British Health Secretary James Murray appeared on GB News over the weekend and acknowledged that he no longer believes a woman can have a penis, reversing a position he had publicly held, and conceded that he would not now say trans women are women. When pressed on why a well-educated man in his fifties needed years to arrive at a conclusion rooted in basic biology, Murray could only say that a lot of people have been thinking about this issue over recent years. When asked whether he owed an apology to gender-critical women who were canceled for saying exactly what he is now saying, he offered none.
Megan McArdle, Washington Post columnist and author of The Upside of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to explain the phenomenon through the lens of what economist Timur Kuran calls preference falsification and why the transgender sports issue in particular was the fatal mistake that unraveled the entire project.
McArdle said what happened over the past decade was not a genuine public debate that produced a considered consensus. It was a top-down effort by activists who pressed sympathetic institutions, predominantly those leaning left including politics, media, academia, and nonprofits, to adopt a series of propositions without interrogating them. Trans women are women in every sense that matters. There is no meaningful difference between male and female athletes. The evidence behind puberty blockers and pediatric medical transition is rock solid. The procedures are evidence-based and medically necessary. She said these positions were not adopted because people thought them through and decided they believed them, in contrast to marriage equality, which evolved over decades of genuine public deliberation. They were adopted because questioning them got you branded a bigot, and people were afraid of that label.
She cited journalist Jesse Singal’s observation that CNN’s style guide apparently required some version of the phrase evidence-based and medically necessary to be appended to any discussion of puberty blockers and hormones for minors, which produced the absurd result that when the UK’s Cass Report, a comprehensive government review, came out documenting the incredibly low quality of evidence supporting these interventions, CNN’s coverage right in its reporting of that very finding still described the treatments as evidence-based and medically necessary. She said the entire apparatus of institutional endorsement was built on borrowed credibility rather than earned argument.
McArdle said the transgender sports issue was the worst strategic mistake the movement made because it was the one area where the claimed expert consensus was transparently contradicted by what every person could see with their own eyes. She said she stumbled onto the beat almost accidentally because she is a six-foot-two woman and advocates were namechecking her as evidence that female outliers could compete with males, which she said is simply not true. Her height does not make her stronger or more athletic than a man. When she began writing about swimmer Lia Thomas, who had been a competitive but not dominant men’s swimmer before transitioning during the pandemic and immediately became the number one women’s swimmer in her event, the response she encountered was unlike anything in her career as an economics and science journalist. Sources who would normally speak freely about their research insisted on deep background. One person she asked simply to explain the rules of swimming, not to comment on Thomas, agreed to speak only on the condition that no identifying information be used, telling her that his wife would be furious and that he had children in competitive swimming and could not risk the professional and social consequences.
She said the level of terror was totally insane and is itself the most important part of the story, because preference falsification creates vulnerability to what Kuran calls a preference cascade. When everyone is privately skeptical but publicly compliant, no one actually knows what public opinion is because everyone is lying. But the private opinions persist, and the moment a few people demonstrate that it is safe to speak, others follow rapidly, and the apparent consensus shatters like glass. She quoted the seventeenth-century poet Samuel Butler: one who complies against his will is of the same opinion still.
She said the advocates’ own argument contained the seed of its destruction. They claimed the number of trans female athletes was so small as to be inconsequential. If that is true, McArdle said, then why are so many of them winning championships? If there is no enduring male advantage, a tiny number of trans female athletes should produce a proportionally tiny number of champions. Instead, state championships have been won, adult competitions dominated, and the Olympic boxing controversy this year, involving athletes with disorders of sexual development rather than transgender athletes but lumped into the same political category, further undermined public willingness to defer to expert assurances. She noted that even Serena Williams acknowledged in a simpler time that she could not compete on the men’s tour and would rank around seventieth, a statement she later had to stop making as the politics changed even though the underlying reality did not.
On the medical side, McArdle said the most consequential damage may involve puberty blockers and hormones for minors, where the honest assessment is that the evidence is simply inadequate. There is not strong evidence for or against these interventions because the necessary long-term studies were never conducted. If it turns out these treatments do not help as promised, the consequences are severe because the physical alterations are permanent, require lifelong medical management, and carry serious side effects. She said policies allowing biological males to self-identify into women’s prisons, which have been implemented in various jurisdictions globally, represent another area of serious concern that was adopted on the basis of the same unearned institutional deference.
On the figures who demonstrated the courage to speak early, McArdle cited JK Rowling as effectively uncancellable given the commercial value of Harry Potter, noting that when Rowling’s publishers’ employees attempted to get her books dropped, the publishers looked at the revenue and declined immediately. But she said Jesse Singal, who wrote merely that detransitioners exist and that the medical system should try to distinguish between children who would benefit from transition and those who would regret it, suffered a genuine career setback and was effectively forced out of traditional journalism for a period. She said Riley Gaines, who was physically attacked on a college campus for speaking on the topic, and Rowling, who endured years of vilification, created the conditions for the truth to reassert itself simply by being visible and refusing to comply. She said courage is contagious in the same way cowardice is, and the preference cascade now underway, visible in everything from the British Health Secretary’s reversal to the Supreme Court’s expected ruling on transgender athletes in women’s sports, is the direct result of individuals who absorbed real costs to say what was obviously true before it was safe to say it.