (also known as “trans men”) count as what most people think of as “men”, and thus some “men” can get pregnant.  It’s painful to watch Verma squirm and wriggle, all because she wants to equate “identity” with biological reality. Hawley even gives her an opening, referring not just to “men,” but biological men. If you use the biological construal, then of course “men” cannot get pregnant. But Verna still won’t even answer that unambiguous question, accusing Hawley of trying to be “polarizing”. Perhaps he is, but he is on the right side in this exchange.

This question is a byproduct of Hawley trying to emphasize the dangers of medications designed to produce abortion (“abortifacients” like mifepristone and misoprostol).  These are generally quite safe, which is why they’re widely prescribed. And, as someone who’s pro-choice, I have no problem with these drugs, and probably agree with Verma on this issue.  Hawley is trying, however, to attack her credibility by trying to pin her down on the biological definition of “woman.” She comes off looking ideological rather than “science based.”

Verma would have been much better off had she answered this way:

“If one adheres to the biological definition of ‘woman’ and ‘man,” involving reproductive systems, then no, men cannot get pregnant. Some people believe, however, that biological women who identify as men, called ‘trans men’ or ‘trans-identified women’, also count as ‘men.’ If you have that construal, which is really gender-based and not biology-based, then yes, some people who identify as ‘men’ can get pregnant.”

But she can’t answer that way because even saying this palpable truth is enough to get you deemed a “transphobe” by “progressives”. (I speak here from personal experience.)

I’ll add that self-identification equates to biological reality only when sex is involved. As Rebecca Tuvel found to her dismay, progressives won’t allow you to identify as a member of a race or ethnic group different from your natal group. Nor can you do it with age, or height, or anything else. I am still mysified why equating self-identity with biological reality is possible only when sex is at issue, not age, race, or species.

But I digress. Listen to Verma embarrassing herself below. This is what happens when you equate sex with gender, and I urge fellow scientists not to conflate the terms this way, for the public will not be fooled.

Here are the YouTube notes:

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO): “Can men get pregnant?”

Dr. Nisha Verma: “I’m not really sure what the goal of the question is.”
Hawley: “The goal is just to establish a biological reality. You said just a moment ago that science and evidence should control, not politics. So, let’s test that. Can men get pregnant?”
Dr. Verma: “I take care of people with many identities…I’m also someone here to represent the complex experiences of my patients. I don’t think polarized language or questions serve that goal…
” Hawley: “It is not polarizing to say that there is a scientific difference between men and women…It is not polarizing to say that women are a biological reality and should be treated and protected as such.”

Full Senate hearing here: https://www.c-span.org/event/senate-c…

After I wrote this, I asked Emma Hilton if she’d seen the video and of course she had tweeted about it.  Emma’s a bit more charitable than I, but is clear-eyed about Verma’s moment in the spotlight.  Coincidentally, both of us confected what Verma should have said. I still have no idea if Verma really believes what she says, or is playing to the progressive public.