Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell is revising his take on transgender athletes, saying he’s ashamed of his previous comments supporting trans women in sports.
Gladwell, 62, divulged his amended point of view on the hot-button issue during a podcast Tuesday, insisting “trans women have no place” competing with athletes assigned female at birth.
“If we did a replay of that exact panel at the Sloan conference this coming March, it runs in exactly the opposite direction,” Gladwell said. “And it would be, I suspect, near unanimity in the room that trans athletes have no place in the female category. I don’t think there’s any question.”
Gladwell said he regretted his 2022 appearance at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, where he moderated a panel discussing the “path forward for the inclusion” of transgender athletes in sports.
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“I’m ashamed of my performance at that panel because I share your position 100 percent and I was cowed,” Gladwell said on The Real Science of Sport. “The idea of saying anything on this issue — I was, I believe in retrospect, in a dishonest way, I was objecting in a dishonest way.”
Benjamin Ryan, an independent writer who contributes to the New York Times, The Guardian and other outlets, publicly questioned whether Gladwell’s reworked position would serve as a “tipping point” on transgender athletes, using the title of Gladwell’s most well-known book.
Tim Miller, an analyst for MSNBC and host of “The Bulwark Podcast,” criticized Gladwell’s “shifting stance,” as Ryan noted in a follow-up post.
“Rich people stop blaming their clinical desire to be loved on others challenge,” Miller wrote on X. “These guys weren’t cowed into anything they said the en vogue thing then and they are saying the en vogue thing now. Zuck, Bezos, Dimon same story.”
Other observers accused Gladwell, who penned “The Tipping Point” in 2000, of being disingenuous.
“I’m Malcom Gladwell and I misrepresented what I really felt because I wanted to please people in the room,” attorney Robert Freund wrote on X. “But now I’m totally not doing that, even though I explicitly say I think everyone would agree with the other view now. Please believe me again.”
Gladwell, who has sold more than 25 million books, shared his thoughts on trans athletes Tuesday during an appearance with podcast hosts Dr. Ross Tucker and journalist Mike Finch. Tucker, a sports scientist, joined Gladwell for the 2022 panel discussion, along with ESPN writer Katie Barnes and Loughborough University’s Joanna Harper.
Ryan posted the footage of Gladwell while reporting for UnHerd, a London-based outlet featuring his latest story on Gordon Guyatt, a Canadian physician and professor at McMaster University who “caved to transgender-activist pressure and thrown under the bus the funder of his systematic reviews of pediatric gender-transition treatment,” according to Ryan.
Some critics, meanwhile, accused Gladwell and other high-profile commentators of being inauthentic.
“Like him or not, Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most influential and financially successful journalists of the last 30 years,” Michael Shellenberger wrote on X. “For him to say he was too scared to say men don’t belong in girls sports shows both how totalitarian the [mainstream media] is and how chicken shit MSM journalists are.”
A message seeking additional comment from Gladwell, who released “Revenge of The Tipping Point” in October, was not immediately returned. He shared footage of his appearance to more than 660,000 followers on X early Wednesday.
“Have you always been transphobic or are you just trying to get a fox news gig?” one reply reads.