What’s With Donald Trump’s Man Jokes?

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Jonah walks into a Gay Jokes Anonymous meeting.

 

Hi. My name is Jonah.

 

A half dozen middle-aged men and one big-haired woman on folding chairs say in unison: “Hi, Jonah.”

 

It’s been one month since I made a gay joke.

 

Smattering of applause. “Way to go, Jonah!”

 

Many of you know that I’m a writer and a pundit. That’s why I started attending these meetings. I mean, I have friends who work on Wall Street, and they say they can still use Andrew Dice Clay material …

 

“Dice! Yeah!”

 

Settle down, Phil … But in my line of work, falling off the wagon even once can cost you everything.

 

Nods all around.

 

When I was younger, I made a lot of gay jokes. I was never “anti-gay,” I just thought the jokes were funny. I mean, some of the best gay-joke tellers are gay themselves. That seemed unfair. But the rules are the rules. And besides, we still had schlong jokes.

 

But here’s the thing. Donald Trump is making it really hard.

 

“That’s what he said!” Phil yells, turning left and right for an unrequited high-five.

 

I mean, it was bad enough when he made “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People his campaign anthem and started dancing like he was making the “middle-out” scene from Silicon Valley into a musical. I mean, what is that? I half expected them to come out with a MAGA-branded Shake-Weight.

 

“So ghey!”

 

Sam!

 

“What? I did it with the gh- spelling!”

 

Anyway, if you follow politics, you’ve probably seen how Trump is out there almost every day talking about men’s asses, especially this Ohio senator, Jon Husted. I mean, last night he said … here, I have it on my phone:

 

But I looked at his ass, and then I looked at his legs. I said, “His ass, s–t, it’s like, it’s like a pile of muscle.” Then I looked at his legs, and I said, “Man, his feet are big.” Then I looked at his shoulders, and I tapped him on the shoulder, and it actually hurt my hand. He’s like a piece of steel. I said, “This guy’s a monster!”

 

Several men in the group clench their teeth. One bites a knuckle. Another mutters, “Don’t drop the soap, Senator!” The big-haired lady can’t stop laughing.

 

This guy is killing me. And this is like the third or fourth time he has talked about this Husted guy. Get a room already, you know? And it’s not just him. At a Coast Guard Academy graduation, Trump talked about one graduate who attracted his presidential gaze to the point where I thought he might invite him to Netflix and chill while watching a Judy Garland documentary.

 

Crap, I’m gonna lose my one-month chip for that.

 

“It’s OK, Jonah. This is a safe place.”

 

I mean, even the New York Times is like, “What the hell?”

 

I guess my real problem is, I don’t know what the rules are anymore. Is it like the Michael Scott rule? You can call lame stuff gay but can’t call “gay-gay” dudes gay? I mean, speaking of lame, the other week, someone at a J.D. Vance rally shouted he loved the vice president. Vance responded, “I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.”

 

“Hey, how do you tell Vance and Talarico apart? Vance is the one who leaves eyeliner smudges on your hotel pillow!”

 

Phil, come on.

 

I was watching Jesse Watters explain that Trump can get away with sounding “a little gay” because he’s straight. Yeah, okay, maybe. Is that the rule now? I mean, I’m not allowed to tell gay jokes, but Trump can spend all his time obsessing over interior decorating, putting on lavish gladiatorial shows, planning a fancy ballroom …

 

Phil: *snicker* “‘Ballroom.’ You know what he… ”

 

Phil, sit out a few plays. Meanwhile, Watters and that crowd think it’s fine to switch back to all this “Talafreako” gay stuff. They’re like Roger Stone; they swing both ways.

 

Look, what am I supposed to do? I mean, Trump has a bunch of openly gay dudes working for him. Scott Bessent is gay. He’s a billionaire but calls himself a “soybean farmer.” There’s nothing homosexual about that, but man, I could work with it. Ric Grenell is super gay, though in that weird Weimar Germany private-cabaret kind of way. Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, was one of those gay guys who hated gay guys.

 

Peter Thiel? He’s Vance’s mentor. He’s choreographed J.D.’s political career like a child-beauty-pageant-obsessed gay dad, but Vance wants people not to vote for Talarico because Talarico is gay? I mean, Talarico isn’t the kind of dude who attracts long-lingering looks from President Trump. But Talarico’s not actually gay. I get that Talarico looks like he rollerblades, but he keeps challenging Ken Paxton to debate, and Paxton is too much of a wuss to do it.

 

Brandon Gill, a Texas congressman, calls Talarico a “barely straight version of Pete Buttigieg.” What does that even mean? Buttigieg is openly gay, a fact the RNC is eager to remind voters of. I mean, Bessent supposedly wants to run for president as America’s first gay soybean-farmer commander in chief (that we know of—there are rumors that James Buchanan planted soybeans in his backyard). Would that be okay?

 

MAGA world is constantly talking about things like “globohomo,” which always sounded like a convention that Trump would be happy to host at Mar-a-Lago if the check cleared and the security staff had Grade-A Husted asses. Remember to buy Trump Baby Oil! Some of the Christian nationalist types are all freaked out about “gay race communism,” but a bunch of them rushed to catch Thiel talking about the Antichrist. I wouldn’t have been shocked if they showed up at the midterm convention dressed in Village People outfits doing the Shake Weight dance. These guys have sunk so low, I don’t know where the bottom is. Shut up, Phil.

 

I really don’t care who is gay and who isn’t. But, no offense, the coffee here sucks and, frankly, I sometimes think you guys are in the wrong room, if you know what I mean. So, just tell me. What are the rules? Because this is too damn hard.

 

“Thanks for sharing, Jonah. Good share. That’s all the time we have. The Recovering Antipedophile group needs the room.”

What the ‘Anti-Woke’ Crowd Gets Wrong

By Abigail Anthony

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

I had the pleasure of attending a retreat last weekend for young conservative professionals. “Varieties of conservatism” was the organizing theme of the seminars, and National Review’s 1955 mission statement was included in the readings. Someone mentioned during the class that Buckley was opposing moral relativism. That’s true, but it misses the more important point.

 

The justification for establishing a forum like National Review was that a dangerous illiberalism, animated by hostility to truth and reason, had already conquered virtually every major institution. My verb tense matters: Buckley et al. were not worried that such a dubious philosophy might eventually capture a few prestigious establishments that failed to engage in an ideological battle. Rather, NR’s founders astutely detected that the radicals had already seized control everywhere it mattered. The publication’s purpose was not merely to argue against an existing ideology but to disrupt its monopolistic power, hence the mission statement’s phrases such as “liberal orthodoxy” and “liberal world” appearing in 1955. The diagnosis was explicit: “And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’.”

 

Such an assessment is so germane that it could have been written today; the founding editorial is one among many artifacts confirming Buckley’s prophetic wisdom. But the mission statement also identifies precisely the problems that supposedly “reasonable” liberals, allegedly friendly to the conservative movement, discovered only in 2016 or 2020 during the “Woke Era” — and those “dissidents” positioned themselves as insightful heretics for observing what NR described over 70 years ago.

 

The broadly “anti-woke” crowd, exempting self-described “conservatives” and “right-wing” individuals, suffers from the delusion that elite institutions were ideologically captured in roughly the past decade. Such liberals think that the New York Times was an exemplar of fair and rigorous journalism until 2016, but then, it was suddenly corrupted by a virulent opposition to MAGA; the ideological tilt was only obvious when an editor resigned in response to outrage over an opinion piece by Senator Tom Cotton. They’ll tell you that NPR was a fantastic source of insightful nonpartisan discourse until 2020, when the radio hosts and writers all suddenly suffered from Rapid Onset Wokeness. They’ll claim the media were neutral and accurate, then unpredictably shifted to call the BLM riots “peaceful.” They’ll say universities were environments for open discourse, deep learning, and character formation until there was some overblown debacle at Yale University over appropriately sensible Halloween costumes. Experts in government, doctors, and medical associations were entirely apolitical prior to Covid, or perhaps just until they endorsed performing “gender-affirming” surgeries on minors, per the devoted readers of The Atlantic. The people who own a New Yorker tote bag and wear lanyards at work think corporations never engaged in left-wing social activism until grocery stores issued statements endorsing Black Lives Matter.

 

But that is all wrong, and our mission statement proves it. National Review detected the intelligentsia’s hegemony, and further denounced their falsehoods, decades ago. “Conservatives in this country . . . are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can readily show by pointing to his scars,” we attested in 1955. However, since we still live in “a Liberal world,” this statement was only considered potentially true once the former conformists — “intellectual dark web” members, former Times staffers, harassed professors — who are licensed by Ivy League diplomas said it in the past few years.

 

Make no mistake: The “canceled” class of podcasters acknowledge the “liberal orthodoxy,” but these “dissidents” of the 2020 era are not genuine allies to conservatives. The left’s expats today — the people who criticized “woke ideology” when fleeing their employer’s building without actually interrogating, let alone abandoning, their own views — only disapprove of which progressives are in charge. We see a problem with the ideas, whereas they have a problem with the personnel.

 

The woke movement’s rejected celebrities don’t actually have any defensible principles, despite claiming otherwise. Hillary-supporting liberals who attended cocktail parties weekly with embroidered fabric napkins wondered aloud in 2019 if maybe they should be able to say that not all men can suddenly become women just because, in theory, an unusually bad guy might take advantage of flexible bathroom policies — but in general, they assured everyone, “trans” adults are broadly acceptable, and we should honor their “preferred pronouns.” Dress however you like, engage in whatever consensual sex you want, and I’ll happily use whichever pronouns you like, but just don’t punish a woman for not doing so, said the supposedly reasonable feminists demanding female-only spaces after spending decades destroying male-only associations. The articles in mainstream media nervously suggesting “gender-inclusive” policies are potentially troublesome still deferred to a deluded subject’s wrong pronouns. Every columnist or podcast interviewee who suggested “gender-affirming care” is bad for minors danced around the central claim that “being trans” is a farce. “You see, children can’t consent to surgically removing their reproductive organs or receiving hormone injections,” argued the left-wing critics of gender nonsense. “But adults can . . . it’s a free society! Be sure to enforce policies for single-sex facilities, though.”

 

None of the “centrists” pushing against the extreme progressives were actually willing to state the true premises — and that’s because they refuse to believe those premises for the sake of continued social acceptance. The “anti-woke” subtle resistance to totalitarianism claimed, ever so cautiously, that democracy (or some other sacred value) means we should allow at least some widely held views a teeny bit of airtime occasionally. (These people were paid thousands, even tens of thousands, to declare this on the campuses where conservatives still may not tread.) Yet these Free-Thinking Liberals do not claim, let alone defend, that men can never be women, “transphobia” be damned. Why not? The “open-minded” lefties all have a gay best friend, or they are gay, or their distant cousin is in a polycule, or their nephew is going by “they/them” now, or their amazing hairdresser (who charges upwards of $500 for blonde highlights) is gay. Ideological trespassing subverts the left’s chief virtue of appearing polite, so anything more aggressive than tepid disagreement would mean losing friends, and more tragically, invites to soirees. (They eventually started their own parties for the outcasts who have “forbidden ideas,” and those dangerous thoughts were things like “don’t cut off a teenage girl’s breasts” or “maybe affirmative action results in less-qualified students.” Rather mysteriously, the invites for people like Charles Murray got lost in the mail.)

 

Worse than the “anti-tribal” leftists who retreated while wearing an “I’M SO BRAVE FOR LEAVING” shirt are those who remained within their elite institutions, caved, and are now doing minimal damage control. “Forget the woke things we sanctimoniously shouted even though we condemned you, ridiculed you, and fired you for not saying them” is the unsaid message. (An actual apology will never come.) Given the gaping wounds to the public reputation of progressivism in light of 2020-era absurdity, and the growing resentment confirmed by Trump’s 2024 popular vote victory, supposedly self-aware editors at mainstream publications reluctantly publish an opinion piece every few weeks that mildly suggests a particularly bad progressive policy might have some consequences; defending even modestly conservative or right-wing opinions would be too far. “Conservative columnists” who recently joined high-profile outlets obtained good enough social standing by signaling that Trump is a bad guy. The tolerable principled conservatives, according to the “canceled” progressives, are those whose most important principle is reflexively opposing Trump. Anything that any major institution has done in the past few years that vaguely resembles a concession to conservatives is nothing more than attempted image rehabilitation. There has not been a single instance of restructuring of an organization, publication, or university in the past decade or so that actually removed the left’s chokehold by introducing a critical mass of conservatives.

 

Everyone agrees with a modern application of National Review’s initial evaluation: Yes, there is a “liberal orthodoxy.” The problem, then, as now, is that all liberals want that orthodoxy. They reject NR’s 1955 declaration that “the largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques.” Today, there’s just an internal leftist Struggle Session at every institution with a recognizable acronym or logo. The unapologetically radical activists (usually identifiable by a keffiyeh, an N-95 mask, or an assortment of small tattooed doodles schizophrenically placed all over the arms depicting random household objects like buttons or toast) will actually admit as much and openly defend keeping out “fascists,” defined as “everyone we dislike.” The other liberals (distinguished from the others by decent outfits, sometimes tailored) are simply moderating their views and occasionally posing with an anti-Trump conservative to maintain, or regain, control. For the sake of optics, these cultural curators will proudly announce a new token staff member who voted Republican once. To regain credibility, a single event will be organized each year at universities with a panel featuring someone who doesn’t totally love abortion so that the leadership can claim, “Look at the intellectual diversity thriving in our culture of academic freedom!” when it is time to solicit donations. A publication will boast, “Yes, we have political disagreements on our editorial board. There are both Kamala and Bernie supporters. And there’s someone who wrote in a name last election who writes for us about why capitalism might be okay!”

 

In the mind of the supposed Self-Sacrificing Dissident Elite who participated in no fewer than ten interviews about their own “cancellation” and published an essay titled “WHY I LEFT THE LEFT,” desired reform is simply restoring the culture to its 2010ish norms — an environment that would let them sit again at a long table in a meeting room, but wouldn’t leave a chair for anyone actually conservative or right-wing. The aim of the “moderate” Democrat is not to cultivate the conditions where every view can be debated but, rather, to ensure their own views are restored to prominence. National Review has long fought against moral relativism and illiberalism, whereas the leftists who decried “groupthink” only whined after being booted out of the group; they could not even briefly endure the treatment that had previously been reserved for conservatives.

 

What’s the justification for refusing to seriously engage with conservative or right-wing thinkers, and continuing to ostracize us? Liberals with a Wikipedia page, who are usually now on their second marriage, think with absolute certainty that they are superior to us — politically, morally, spiritually, and so on ad infinitum. As proof that their views are better and therefore correct, they cite public polling figures that were cultivated through their own media outlets by strategically avoiding discussion of any alternative views to coerce a consensus. “Look, we really just can’t run an article presenting concerns about IVF technology because most people are totally fine with IVF,” is a slight paraphrase of what I was told by an editor at a left-leaning outlet. (Notably, the article also had pro-IVF perspectives.) Only occasionally does a conservative argument gain enough traction that it must be acknowledged, but in those cases, it must be “balanced” with the Democrat-approved alternative. When I contributed to a different left-leaning paper that masqueraded as “unbiased,” an opinion piece about the pro-life movement around the time of the March for Life had to be published adjacent to a pro-abortion article for the sake of “presenting both sides.” The standard disappeared when an article about a large pro-abortion rally occurred months later.

 

When introducing itself to the public in 1955, National Review explained that “we begin publishing, then, with a considerable stock of experience with the irresponsible Right, and a despair of the intransigence of the Liberals, who run this country; and all this in a world dominated by the jubilant single-mindedness of the practicing Communist, with his inside track to History.” As it was in the beginning, it is now. But through tireless work through National Review and other avenues, there’s no reason it ever shall be a liberal world without end.

The Last Ditch for Mask Hysteria

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Maybe it says something about my excessively bourgeois, disproportionately right-of-center, gay-friendly but mostly not gay social and professional circles, but I haven’t met anybody who didn’t love the Boston Globe piece on the Last Ditch Bar. I’ve barely even seen any criticism of it, and the criticism I have seen has been more like a continuation of the joke. The most forceful condemnation of the Globe piece that I’ve come across was issued by the Western Massachusetts Communist Party USA.

 

Let’s stop right here. I love that there’s a Western Massachusetts Communist Party. It implies the existence of an Eastern Massachusetts Communist Party, and from there the People’s Front of Judea vs. Judean People’s Front jokes just start tumbling out like patrons leaving the Last Ditch on ladies night. I mean, we all know that those Eastern Massachusetts faux communists lack the revolutionary zeal of the true believers of the Berkshires and Pioneer Valley. When the revolution comes, the Kulaks of Boston and Salem will be the first to be reeducated or liquidated.

 

Fun fact: When I googled “Western Massachusetts,” I got results describing the region. But when you google “Eastern Massachusetts,” the results are just for the whole state of Massachusetts, which any Western Massachusetts Stalinist will tell you is evidence of how the Easterners are in bed with the corporate hegemons, colonizing the whole state with their settler ideology. This will no doubt be part of the indictment when the trials come.

 

The Western Mass Communists objected to the story because it invited “heightened national scrutiny” at a time when the Trump administration and Republican governors are carrying out a “genocide of LGBTQIA+ people.”

 

“The Western Massachusetts CPUSA rejects the use of conflicts among LGBTQIA+ people and organizations as a tool of division by the extreme right,” the statement said. “We reaffirm our solidarity with all those struggling against the genocide of transgender people.”

 

Okay, like whatever. But here’s the thing. Or a thing. Or something. The people profiled in the story aren’t mobilizing and protesting against Donald Trump or Republican governors. They’re tearing down a lesbian bar opened to be a safe haven for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends.” It even welcomes the “poor and unhoused” and serves them for free when necessary. The only condition: You had to wear a KN-95—or higher filtration—mask.

 

Because the bar was struggling financially—who could’ve guessed that serving people for free was not a great business model?—its operators announced, very politely, that they were going to go mask-optional on Saturday nights. A fierce backlash ensued. One patron replied, “I hope you get firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists[sic].”

 

Now, call me a cis-heteronormative, sellout-to-neoliberalism-and-patriarchal-values square, but I kinda think this is overkill.

 

One of the central themes of communist history, and radicalism generally, is the tendency to tear down the groups, institutions, tribes, whatever, closest to you. Who were the first victims of the Jacobin Reign of Terror? Their fellow revolutionaries, the Girondins. Long before the Nazis turned on the Jews, they first turned on the leadership of the SA, aka the Brownshirts. Stalin’s Terror mostly liquidated fellow Communists. In the 1960s, the new left disliked conservatives and Republicans, but they hated liberals and moderate Democrats. The radical jabronis of the new right hate the Reaganites and Bushies, maybe not more than they hate the left, but they dedicate a lot more time and energy to them.

 

I think there’s a lot of this kind of dynamic in the riot of dysfunction chronicled by the Globe. But the more interesting thing to me is how the ideological rhetoric the angry patrons of the Last Ditch deployed is really a mask for something else. For instance, Soe Noire, the stage name of a leading critic of the bar and the head of another “Queer COVID-conscious collective in Western Massachusetts,” hurls all sorts of ideological buzz phrases at the bar’s proprietor during a struggle session. Noire accuses the owner of shedding “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS” and accuses the Last Ditch of not being “a safe environment nor interested in revolutionary praxis.”

 

If your irreducible requirement for a good bar is that it be dedicated to “revolutionary praxis,” you might end up drinking alone more than you want. That’s late capitalism for you.

 

What I mean by a mask for something else is that the Marxist and Marxish vocabulary is the language the critics have available. I don’t know if this has happened to you, but sometimes when I am in a non-English-speaking country, I will lapse into using whatever tidbits and snippets of any foreign language I do know. I’ve spoken bits of Czech to Germans, slivers of German to Czechs, and chunks of Spanish to French people. Your brain grabs what it can from the lost-and-found box of foreign languages.

 

The language these people have greater fluency in is obviously the subdialect of gender theory. But between the Marxist jargon and the trans terminology, there lies another vocabulary of neuroses, or psychobabble, or hygienic paranoia. It’s a weird dialect or “fusional language” that blends terms like “revolutionary praxis” with racialist identity politics, even a bit of anti-Zionism, and medicalized phobias about contagion. It’s a kind of Yiddish for the immunocompromised, real and, I firmly believe, alleged alike.

 

The COVID-19 epidemic ended years ago. There are vaccines and many treatments for it, but like the famous Japanese soldiers keeping World War II alive in their hearts long after the paperwork was signed on the USS Missouri, the ranks of the traumatized and COVID-neurotic live on, hiding in plain sight from an ended epidemic. The Last Ditch is a kind of Brigadoon for these people.

 

And I have to say, while I think a lot of it is funny, pathetic, and weird, I also find some of it kind of touching. I don’t think these people are living happy and healthy lives. But the Last Ditch was a place for unhappy and unhealthy people to enjoy each other’s company.

 

But I also think there’s something else going on. The tendency of radicals to attack those closest to them gets at it a little. But I think that’s too political. I mean, I doubt many of these self-styled Marxist types could speak for three minutes on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program.

 

I’ve long argued that American or even Western culture is suffering from a kind of autoimmune disease. It’s a cultural and political version of the hygiene hypothesis. Why do so many kids get asthma? One reason is that the environments they grow up in are too clean. Not having enough real allergens to fight, our immune systems become hypersensitive. You know how you can prevent kids from getting peanut allergies? Give them peanut butter when they’re young. Wait too long, and the body overreacts to peanuts. Kids who grow up on farms are much less likely to get asthma, because their bodies learned to deal with dirt and dander from day one. (Alliteration for the win!).

 

America has gotten steadily less racist over the last 70 years. But large chunks of our society, the lymphatic system of the body politic, are more attuned to spotting and combating racism in the nooks and crannies than ever before (this tendency, I believe, has invited an ugly right-wing racist reaction. But that’s a topic for another day). Noire, a lesbian who uses masculine pronouns, is so hypersensitive to racism, he is sure that it’s not only the explanation for the mask-optional policy, but also explains why the apology for the policy was insufficient. “I’m not going to give grace,” he explains, when someone is “spreading rhetoric that will get people hurt.” The evidence of this dangerous rhetoric spreading? The bar’s Instagram account “liked” some of the responses that supported the initial policy announcement. That’s not exactly Bull Connor with a megaphone.

 

This is the problem with our cultural autoimmune disorder. It has a kind of China Syndrome logic to it. People who suffer from it cannot turn it off; they cannot take the win. The meltdown is inexorable, burning through every barrier, every obstacle. Noire’s emotional meltdown acts the same way. He cannot offer “grace” to someone who is losing money on a bar that caters to people like him, because such thinking has no ends—it’s means all the way down. Acid doesn’t say, “I’ve dissolved enough material.” Fire doesn’t declare, “I’ve burned enough of the house.” Water doesn’t decide, “This is a nice spot, I’ll seek my level tomorrow.”

 

We get the term “last ditch” from the military. It appears to have come from William of Orange, the idea being that it’s the last line of defense. To die in the last ditch is to fall in battle because there’s nowhere else to fall back to. To fight to the last ditch, or make a last-ditch effort, is to stand your ground because there’s no other option, save dishonorable surrender. Noire and friends are fine with seeing the Last Ditch go under, even if it might be the last ditch for people like them in Western Massachusetts. Because for them, revolutionary praxis means tearing down anything that is good—on their terms—in the name of the perfect, and the impossible.

Trump Strikes Blow Against Gender Experiments on Minors

National Review Online

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Thanks to the Trump administration, some medical facilities are stopping their dangerous gender experiments on distressed children. This is encouraging news, but the battle is not over.

 

The New York Times reports that at least six major hospitals have acquiesced to pressure from the Trump administration and agreed to stop providing “gender-transition treatment” to minors, although they have not formally admitted to wrongdoing. The hospitals have also agreed to pay fines, and some will provide services free of charge to former patients who wish to detransition or manage side effects. According to an announcement from the Department of Justice this month, two of the nation’s largest health-care systems — New York University Langone Hospitals and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center — have agreed to cease offering puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and gender-related surgeries to minors. The resolution is reportedly similar to those previously reached with Mount Sinai Health System in New York, Texas Children’s Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and Connecticut Children’s Hospital. The Advocate, an LGBTQ-themed paper, reports that the hospitals have agreed to pay at least $24 million combined in the settlements.

 

“My office’s foremost priority is protecting children. The resolutions announced today reflect the close collaboration across the Department of Justice and our continued commitment to ensuring that minors are safeguarded,” Ryan Raybould, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said in a press release issued by the DOJ. “These investigations are ongoing, and my office will continue to follow the evidence, act decisively when the well-being of minors is at stake, and fully pursue wrongdoers who have broken federal law.”

 

Somehow, doctors believed that the kids who were too young and too underdeveloped to consent to sex were capable of agreeing to a “sex change.” The patients who signed papers and underwent the procedure for a needless double mastectomy would have faced more difficulty trying to get a tattoo.

 

But why did it require pressure from the Trump team for these hospitals to stop performing these harmful practices? The science is clear: Large-scale reviews conducted in both the United Kingdom and the United States found that there is shockingly poor evidence to suggest that “gender-affirming care” is a safe and effective treatment for minors. On the contrary, the data are piling up that show these interventions cause nothing but harm. The consequences from these medicalized “treatments” include infertility, sexual dysfunction, weakened bone density, cardiovascular disease, and a range of other devastating, lasting side effects — some of which are irreversible. The public testimonies from children and adults explaining their lasting health problems from these traumatic interventions, as well as the lawsuits against the wicked doctors who provided the services, are growing steadily.

 

Even in the absence of comprehensive scientific reviews, nobody should have ever believed the absurd idea that people could change sexes. There was never a single compelling argument that a minor, or even an adult, should receive extensive hormonal therapies or mutilating surgeries as an attempt to reconcile their physical appearance with their self-perception of being “born in the wrong body.”

 

While we welcome these recent settlements with hospitals, we are aware that these injurious services are still widely available and easily obtained. In fact, some Planned Parenthoods currently advertise that “in most cases your clinician will be able to prescribe hormones the same day as your first visit” and “no letter from a mental health provider is required.” The Justice Department has done admirable work by reforming these major medical providers, and we encourage further investigations. But if just one clinic or hospital is offering cross-sex hormones as part of a “gender transition” regimen for minors, then it is one too many.

Our Culture Needs a Return to Biological Realism

By Christine Rosen

Saturday, September 05, 2026

 

Several recent stories might not, at first glance, seem connected: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted videos of herself injecting fertility drugs into her stomach and, later, having her eggs harvested to freeze them; technology entrepreneur Bryan “Never Die” Johnson doubled down on his extreme health and longevity project despite being diagnosed with an autoimmune condition; and former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White announced their intention to register for the Women’s NBA draft in 2027 as a protest against the league’s absurd stance on gender.

 

These stories suggest our culture needs a return to biological realism — that is, a sensible acknowledgement of human limits and biological realities. The normalization of extreme claims about humans’ ability to push past or ignore those realities has only increased in recent years, to the detriment of our common culture and common sense.

 

Consider Ocasio-Cortez’s unpaid advertisement for the fertility industry. Whatever her personal reasons for deciding, at age 36, to freeze her eggs, she chose to make it a public performance, saying she hoped to “normalize” the process of delaying the decision to have a child.

 

This is where a biological realist might point out that while there are numerous understandable reasons beyond personal preference for a woman to freeze her eggs (including to preserve them while undergoing cancer treatment), it remains a harsh biological reality that most women experience a significant decline in fertility after the age of 35, and the women most likely to achieve successful pregnancies using their previously frozen eggs are those who froze a lot of them before 35. If Ocasio-Cortez were intent on educating women of her generation about preserving their fertility (rather than turning her personal choices into yet another Instagram-enabled political stunt), she would have noted these biological realities. She might also have acknowledged that the largely unregulated fertility industry raises many ethical and legal questions and has been implicated in cases of abuse and fraud.

 

It is not only eggs that deniers of biological reality hope to freeze; it is themselves, in perpetuity. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly paid a Canadian company, Nectome, a deposit of $10,000 to secure a spot on its waiting list to one day freeze his brain, with the expectation that the company will scan it and grant him some form of digitized immortality. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” he said. Altman is one of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs on a quest for life extension and immortality. Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil has long predicted that humans, nanobots, and artificial intelligence will eventually merge to form a new species, while others in the AI successionism movement want AI to replace humanity.

 

Bryan Johnson, champion of the “Don’t Die” movement who is tracking and monitoring every possible bodily function he has while taking extreme measures to prolong his life, describes his journey as follows: “Conquering death will be humanity’s greatest achievement.” Talking to Ross Douthat on the Interesting Times podcast, Johnson described himself not as a man, but as “the first Don’t Die Homo sapien prototype.” Comparing himself to a self-driving car, he noted, “I’m building a self-driving body so it just automatically takes care of itself.”

 

The denial of biological limits is perhaps most prominent among transgender activists, who insist that biological men can become women and that those men should be allowed access to women-only spaces, including in women’s sports. Just as a child had to point out that the emperor wore no clothes, former NBA players Kanter and White highlighted the absurdities of men in women’s sports by declaring their intention to play on women’s teams. Their stunt was in part a response to criticism of professional athletes like WNBA player Sophie Cunningham for simply stating the obvious: Significant biological differences between the sexes make it unfair to allow men to compete against women. The overwhelming majority of Americans agree with her, and when Cunningham told reporters her position was “common sense,” she was correct.

 

Common sense does not fare well when pitted against the ideological zeal of an extremely small minority — especially when that minority controls the levers of power in institutions. During a press conference, WNBA Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve hemmed and hawed but stuck to the ideological script, saying, “We need to protect trans kids.” Some WNBA players, like Golden State Valkyries player Gabby Williams, went so far as to claim she would “welcome a trans athlete on my team or against my team, anytime.” Even though the U.S. Supreme Court upheld states’ right to ban men from playing on women’s teams, the mainstream media and trans activists continue to push the message that biological men should be allowed to take spots on teams from women.

 

Kanter and White are forcing the ideologues to be honest: If they allow men to play in a professional women’s league, then the word woman has no meaning, and biological reality will have been jettisoned in favor of ideological conformity. It’s not a coincidence that the transhumanist and transgender projects share a prefix (trans means “across” or “beyond”). Acolytes of both seek to cross beyond the limits of biology; both movements are also characterized by a rigorous enforcement of groupthink.

 

Most people can’t afford to freeze their eggs like Ocasio-Cortez or meticulously track the duration of their nighttime erections like Bryan Johnson, and most will never play professional sports like the women of the WNBA. But when advocates of transgenderism, transhumanism, extreme longevity, and extreme fertility treatments promote the message that there is no biological limit that cannot eventually be overcome by medicine or technology, they normalize something that is harmful to a flourishing society: denying the reality of human limits.

 

Embracing biological realism does not mean artificially stunting the remarkable advances of technology and science or fetishizing the challenges of aging or conception for its own sake. It simply rejects the conceit of those who would claim the power to ignore biological realities. Their hubris is a reminder that the conditions that allow for innovation and scientific advances and prosperity do not always produce morally sound people.

El-Sayed’s Circumcision Quip Was Too Clever by Half

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

You know that a Democrat has done or said something indefensibly asinine when the political press covers the reaction to it with more vigor than the precipitating event. So far, that is what we’ve witnessed in the hours since Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed asked Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters if his penis is intact.

 

The exchange, via Mediaite:

 

“Sex change for minors. Do you support that?” Watters asked at one point.

 

“I just think the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of healthcare you should have,” El-Sayed replied.

 

Watters then pressed him with a more graphic formulation: “So you think it’s OK for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?”

 

El-Sayed fired back: “Do you really want to have this conversation? Are you circumcised?”

 

“Yeah, but I mean that’s a personal question, doctor,” a visibly surprised Watters responded.

 

Watters argued that circumcision is “different than castration,” prompting El-Sayed to reply: “I’m just saying that yes, circumcision is surgery on a kid’s ding-a-ling.”

 

The coverage of these remarks diverted quickly away from them, focusing instead on how the candidate’s political opponents were supposedly fit to be tied over El-Sayed’s failed attempt at cleverness. But the reaction to this story, however entertaining it may be, is not the real story here.

 

Surely, El-Sayed’s revealed confusion over the practice of circumcision and how it is distinct from genital mutilation will do nothing to dispel the allegations of antisemitism swirling around his campaign. More damaging to him, perhaps, is the candidate’s flat-footedness on the controversial issue of youth gender transition therapies and the harm they do.

 

The minimally curious should by now have grappled with the medical literature that finds young people suffering from gender dysphoria do not, on balance, experience positive mental health outcomes as a result of surgical or pharmaceutical interventions. Indeed, their conditions often worsen. El-Sayed and others should be expected to have surveyed the landscape in Europe, where the public health apparatus expresses increasing uncertainty about the value of those interventions.

 

They should recognize, at the very least, the political peril associated with their incuriosity, especially if they’re running for office. It’s not too much to expect candidates to familiarize themselves with the public’s anxieties toward biological males playing in women’s sports or the increasing episodes of violence attributed to gender dysphoric personalities.

 

If El-Sayed had acquainted himself with even the basic contours of the issue, he probably wouldn’t have struck the condescending posture he adopted on Monday night. Instead, he smirked his way through an exhibition of profound ignorance — a display that was not masked by the candidate’s obviously practiced and admittedly expert Barack Obama impression — that conveyed only his contempt for the concerns shared by a majority of Americans, including a plurality of Democrats.

 

“You should want to move on,” said El-Sayed, closing out the interview with the confidence of someone who hadn’t just fumbled the ball on the one-yard line. But anyone who watched the exchange would conclude that it was El-Sayed who was desperate to change the subject.

‘Woke One’ Wasn’t Just Crazy — It Was Destructive

By Becket Adams

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

 

We’re living through a real-life attempt to erase the recent past.

 

“Woke One was crazy,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) laughed recently during an appearance on ABC News, approvingly quoting a New York City councilman. “Woke One was crazy. Okay, that’s a truth,” ABC’s Jonathan Karl replied. The anchor then asked whether the left had gone too far during “Woke One,” including with its calls to “defund the police.”

 

This is where Ocasio-Cortez — and many within her ideological cohort, whether it’s writers at Vanity Fair or the New Republic, or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or even failed Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong — want you to accept their version of events over your own memory.

 

“I think that during this time and during, especially during Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton window,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.”

 

She added, “I think that when we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down, right? And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that, you know, during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

 

Total nonsense.

 

She’s simply trying to rewrite the record, and it’s as dishonest as it’s brazen. It’s also glaringly obvious what this is: a cleanup effort by someone with aspirations for higher office.

 

Her attempt to blame the “woke” era on pandemic hysteria collides with a simple fact: Anyone who is old enough to argue about this lived through 2020 — and 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. We remember the pandemic craziness as a continuation of a broader craziness that was already well underway. The term “cancel culture” appeared widely in mainstream media around 2018; “woke” itself gained popular prominence in the early 2010s.

 

Also, “Woke One” was far worse than cabin-fever rhetoric. It was often direct action with real, tangible consequences.

 

As early as 2014, before the pandemic hit the U.S., “Woke One” was JavaScript co-creator Brendan Eich being forced out as CEO of Mozilla after only eleven days because of a $1,000 donation he had made in 2011 to California’s Proposition 8.

 

It was watching a male beat the bricks off a woman in a women’s division and being dared to say you found anything untoward or cruel about it.

 

It was campus lectures across the country being canceled or abruptly ended by the threat or reality of violence from radicalized college students.

 

It was the British government’s agreeing to house male sex offenders who identify as female with actual female prison inmates. It was the insistence that “drag shows” have always been a normalized and beloved part of the everyday American tableau, and that “drag shows” for children were a beautiful and positive development. It was the fanatic promotion of sex-reassignment surgery and procedures for children and teens.

 

It was the entire news media apparatus agreeing that the hand gesture for “okay” is a secret white-supremacist signal, ensnaring bystanders from West Point cadets to firemen in allegations that they were covert racists.

 

It was the effort to cancel Laura Ingalls Wilder and Mark Twain.

 

Then came the pandemic, and “Woke One” was now the effort to cancel Mozart and Flannery O’Connor while removing, dismantling, or toppling monuments to Theodore Roosevelt, the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, and Christopher Columbus.

 

It was the Smithsonian Institution listing as “aspects and assumptions” of “whiteness and white culture” in the United States: rugged individualism, respect for authority, politeness, punctuality, competitiveness, the nuclear family, objectivity, the scientific method, self-reliance, and hope.

 

It was Amazon abruptly removing Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment while continuing to sell Mein Kampf. It was Puffin Books scrubbing supposedly problematic words such as “fat” and “ugly” from Roald Dahl’s children’s books, often inserting gentler substitutes of its own choosing. Puffin also replaced terms such as “mothers and fathers” with gender-neutral terms, including “parents” or “families.”

 

It was the Washington Post publishing an opinion piece characterizing as racist the effort to end school closures. The Chicago Teachers Union would also claim, “The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”

 

“Woke One” also included the moment during the 2020 Minneapolis riots when a career criminal set fire to a building with a father of five still trapped inside, killing him. The Biden Justice Department handed down a mere ten-year sentence, well below the federal guidelines of 17–20 years. In its sentencing memo, prosecutors cited as justification for the leniency Martin Luther King Jr.’s line that “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

 

It was all of it, before and after Covid-19.

 

It was “microaggressions,” “cultural appropriation,” parades of activists in Handmaid’s Tale costumes, the heckler’s veto, actual violence, “pussy hats,” and mass censorship across major social media networks. Then it was the fast-tracking of obviously unqualified and dangerously incompetent people into positions of real power and authority, often with devastating consequences. It was the “toxic masculinity” of men’s razors, transgender beer, and Land O’ Lakes removing the Native American mascot from its branding (they kept the land, though). It was taking a knee during the national anthem, “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots, looting, “social justice” financial scams, and being told that you were the problem if you didn’t embrace sex clown story hour for children.

 

It was also Ocasio-Cortez condemning the inclusion of Saint Damien of Molokai as one of two figures representing Hawaii in the National Statuary Hall Collection. “This is what patriarchy and white supremacy culture looks like!” she raged in a 2020 video. Saint Damien was a Belgian missionary who died caring for a Hawaiian leper colony, serving the neediest even as his body fell apart to leprosy.

 

“Woke One” was not just Covid-19 hysteria. It was not just rhetoric about making the world a better place. For roughly a decade, beginning in the mid-2010s and slowing only with President Donald Trump’s reelection, liberals and progressives gorged on identitarian excess, making victims of anyone who didn’t share their cravings. Across popular culture, politics, academia, and corporate America, they demanded 100 percent participation in their identitarian gluttony. Anything short of absolute compliance brought swift personal or professional ruin.

 

Lives were ruined, businesses destroyed, industries cowed, sectarian violence applauded, iconoclasm encouraged, excellence denigrated, rioting cheered, looting rationalized, history erased; “social justice” charlatans, junk scientists, and race-hustlers elevated; free expression censored, dissent punished, art and the human experience cheapened, the bodies of sad and confused teenagers experimented upon, intense racial animus incited, and, in certain cases, people were killed.

 

A political faction in this country was given carte blanche to enforce its revolutionary vision on every aspect of modern life, and it did so with ruthless devotion, capturing every major industry and social institution along the way, and with zero regard for the chaos, destruction, and lasting damage it caused.

 

It was an era of godless puritanism; except we know it better as the “woke” era. It was not long ago. It was every bit as bad as you remember. And its champions would prefer you forget the worst parts and the role they played — not from any sense of shame or guilt, naturally, but because the culture has shifted and your remembering might threaten their proximity to power.

 

What — you don’t think they’re actually sorry for what they did, do you?

Enes Kanter Freedom Obviously Doesn’t Belong in the WNBA

By Helen Lewis

Sunday, August 16, 2026

 

Why shouldn’t Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White play women’s basketball? The answer is simple: They’re not female. By all evidence, the two former NBA players have XY chromosomes—White has fathered children—and have been through male puberty. They have significant athletic advantages over female athletes and should not be eligible for the WNBA. To reach this conclusion, I don’t need to peer into the pair’s souls to see whether they’re pink or blue, nor do I need to decide whether they are sincerely applying for the WNBA draft or just trolling.

 

Although, let’s be clear, they are trolling. On August 6, Freedom sent a letter to the WNBA’s commissioner that might as well have read: Hello—I would like some attention. The 34-year-old, whose NBA profile lists him at 6 foot 10 and 250 pounds, played pro basketball for 11 seasons. Now he wants to register for the women’s draft. He argued on X that he is “simply asking that the current rules be applied equally to everyone—the rules that represent the very values many WNBA players and coaches have publicly advocated for.” In an interview on Friday, he imagined catching a pass from the Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark, dunking the ball, and then bumping chests with her—“which I’m allowed to do,” he said, “because I’m now a woman.”

 

The backdrop to this stunt is the controversy over the Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, who told ESPN last month, “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” and has been mocked as “MAGA Barbie” because of her views. The players’ union put out a statement condemning the “hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people.”

 

As it stands, the WNBA’s collective-bargaining agreement restricts entry to “players who are women” but does not define women. The league has so far waved away Freedom and White. “There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA,” it declared in a statement Wednesday, “and we strongly denounce the bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.”

 

No one—not even White and Freedom—seriously believes that the WNBA will let the two trollish men play as women. But the league apparently hopes to reject them without ever grudgingly coughing out an agreement with Cunningham’s view that biological males don’t belong in women’s sports. Five years ago, the WNBA’s official Twitter account celebrated Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, biologically male athletes whose female competitors in Connecticut sued to keep them out of girls’ races in high-school athletics. The ACLU defended the trans girls’ right to compete. Above a picture of Yearwood and Miller, the WNBA expressed its own support: “We support you and all of the other trans athletes just trying to compete in the sports they love.” (Six years on, there has been no ruling in the case.)

 

The WNBA has become an appealing target for culture-war politicking, in part because the successes of Clark and a handful of other exceptional players have significantly raised the league’s profile in the past few years. As its prominence grows, its ability to sidestep controversy shrinks.

 

Not long after Freedom’s declaration, White also announced plans to enter the draft. After a short, lackluster career in the NBA, he is now a conservative activist who has run for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, and he is currently under a no-contact order with his ex-wife because of alleged threats against her and their teenage son. (He has disputed the accusations.) White has declared that he is indeed a woman, if only for basketball purposes. “I’ve always trusted the science and I thought I was a man my entire life, but after further review, a strong look at my personal preferences, it would appear that I am indeed sometimes identifying as a transgender woman,” he said on Fox News. He has since bought a long wig and accused a television network that canceled an interview with him of “not giving Black women a voice.”

 

When the WNBA uses the words bad faith, the only reasonable interpretation is that league officials do not believe that White and Freedom are women, despite their self-declarations. Funny story: I’m still on the advocacy group GLAAD’s enemies list for saying the same thing in 2017, in a column headlined “A Man Can’t Just Say He Has Turned Into a Woman.” At the time, Britain’s government was debating whether to loosen requirements for a person to legally change their gender. Many feminists feared that without any gatekeeping, nothing would stop male creeps and predators from using a new identity to victimize women (as the rapist Karen White did in a women’s prison). Although my article acknowledges the existence of transgender identities, it also argues that legal protections for trans people should rest on a medical diagnosis, or at least a formal bureaucratic procedure, rather than a simple verbal declaration.

 

Now, it seems, the WNBA agrees with me—White has not magically turned into a woman because he says so. You are allowed to dispute people’s self-identification. But only if they are a Republican.

 

***

 

In the United States, many progressive organizations, including the ACLU, maintain that the female category belongs to anyone who (sincerely) identifies into it. The underlying argument is that trans people should not have to seek medical treatment or alter their physical presentation to have their inner identities respected.

 

Freedom and White have elicited much less deference. Pod Save America’s Jon Lovett recently declared, “If they would like to play in the WNBA, they better fucking transition. Let’s get them on some fucking hormones.” The left-wing satirist Walter Masterson demanded that the two men “commit to the bit” and “chemically transition, or STFU.” But this is not a demand that is applied, say, to male sex offenders who ask to be housed in women’s prisons in California. Several years ago, the ACLU and other groups successfully lobbied for a law directing prison authorities to house trans women in a women’s facility if they request it, regardless of whether they have physically transitioned at all.

 

Bombarded with pro-trans commentators insisting that he medically transition, White has gleefully thrown progressive talking points back at them. “Don’t tell me how to be a Black woman! Taking hormones are optional,” he wrote in one X post. In another, he added, “Genitalia doesn’t determine gender.” Royce’s clapbacks are near-verbatim rehashings of popular activist slogans.

 

Over the past decade, many sports have wrestled with the question of how trans and nonbinary athletes can be accommodated fairly and safely. In some cases, such inclusion has presented no problems—biological females have competed in sports for both sex categories because they have no unfair advantage in either. (The WNBA accommodated the player Layshia Clarendon, who came out as trans and nonbinary, until their retirement in 2024.) Admitting biological males to women’s sports presents a more difficult question. Almost everyone agrees that men are on average stronger and faster than women, but how much of that advantage can be mitigated by testosterone suppression? Various sporting bodies have tried different approaches in the past decade, although many—including the International Olympic Committee and the Women’s Tennis Association—have now concluded that the women’s category cannot admit males, no matter how comprehensive their physical transition has been.

 

Having belatedly realized that the majority of Americans do not agree with their enthusiasm for male inclusion in women’s sports, the response of the left has often been to say: Why are we even talking about this nonstory? The columnist Candace Buckner of The Athletic criticized Cunningham for “choosing to weigh in on the divisive topic of transgender athletes in women’s sports, a grossly exaggerated ‘issue,’ and opening the door for a flood of agitators to defile the discussion.” But surely, athletes are allowed to have an opinion about competitive eligibility for their own league? For a long time, the right told stars such as Colin Kaepernick, who wanted to make political points about racism and injustice, that they should “stick to sports.” Some on the left now think that female athletes should not even have that grace.

 

***

 

What Freedom and White’s trolling has exposed is a widespread refusal to defend gender-self-identification policies on their own merits. One can argue that there is no such thing as male athletic advantage, or that inclusion for trans people is more important than fairness and safety for women. Both of these arguments are wrong, in my view, but at least they are internally coherent. What we get instead is a squeamish refusal to own the consequences of the approach that liberals endorse: White and Freedom are cynical operators, and that’s all anyone needs to know.

 

My counterpoint would be that cynical operators will always be with us. Any regulations that can’t deal with that fact are, by definition, bad regulations. Self-identification is unworkable in practice for the same reason that prison abolition isn’t viable: Bad actors will ruthlessly further their own interests at other people’s expense. For more examples, see how rich students are asking for disability accommodations to secure an advantage in college exams. How some air travelers are using wheelchair services to skip lines—at the expense of genuinely disabled people. How the service-animal exemption for airplanes was stretched so far that someone eventually tried to take a peacock into the cabin. Wherever there is an unpoliced boundary, some individuals will cross it.

 

Why would gender be exempt from this phenomenon? In 2024, soon after Germany passed a gender-self-ID law, a neo-Nazi named Sven Liebich declared that he was now Marla-Svenja Liebich and would therefore require accommodation in a women’s prison. (Marla-Svenja kept Sven’s handlebar mustache, however.) After a public backlash, Liebich was sent to a men’s jail, although it is unclear what legal basis the German state had for declaring this one particular case of self-identification fraudulent.

 

The WNBA appears to be following the same playbook—gearing up to make an arbitrary decision because of bad publicity, rather than engaging with the fact that its policies have created an exploitable loophole. Keeping out Freedom and White is not a hard problem to solve: Just say that you respect people’s identities, but sports are segregated by sex.

 

Progressives are losing the fight over gender identity in women’s sports. It’s time to concede and move on. They should save their energy to fight some of the truly egregious discrimination imposed against trans people by red states and Donald Trump’s executive orders. No one’s interest is served by refusing to articulate why Freedom and White don’t belong in the WNBA.

A Child’s Healthy Body Is Not a Problem to Be Solved

By Chloe Cole

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

Like many in my generation, I was always trying to grapple with where I belonged when I was kid. I was the youngest of five children, separated from my older siblings by a wide age gap. As I grew older, I related most naturally with my brothers. I was a tomboy, though at the time, that word did not seem weighty or political. It simply described how I felt: a girl who felt more comfortable in pants and short hair than girly dresses and bouncy curls.

 

Fitting in at school was even harder. I didn’t necessarily struggle academically, but I struggled to find a purpose in the classroom. Bullying left me with memories that are still difficult to revisit. People could feel unpredictable and cruel, so naturally I felt that my healthiest and safest relationships were in the company of animals. They didn’t expect anything from me or ask me to be anything other than myself to deserve affection.

 

That is what I wanted more than anything: to feel loved. Yet I began to believe that, to make other people happy, I would have to become someone that I was not.

 

Puberty intensified my discomfort. I had once been excited about growing up, but my developing body drew unwanted attention. Adults and children alike made uncomfortable comments about my curves and maturing figure that only agitated me further.

 

At the age of twelve, I got my first phone, which unlocked access to the world of social media. Online, I found people who seemed remarkably similar to me. They spoke openly about difficult childhoods, alienation, identity, and the feeling that something about their bodies did not match who they were inside. The explanation they offered was simple: They had been born in the wrong body. It made sense that maybe I had been, too. The more I read, the more I wondered whether this was the cause of my resistance to the female stereotype — that maybe, inside, I wasn’t a girl at all.

 

No child that age can make fully informed adult decisions about identity, fertility, sexuality, or lifelong medical treatment. And yet, before I was even a teenager, I began moving down the path of transgenderism. At first, the changes were gradual. I cut my hair shorter. I changed how I dressed and even acted to some extent.

 

Eventually, I told my friends and parents that I was transgender. My parents were at a loss. They wondered whether this belief pointed to something bigger and deeper than just an identity crisis, and they responded by doing what any responsible parents would: They sought professional help.

 

Their hope was to send me to therapy, get to the bottom of this, and perhaps let me be a child again. Unfortunately, the exact opposite happened. My parents were not permitted to sit in on any of my conversations with the therapist. They had little idea what was being discussed behind closed doors, even as they watched their daughter grow more and more distressed.

 

Instead of asking why I felt disconnected from my body, the professionals around me taught me that my feelings were not only valid but that they dictated my identity. Meanwhile, they told my parents I would kill myself if I wasn’t affirmed completely.

 

While my parents had their hesitations, they allowed me to begin the medical process, having been emotionally blackmailed. By the time I entered high school, I went by a new name and was on puberty blockers and testosterone. The drugs were powerful — my voice and body changed drastically. People I had known for years didn’t even recognize me. I began using boys’ restrooms and locker rooms. Anyone who remembers high school can remember the smells and atmosphere of a boys’ bathroom. Beneath the awkwardness, as I reflect on that time, I now realize just how dangerous it would have been if the boys around me had discovered that I was female.

 

In June 2020, at the age of 15, I underwent a double mastectomy. For four years, I clung tightly to the belief that transition was the saving grace of my story. But life was not greener on the other side. I learned that young men carry struggles of their own, including profound loneliness and pressure to conceal vulnerability. There often seemed to be no place where a boy or man was allowed to struggle honestly. I experienced that isolation firsthand.

 

Harder questions began surfacing. What if I wanted to be a mother? Or what if I wanted to be a wife? In my desperate pursuit of finally feeling whole, I had lost pieces of myself that I could never get back. When it struck me that I would never be able to nurse my children and that the medical interference in my life could affect my ability to have biological children at all, the illusion began to collapse. I started reconnecting with reality — not all at once, but piece by piece.

 

This awakening lit a fire under me. I could not keep living a lie. I had a choice: to separate myself from the world and spend my life mourning what had been done, or to completely immerse myself in the fight against the ideology that had defined my life.

 

Realizing that future generations might be affected by whether or not I spoke up, I found my purpose. I began testifying before lawmakers and traveling the world speaking out against what had been done to me, working to ensure that, one day, every child in every state is protected.

 

I am so grateful to U.S. Representative Bob Onder (R., Mo.) for spearheading legislation bearing my name. As a physician, he understands that medicine carries an obligation to do no harm. In my case, and in the cases of too many others, that oath was broken.

 

The Chloe Cole Act provides a federal civil remedy for individuals who were subjected to irreversible gender interventions while they were minors. Rather than regulating gender interventions directly, the bill allows detransitioners and their parents to sue the medical professionals who prescribed puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or performed gender surgeries. Those harmed may seek compensation for the lifelong physical, emotional, and financial harms those irreversible procedures caused. The bill also establishes a lengthy statute of limitations, ensuring that those harmed have a meaningful opportunity to seek justice.

 

My story cannot be rewritten, but another child’s story still can. Today, Congress has an opportunity to ensure that fewer families experience what mine did. The Chloe Cole Act would establish a national standard that puts children’s long-term health at the front and center of the medical system. That’s why I am calling on all members of Congress to move this legislation forward to a vote when they return in September. Every day lawmakers delay is another day vulnerable children are told that healthy bodies are problems to be solved rather than gifts to be protected.

 

There is nothing more evil than taking the most vulnerable of our society, lying to them about who they are, and taking away their health permanently. Yet I refuse to believe that evil gets the final word.

 

Everything I have gone through has shaped the woman I am today. I believe God has given purpose even to the parts of my story I would never have chosen. My suffering is not meaningless — this has become my life’s purpose. The Chloe Cole Act may bear my name, but it belongs to all of us.