Why Malcolm Gladwell’s trans retraction won’t ever be enough: If you don’t speak when it counts then it will always be too late (Victoria Smith, 8 September, 2025, The Critic)
It’s not just that it’s far too late. It’s that Gladwell has not changed his mind at all. He — the same, I would suggest, as many a “sceptical” male comic, “curious” journalist or writer of “feminist” dystopian fiction — always knew that trans activist claims were nonsense. Indeed, the claims are so internally incoherent — sex is pure guesswork but some kids will die if they go through the “wrong” puberty — that I don’t think trans activists believe them, either. The damage done by trans activism is not just direct, in terms of harms to gender non-conforming children, same-sex attracted adults and women seeking female-only spaces. It has also changed the way many of us see those we thought of as, if not allies, then essentially principled people.
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.
Gladwell now admits that when he participated in a 2022 discussion on male people participating in women’s sports, “I heard that and thought, ‘This is nuts,’ and yet I didn’t say anything”. He claims to have been “cowed”. I get that. Everyone has something to fear in a world where you can be torn to pieces for simply saying sex matters. But this world only came into being because people who agreed with feminists spent years refusing to say so. We were scared, too, and we would have had far less to be afraid of had we had some support.
Like many a terf, I have had years of people mistakenly believing that they can “support” me by telling me in private that they agree with me, even if in public they say the opposite. This is not support. While I can empathise with being afraid, all too often the reasons given for “not being able” to speak up rest on the assumption that those of us who do are blessed with some form of inferiority which mitigates the costs. Unlike people who have reputations to protect, friends they don’t wish to offend, concerns about playing into the hands of the far-right, women like me are apparently unimportant, insensitive and politically reckless. It’s only right that we should serve as cannon fodder in the gender wars, clearing the way for the “good” people to breeze in later.