Malcolm Gladwell Reaches His Tipping Point on Trans Athletes

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, September 03, 2025

 

It’s rather amazing what can be said out loud, into a microphone, once the political winds change.

 

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for the New Yorker and one of those rare authors who shaped his own oft-imitated genre. Starting with The Tipping Point, Gladwell used recent academic research to coin phrases and introduce concepts in psychology and sociology into popular culture. (How many people knew he started at the American Spectator?)

 

Earlier this week, Gladwell appeared on The Real Science of Sport podcast, a program hosted by sports scientist professor Ross Tucker and sports journalist Mike Finch. Gladwell made the remarkable confession that when it comes to advocates of athletes born male participating in women’s sports, he found their arguments unconvincing for a long time — but only felt comfortable publicly saying so recently:

 

Ross Tucker: Well, Malcolm chaired a session at the Sloan conference. That’s a big event held every year at MIT in Boston. I think it was in 2022. I lose track of time, but he was the chairperson, and I was on a panel of three or four. I forget exactly how many, but—

 

Malcolm Gladwell: They stacked the panel. They stacked against you, Ross. They put a trans athlete and a trans advocate and you on the panel and I was the moderator. And it was one of those strange situations where I my suspicion is that 90 percent of the people in the audience were on your side, but 5 percent of the audience was willing to admit it.

 

Tucker: My recollection of it is that everything I said was met with deathly silence, and everything the other two said got cheered.

 

Gladwell: Well, but the cheers were very — I mean I think there was a hardcore of people who were ideologically committed to the position, but the idea that that — I mean there’s many interesting things to say about that conversation. One was that it was a particular moment which has passed. If we did a replay of that exact panel at the Sloan conference this coming March, it runs in exactly the opposite direction.

 

And it would be, I suspect, near unanimity in the room that trans athletes have no place in in the female category. I don’t think there’s any question. I just think it was a strange — I mean I felt I mean I was — the reason I’m ashamed of my performance of that panel [is] because I share your position 100 percent, and I was cowed. The idea of saying anything on this issue — I was in I believe in retrospect — in a dishonest way. I was . . . I was objective in a dishonest way.

 

I let a lot of real howlers pass without comment because I didn’t — and I said to you in an email, there was that moment when — and I forgotten her name she’s wonderful, sorry, I’ve forgotten their name, a very thoughtful person.

 

They were the trans athlete on the panel and at one point they turned to you, Ross, and they said, “Ross, you have to let us win.” And it was at that moment that I realized this position has gone, this argument has gone to the furthest extreme. What the trans movement is not asking for — they’re not asking for, you know, a place at the table. They’re not asking to be treated with respect and dignity. What they’re asking is for no one to question the considerable physical, physiological advantage they bring to the sport, and no one to question — if they’re gonna win these races by five seconds, suck it up! That’s what they were asking, right?

 

Gladwell continues:

 

If a really good Caster Semanya (South African middle-distance runner) comes along, who can run 147, what they’re saying is you just have to like — so they win by ten meters. So, they win by 15. Well, I mean, you would win by almost 100 meters, right? What they’re saying is you should have to live with that. And that when I heard that, I was like, “This is nuts.” And yet I didn’t say anything.

 

Ross Tucker: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s true. I would say that that conversation was the first indications of where the argument was evolving. Because if that had happened a year before that, we would have been debating whether there even was male advantage. So, by the time we sat on that stage in Boston, the evolution of the argument had already happened to the point that people like Joanna Harper and Katie Barnes were arguing that, “Hey, there might be male advantage, but that’s fine.” We just have to accept it. That’s what I think came out there, and Joanna Harper for instance, had denied the existence of advantage, and by Boston, had started to argue for “it’s not meaningful advantage.” In other words, we can still have a competitive race.

 

[I’ve made light edits to the transcript above for clarity, removing “uhs” and repeated words, etc.]

 

In 2005, Time magazine named Gladwell in its list of the world’s 100 most influential people. Foreign Policy magazine ranked him on its Top 100 Global Thinkers lists in 2009 and 2010, and Newsweek chose him for the Top 10 New Thought Leaders of the Decade.

 

The Tipping Point was the fifth best-selling nonfiction book of the decade, according to Barnes & Noble. Gladwell has seven New York Times bestsellers, more than 23 million copies sold. He’s an extremely in-demand public speaker, with a speaking fee between $200,000 and $300,000.

 

You have to look hard to find a guy with a better, higher, or more stable perch in the American cultural elite than Gladwell. (In this case, “American cultural elite” isn’t a sneer, it’s just descriptive.)

 

I mention all of Gladwell’s honors and praises and status to point out that even this guy was afraid to say what he really thought, for fear of getting “canceled.”

 

If 90 percent of the public feels a certain way, but only 5 percent are willing to say so, doesn’t that seem like a formula for consequential bad decisions? Particularly if you believe in “the wisdom of crowds.”

 

Are there other current issues where 90 percent of the public feels a certain way, but only 5 percent are willing to say so, for fear of social ostracization and dire professional consequences? If so, wouldn’t we all be better off if we all said what we thought? Or is the ideological spectrum now so large, and the Overton Window now so wide open, that if we did, we’d all be horrified by what our fellow citizens actually thought?

 

Does the combination of anonymity and an audience provided by social media indicate that a lot of taboo thoughts — hateful, racist, sexist, pornographic, unjust, insane, etc. — run through people’s minds frequently, but are not expressed because of fear of social ostracization? If that’s the case, are we sure we want everyone expressing every thought they have?

 

A few days ago, economist and former Bloomberg Opinion columnist Noah Smith wrote about the social-media platform Bluesky, which is full of ardent progressives — often refugees from Elon Musk-era Twitter/X — doomscrolling and raging at each other, with minimal influence on the political culture at large:

 

[I] feel like Bluesky is a microcosm for all of American liberalism right now. The entire left-of-center became defined by cancel culture. Now the spaces where that culture exists are shrinking under external attack, but everyone on the left just stays within those shrinking spaces.

 

There was this big idea that social media was this infinitely powerful tool that allowed a small number of progressives to shame a huge number of Americans into accepting their values. For a decade it seemed to be working. But it overreached and collapsed. . . .

 

Now the spaces where 2010s-style progressive cancel culture still works are shrinking. It still works within certain universities, NGOs, or online spaces. So most of the libs stick within those spaces, canceling each other because there’s no one else to cancel.

 

Meanwhile, Trump and the rightists are taking over the country with relatively little opposition, because progressives have basically removed themselves from the equation. They’re screaming “transphobe” and “racist” at each other in little rubber rooms.

 

If you’re a conservative, reading that may make you want to react like Meg Ryan in the diner scene in When Harry Met Sally. Or you may wonder if Smith’s vision of the right’s ongoing far-reaching triumph is entirely accurate. Trump’s agenda keeps running into roadblocks, or at least speed bumps, in the courts. Congressional Republicans remain about as easily unified as a herd of cats. Trump’s approval rating is pretty “meh,” the 2025 elections look pretty good for Democrats, and while it’s early, the 2026 midterms don’t look like smooth sailing for Trump and the GOP. The fact that academia is in a panic and feels besieged doesn’t necessarily mean that left-wing indoctrination is ending.

 

Back in 2014, the New York Times experimented with making its opinion-columnists subscriber-only on the website, while keeping much of the rest of the newspaper accessible for free. For those of us who were not big fans of Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein, Jamelle Bouie, etc., it was beautiful; the rest of the paper was easily accessible for free, while the guys we wanted to hear from the least were safely walled off where their words would be much less widely read and influential. (Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens were regrettable collateral damage.) Unsurprisingly, a system where the op-ed columns reached considerably fewer readers than the rest of the paper was not universally beloved, and within a few years, almost all the Times’ content was behind the paywall.

 

Rush Limbaugh used to joke that after the final victory of conservatism, the right should keep some liberals around to ensure no one forgot what they believed and how harmful their ideas were. “So you will never forget what these people were like . . . keep one Marxist and two liberals on the staff of every university so you can show your children . . . living fossils. Living fossils.”

 

If the goal is to keep progressives walled off from the rest of society, minimally influential among those who don’t already agree with them, and arguing amongst themselves about who’s the purest, Bluesky is a masterpiece.

 

Progressives, including advocates for athletes born male participating in women’s sports, could attempt to convince the broader public, if they wanted to, but they would have to engage with those who disagree with respect, and attempt to persuade, not shame, demonize, mock, or sneer. And even before the question of whether they could do that . . . how many progressives actually want to do that?

 

ADDENDUM: Great news, everyone. President Trump emphasizes he doesn’t want anything in return from China in exchange for keeping the current levels of student visas for Chinese citizens at 300,000 per year for the next few years. As Mark Krikorian writes, “This is a hill worth dying on — the mass admission of students from communist China is a threat to the United States, stupidly encouraged by our government, business, and academia. This is a Boris-Johnson-level mistake.”