Did Anyone Ever Believe Men Could Become Women?

by Daniel Greenfield, New American Prophet, ©2025

(Sep. 28, 2025) — Did anyone ever really believe that men could become women? ‘Tipping Point’ author Malcolm Gladwell helped answer that question when he recently apologized for publicly asserting that men could change sex and fairly compete against women in sports because he was “cowed”.

No one bothered to follow up with the more interesting question, ‘What is Malcolm still too cowed to say in public’? It’s a question that also ought to be addressed to the various public figures, politicians, intellectuals and talkers, who have recanted the transgender heresy.

We know that they claimed to believe in one obviously wrong thing because of some combination of social pressure, manufactured consensus and intellectual incoherence.

What else do they hypocritically assert in public while privately doubting?

The intellectual crisis that led to Gladwell publicly asserting something that a small child, never mind a respected thinker, knew was wrong has its roots in the dual collapse of the western mind. Every preexisting moral and rational system, whether the Judeo-Christian ethos or the scientific method, is being dismantled as reactionary and is in the process of being replaced with the moral imperative of a revolutionary power shift from the oppressed to the oppressors.

This permanent state of moral emergency may not be questioned and its specific assertions are not subject to any of the religious or rational tests that once provided people with a consistent worldview based around clear principles rather than hysterical assertions that the crisis of the moment, ‘trans kids’, global warming, police shootings, Gaza or any of a grab bag of causes, is too grave to subject it to the rules of evidence in a search for the actual truth.

The Left claims that its various ideological flavors are rational and scientific, but they are nothing of the kind; instead they use ideology to pick and choose their science. That was why the Soviet Union could champion Lysenkoism and lock up actual scientists because the pseudoscience fit the Communist conception of how life should work. Not how it did work.

That is why skeptics are right to question environmentalist claims of human industry causing planetary destruction for matching all too closely with traditional leftist anti-capitalism, its luddite obsessions and the romanticization of the pre-industrial countryside, no matter how many PhDs assert that they represent expert opinion that just happens to match their politics.

The bizarre notion that men could become women by identifying as women fit a ‘Lysenkoist’ notion of human plasticity. There was and is nothing scientific to the entire thing. Doctors and researchers have brushed away past subjective claims of patient experiences with various medical conditions, even when those claims were later substantiated, chose to entirely discard basic biology here not because of any new data, but because ideology demanded it.

The transgender case rested on nothing more than special pleading, on long since discredited claims that ‘validating’ delusions about gender spectrums prevented suicides (and where else are doctors willing to prop up patient delusions, let alone perform highly risky unnecessary cosmetic procedures to validate those feelings) and its assertions about men being born with ‘female brains’ were the subject of feverish fantasies in online fetish groups, not research.

The ‘science’ of the transgender case lay not in its assertion of the positive, that men could become women, but in the negative, in its radical destruction of what (as part of this process) it dubbed the gender binary. The Left never really proves its points, rather it uses conspiratorial agitation, turning that which it seeks to destroy into a strawman, picks out-of-context pieces of information to poke holes in it, asserts conspiracy theories in which the strawman represents a broader systemic form of oppression and then politicizes the debate into a binary choice between supporting the victims or being one of the oppressors. That is what sucked Gladwell in and so many others liberals who fear being ‘on the wrong side of history’ more than a big lie.

Read the rest here.