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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

This essay was originally published in The Washington Examiner on April 22, 2026.

The Montana Supreme Court’s decision last week in Kalarchik v. State should put to rest the right’s celebratory mantra that “woke is dead.” It isn’t. In a 5–2 ruling, the court upheld a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of key parts of Montana’s 2023 law, SB 458, and related agency policies that defined sex in binary, biological terms and limited changes to birth certificates and driver’s licenses. The ruling does not finally invalidate the law, but it allows Montanans with transgender or “nonbinary” identities to continue changing the sex marker on identity documents while the constitutional challenge proceeds. More importantly, the majority signaled its view that the challenged policies likely violate Montana’s constitution, holding that “transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination” and subjecting the state’s policy to strict scrutiny.

That outcome matters well beyond Montana, because it shows how thoroughly activist ideologies about sex and gender have penetrated elite institutions, including courts in conservative states. Montana’s legislature had attempted to define sex in law using objective biological criteria tied to reproductive function, while excluding “psychological, behavioral, social, chosen, or subjective experience of gender.” The court majority treated the refusal to translate gender identity into official sex classification as a form of unlawful sex discrimination.

Many of these sex-denying policies were not a result of some revolutionary scientific discovery, but from a form of linguistic capture. Existing legal terms were instead reinterpreted and redefined. “Sex,” once understood as a biological classification, was gradually made to include “gender identity,” a subjective feeling. Once an objective biological anchor is gone, policy will go wherever activists want to pull it. Montana’s law tried to reinstate that anchor, and failed.

That has been the standard pattern. The cultural campaign against the biological reality of sex began in niche activist blogs, women’s studies departments, and obscure ideological magazines. But it eventually moved into mainstream journalism and then into scientific and scholarly journals, where it acquired the prestige that courts and bureaucracies necessarily treat as authoritative.

In just the last few weeks, many outlets have been promoting this sex pseudoscience. Princeton anthropologist Agustin Fuentes argued in Science Politics that government efforts to define sex as a biological binary incorporate “falsehoods and erroneous assertions.” IFLScience ran a piece insisting there is “no clean definition” of biological sex. A piece from the Trans Advocacy & Complaints Collective declared that “sex does not fit neatly in boxes.” A new BioScience paper reported that teaching students “the diversity of biological sex” increased LGBTQIA+ students’ “sense of belonging.” And an Ecology Letters paper concluded that there is “no current consensus” on biological sex. It’s safe to say that the war on biology hasn’t slowed down. It has, in my estimation, been dramatically accelerating.

The main issue is not that these arguments are simply wrong, but that they create the appearance of scientific doubt around fundamental biological facts. Once enough papers and essays circulate claiming that sex is a spectrum or based on clusters of mutable traits, or something with “no consensus” definition, judges and policymakers can present themselves as merely choosing among competing expert views. But this is a manufactured controversy, because the basic biological claim that males and females are reproductive classes rooted in anisogamy (sperm vs ova) has not been overturned. Activists have merely expanded the topic from sex to everything associated with sex—hormones, morphology, behavior, developmental pathways, social roles—and then act as though the resulting complexity is proof that sex itself defies categorization.

That sleight of hand was on display in a recent debate at the University of Delaware between Fuentes and philosopher Tomas Bogardus. Before the debate even began, the moderator had to defend the legitimacy of discussing whether biological sex is binary at all, noting that some critics objected to the event’s very occurrence on the grounds that it could harm vulnerable communities.

Yet the debate also exposed why the activists have vehemently held a position of “no debate” for so long. Fuentes explicitly conceded that humans have two sexes—male and female—and said that when he speaks of sex as a spectrum, he does not mean three sexes or five sexes. Instead, his strategy is to widen the discourse around sex itself to what he called “sex biology,” a much broader category encompassing every axis that bodies, behaviors, endocrine systems, morphology, etc., can vary between the sexes. He emphasized overlapping distributions in height, weight, hormones, fat deposition, and other traits, then argued that because these traits are not distributed in perfectly discrete ways that a binary framing is not biologically sound or useful. Bogardus, by contrast, kept returning to the central question of the debate: what sex is, and how many there are. His (correct) answer was that male and female are functional reproductive classes rooted in producing either sperm or ova, and that variation in correlates of sex does not negate the sex categories themselves.

Of course it is true that not every sexually dimorphic trait is binary. Of course males and females overlap in countless characteristics. No biologist thinks every trait in an organism fall into in two perfect, non-overlapping bins. That has never been the claim. The claim is that in anisogamous species (those that reproduce by fusing sperm and ova) there are two sexes because there are two reproductive functions based on two gamete types. This is precisely the point I made in my 2025 Archives of Sexual Behavior commentary, “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes.” I also addressed the routine attempts to dissolve sex into trait clusters, and explained why these activist models actually presuppose the gamete-based model they seek to replace.

The legal implications of activist pseudoscience are so serious because once sex is no longer understood as a reproductive classification but as an aggregate of partly overlapping traits, it becomes infinitely malleable. Courts can then say that because people differ in complicated ways and because some sex-related traits do not line up neatly, the state has no principled basis for keeping sex distinct from identity. This is how law begins to privilege a pseudoscientific account of human beings while portraying those defending the true biological understanding of sex as ideologues.

My own paper was recently the target of a Letter to the Editor in the same journal by the German scholar Dana Mahr. I welcomed the criticism, because robust public debate about the facts is healthy. But rather than making a scientific refutation of my paper, Mahr chose to critique it from a “feminist epistemology” perspective, arguing that defining male and female by gametes is simply a choice shaped by historical and cultural norms. In my published response, I pointed out that while the labels we assign the reproductive classes “male” and “female” are conventional, the underlying reproductive phenomenon is not. The fact that anisogamous organisms reproduce through the fusion of two gamete types is no more created by language than the molecular structure of water is created by language. The real issue is whether our categories track a mind-independent feature of nature. In the case of biological sex, they do.

Our exchange encapsulates the entire conflict. On one side is the view that biology describes real features of the world. On the other is the claim that concepts literally create the world, and that our definitions should therefore bend toward achieving social and political goals.

Some people still proclaim that woke has peaked, is now trending down, and that the country is finally moving on. There is some truth to that politically, because the backlash against woke is real and the public is more skeptical and informed than it was five years ago. The Trump administration has moved to restore biological language in federal policy, and more scholars are now willing to defend basic biological realities in print. But surveying the daily output of academia, which I do regularly, gives no indication that the activist project is in retreat. It is simply consolidating. If you want to know where the next round of policy battles will come from, do not watch the news or scroll your social media feed. Read the journals.

Some of my colleagues believe we have entered the “lawfare” stage of this conflict. The people who are reachable have now heard the arguments and chosen their side. The fight is no longer mainly about consciousness-raising, but policy implementation. Which view of sex will be written into state and federal policy? Which view will courts treat as authoritative? Which view will medical boards, licensing agencies, school systems, and bureaucracies be able to cite as settled expertise? Those questions will be answered, in large part, by what appears in the academic literature. Progressives understand this, and are playing the long game by saturating academic journals with ideological nonsense.

The Montana decision should be understood in that light, and serve as a warning. Even in a red state, after years of public controversy, and after legislators tried to write biological reality back into law, the highest court in the state treated that effort as unconstitutional discrimination.

This is why serious scholars, now more than ever, must start actively engaging with activist pseudoscience in academic journals. Social media posts and think pieces are not nearly enough to combat the left’s slow manufacturing of expert consensus where it matters most.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pledged to rein in “woke indoctrination” in public education, he wasn’t bluffing. Over the last several years, he and the legislature have pursued an aggressive legal and governance strategy to push far-left ideology out of taxpayer-funded institutions. The justification is straightforward: the people have the right to demand that public universities not become subsidized activist factories.

Laws can close academic departments and impose subject-area bans on paper, but campuses are still run day-to-day by faculty and administrators who may not be interested in what voters want. When progressive activists dominate a university, they will inevitably try to circumvent the law.

Such efforts appear to be happening at New College today. Though the Gender Studies department was shut down at the Sarasota school, and Florida law forbids the use of state and federal funds to “promote or engage in political or social activism,” faculty continue to oversee work promoting activist pseudoscience, treat opposition to explicit content in K-12 libraries as equivalent to Nazism, and celebrate “queer bibliographies” and “resistance” to elected officials.

Consider a 2025 undergraduate thesis covering the “Evolution of Gender” in drama and fashion. Nova Myhill, a professor of English and Theater, Dance & Performance Studies at New College, sponsored the thesis, which explicitly lists “Gender Studies” as its “Area of Concentration.”

At a glance, the thesis appears to be a broad, benign survey of gender-expression conventions through fashion in the context of theater. But it quickly advances to extreme activist views of sex and biology. The opening section, titled “Our Idea of Sex,” portrays sex in humans not as “concrete” or “permanent” but as something “closer to being reflections of societal preconceptions than anything based only on ‘biology.’” It claims that the idea that humans have two sexes became widespread only “around the mid-1700s” due to “changing values of what was important within identity, class and gender beginning to take the utmost importance when using clothing as a symbol or sign of identity.” It even asserts that “there was a time when we conceived of the human race as only ‘one-sex’,” and that our “re-envisioning of the sexes” during the Enlightenment into two categories—male and female—actually “led to the differentiation and specific designation of reproductive organs; the penis, testicles, ovaries, and uterus.”

If this were the only undergraduate thesis at New College promoting such radical activist views, it might be dismissed. It is not.

In January 2026, the college approved and archived an undergraduate thesis in the Division of Humanities that engaged in political activism and covered Gender Queer and Fun Home—books the sexually explicit content of which has prompted parents to oppose their inclusion in school libraries. Myhill also sponsored this thesis and is thanked effusively in the acknowledgements.

Oddly, this thesis includes two abstracts. The first, more formal one describes an exploration of “book censorship, theft, and destruction,” framed as actions “employed to specifically target queer, trans, Jewish, and other marginalized communities,” and ends by describing the authors’ “queer works” as “an act of cultural legacy, heritage transmission, and resistance.” The second reads like a direct taunt of DeSantis and New College’s policy reforms:

This thesis is about queers, trans people, gender, Nazis, book burning, moral panics, censorship, Magnus Hirshfeld, pornography . . . queer bibliography, the Phantasma, classroom libraries, Ron DeSantis, what it’s like to be erased, and also how people fight back . . . so why not read it already?

This isn’t “academic” in any meaningful sense, but rather activist writing designed to indoctrinate, recruit, and promote activism.

In one section, the thesis classifies Gender Queer as essential reading and mocks DeSantis for displaying redacted pages from the book during his November 2023 debate with California Governor Gavin Newsom. It frames Florida’s higher education reforms as part of an “anti-gender movement” with “chilling reach.”

The thesis also compares Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo’s rhetoric to the “paranoia and persecution of McCarthyism in the 1950s” and claims that he helped incite a “reactive moral panic” like the one behind Nazi-era book purges in 1930s Germany. It compares Rufo’s tweet about abolishing the college’s Gender Studies program to a “long and fiery radio address” delivered by “Joseph Goebbels.” Again, such comparisons are not objective scholarship but political activism.

Other recent theses at New College also veer in an activist direction, including a 2025 thesis on “Queer Resistance and the Fight for Change in Morocco,” a 2026 thesis on “Why Queer People Like Horror Films,” and another in 2025 titled “Who Holds the Mic?: Exploring Image, Control, and Identity in Queer.”

Of course, Florida’s higher-ed reforms don’t ban students from discussing controversial topics in class or engaging in activism in their free time. State leaders intended them to prevent public institutions from using public funds to “promote, support, or maintain” programs or activities that “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “promote or engage in political or social activism.”

The work required to shepherd student theses entails faculty time and labor, institutional oversight, and curriculum funded by and developed under the authority of the university. It strains credulity to present as legitimate scholarship works that push false, ideologically charged views of biology or that describe themselves as works of “resistance.” A process that produces such works appears to flout Florida law’s intent to prevent state and federal funds from being used to “promote or engage in political or social activism.”

None of this is to say that shutting down New College’s gender-studies department was in vain. The volume of activist “scholarship” produced at the institution has declined markedly, and that’s a true achievement.

Nonetheless, Florida’s academic reforms are not self-enforcing. As always, personnel is policy. True believers on the faculty will look for workarounds. If nobody is paying attention, abolished departments will soon reappear inside more traditional ones—in this case, the departments of English and Theater, Dance & Performance Studies.

Institutional responsibility lies with the faculty and administrators who decide which scholarship to approve, endorse, or reward. New College’s trustees and the state legislature can pass resolutions and rewrite statutes, but they cannot monitor every thesis committee or syllabus. That requires constant vigilance, because the pattern is predictable: abolish the department, then watch its ideology migrate to the English department, the history department, or the library.

If New College wants to fulfill its evolution into a post-woke institution, its guardians should not approve scholarship that treats its vital reforms as analogous to a second Holocaust. Leaders should hold faculty accountable when they use university resources to resurrect discarded programs and pursue activism under new names.

This article was originally published in City Journal on April 14, 2026.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

The war against biology has not slowed down. Despite the chatter on X that woke ideology is dead or at least in retreat, a brief internet search reveals that activists are still flooding the zone with sex pseudoscience.

Just in the last few weeks, we’ve seen several examples. Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes published a piece in Science Politics arguing that government efforts to define sex as a biological binary are based on “falsehoods and erroneous assertions.” IFLScience ran an article claiming there is “no clean definition” of biological sex. The Trans Advocacy & Complaints Collective published a piece insisting that “sex does not fit neatly in boxes.” And now a peer-reviewed paper in BioScience claims that teaching students what the authors call “the diversity of biological sex” makes LGBTQIA+ students feel more included and enjoy biology more.

That last example is particularly concerning, because peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals carry more weight than newspaper think pieces or activist blog posts. They influence how biology is taught, how future teachers are trained, and regularly serve as the basis for public policy.

The BioScience paper presents itself as offering a more “accurate” way to teach about biological sex, but what it actually offers is the same sex pseudoscience activists have been pushing for years. It promotes confusion about what sex is, arbitrariness in how it is defined, and a conflation of exceptions and variations with the category itself.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

Editor’s Note

The following is an interview I did with the German skeptics organization Die Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften (GWUP), or in English, the Society for the Scientific Study of Parasciences.

GWUP is a longstanding rationalist and scientific-skeptical organization dedicated to distinguishing evidence-based science from pseudoscientific and paranormal claims, and to providing clear, reliable information so people can make sound decisions.

In this interview, we discuss the biology of sex, why biologists define sex by gametes, the activist frameworks used to challenge the sex binary, the professional consequences of defending basic biological realities, and what scientific skepticism requires when politically charged claims are treated as settled science.

I am pleased to reproduce the interview here from GWUP’s website with permission.

Colin Wright
CEO/Editor-in-Chief, Reality’s Last Stand

Introduction

In November 2025, Wright published “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes” in Archives of Sexual Behavior, a scholarly commentary that has become a touchstone in debates over biological sex. The paper systematically addresses the various models that have been proposed to challenge the sex binary—from chromosomal definitions to sex spectrum theories—and explains why biologists define sex in terms of gametes: sperm and ova.

We spoke with Wright about the science underlying the sex binary, the professional consequences of defending it, and what skeptics can learn from disagreements within their own community.

Q: As skeptics, we care about pseudoscience, but also about exaggerated or plainly false scientific claims. In your view, which findings are misrepresented the most, be it in academia or in public?

A: The reality of the binary nature of biological sex, and the claim that it does not exist.

From New Atheism to the Sex Debate

Q: You came up through the skeptic and new atheist movements. How did you end up focusing on this particular topic?

A: I was heavily involved in pushing back against intelligent design and creationism. Those attacks tended to come from outside the academy—people learning things in churches or popular outlets that weren’t scientifically justifiable. I was in the academy pushing back against public misconceptions that originated outside of it.

With the sex biology issue, the misconceptions started outside the academy, but then quickly moved inside. These ideologies have entered many academic departments, so the leading proponents now tend to be within the academy, and the defenders are as well. A moral component has been attached to this question—it’s not just a scientific question anymore.

When I started talking about it, I expected a scientific argument—‘this is the evidence, you’re wrong because of this.’ But it totally avoided scientific disagreement. They went straight to ‘you’re a terrible, evil person parroting far-right fascist, white supremacist talking points.’ The academy and scientists are now the loudest promoters of these misconceptions, and the academy has a legitimizing effect. If journals and scientists say it, people assume it must be true.

The Archives of Sexual Behavior Paper

Q: What motivated you to write “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes” for Archives of Sexual Behavior?

A: I’ve been writing about this for about seven years. In 2023, I had a peer-reviewed book chapter on the two sexes with Emma Hilton. But the main criticism—partly valid—was that much of what I write appears in popular outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Quillette. These aren’t peer-reviewed journals, so that activists would dismiss my arguments as not scientifically rigorous.

They ignore the fact that people who submit articles pushing back against the sex spectrum stuff often get rejected outright, because journals view these perspectives as socially taboo and morally questionable. So when there was a call for commentaries from Archives of Sexual Behavior on this topic, I thought it was a good opportunity to write something succinct—to get all my arguments into an actual scientific journal that both scientists and the public can cite.

What’s bizarre is that there really weren’t any papers that just spelled out in simple terms what biological sexes are—what it means to be male or female. It’s like gravity: we all observe this force and take for granted that it exists. The same was true for sexes. All biologists understood it once we discovered what sperm and ova were, but few actually wrote it down in explicit terms. Activists exploited that gap. I decided to address this one question head-on because it’s the one being exploited most.

How Biologists Define Sex

Q: For readers who aren’t biologists: how do scientists define biological sex, and why do they say there are exactly two?

A: We need to think about how humanity viewed sex before we even knew what gametes were. We lacked the tools to observe them, yet it wasn’t difficult to recognize that there were two human sexes. We’re sexually dimorphic—men and women look different, have different reproductive anatomy, different functions. Women can get pregnant, gestate, and give birth; men cannot. We had a functional concept of sex, but we didn’t understand the fundamental basis.

We discovered sperm under a microscope in the 1600s and ova in the early 1800s. That’s when we began to understand that what we call males and females are two fundamentally different reproductive strategies: an individual either produces many small sex cells called sperm, or larger sex cells called ova. And this wasn’t unique to humans—it showed up in countless animals and even plants.

We call species that reproduce by fusing a large gamete and a small gamete “anisogamous.” We termed these strategies the ‘male’ strategy and ‘female’ strategy. What does it mean to be male? It means being an individual whose reproductive system has the biological function to produce many small gametes. Females have the biological function to produce fewer, larger gametes.

This became the universal concept of male and female. It’s what unites all species that look and behave nothing like humans. What makes me male, and a snail male, and a fish male, and an asparagus plant male, is that we’re all deploying this reproductive strategy involving small gametes. We have otherwise nothing in common—we look entirely different, our hormones are different.

There are only two sexes because there are only two types of gametes. There’s no intermediate one. Therefore, there can only be two sexes that an individual can have.

Addressing the Counter-Arguments

Q: Your paper identifies five main models used to argue against the sex binary. Could you briefly outline them?

A: First, there’s the conflation of mating types with sexes. Some fungi and slime molds reproduce sexually using gametes of the same size—we call these isogamous species. They have chemical compatibility types between gametes, sometimes thousands of them. Articles about ‘the slime mold with 30,000 sexes’ are based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Sexes refer only to males and females, which are defined by different-sized gametes. Species with same-sized gametes don’t have males and females—they have mating types.

Second, there’s the chromosomal or karyotype model. You’ll hear people say, ‘if you’re XX you’re female, if you’re XY you’re male.’ But this conflates how sex is determined in humans with what sex is. Many crocodilians and turtles don’t have sex chromosomes at all—their sex is determined by egg incubation temperature. People with Klinefelter syndrome (XXY) aren’t a third sex; they’re biologically male. These are chromosomal variations within the two sexes.

Third, there’s the sex spectrum model, which holds that sex is a continuous variable based on genital morphology. Some proponents think males and females aren’t real entities but exist only in a statistical sense—you can be varying degrees of male or female, but not definitively male or female. This ignores gametes entirely and has circular problems: how do you know what genital shape is ‘male’ unless you already know what males are, rooted in gametes?

Fourth, there’s the polythetic categories model—like family resemblance, in which members share overlapping characteristics, with no single feature necessary for membership. They try to apply this to sex, saying it’s a combination of chromosomes, hormones, height, and voice pitch, and many other sex-related traits. But how do you define which chromosomes or hormone profiles are ‘male’ without presupposing what males are, rooted in gametes?

Fifth—and most influential—is the multi-level model, which says we can’t talk about bodies having a sex. Instead, you’d say someone is ‘genetically male’ or ‘hormonally female’ or has a ‘male height.’ But again, how are they determining which chromosomes are male without presupposing that males and females exist apart from chromosomes, inevitably rooted in gametes?

Q: Do proponents of these different models argue among themselves?

A: That’s a good question, and one I’ve asked myself many times. There’s a strange silence and truce between them. I’m not arguing with the sex spectrum people while they argue with the karyotype people and the mating type people about the real definition. It’s all five models versus the binary model.

Even more baffling: there aren’t distinct camps. The same individuals hold all these views simultaneously, even though many are mutually exclusive. Different models are often invoked interchangeably, depending on what seems most persuasive in the moment. The conclusion then becomes, ‘See? Sex isn’t binary.’

It’s rooted in a Queer Theory approach where binaries are thought to signal artificiality and oppression. The emphasis often seems to be less on how many sexes there are than on rejecting the idea that there are only two. Three is fine, ten is fine, an infinite spectrum is fine—it just can’t be two, because two is bigoted. That’s really how the approach works.

The State of the Scientific “Debate”

Q: Is there a genuine controversy among biologists about the definition of sex?

A: If you’re looking at people studying the evolution of biological sex and sexual reproduction, there is overwhelming consensus. However, they’re insulated from cultural debates—just nerds studying computer models of how selection favored two different gamete types. It’s one of the most robust areas in evolutionary biology.

There are parallels to creationism. If you ask creationists about evolution, they’ll say it’s “hotly debated” because they want to portray it that way. With sex, activist and online discourse began framing the issue as controversial. The controversy was spoken into existence, even though it’s baseless and incoherent.

No empirical findings have overturned the core biological framework. No Nobel Prizes have been given for discovering the supposed sex spectrum. Again, it was just spoken into existence.

Professional Consequences

Q: Why aren’t more scientists speaking up?

A: Prominent biologists are speaking up. Richard Dawkins hasn’t written a scientific paper on it, but he’s written explicitly about biological sex and why the gamete definition is the universal and only coherent one. He’s one of the most preeminent biologists of our time, and he totally agrees with me. Jerry Coyne, one of the best evolutionary biologists in the world, shares my work and agrees with what I’m saying, because I’m not saying anything extreme. I’m really just articulating basic biology.

But we’d get more scientists willing to write about this if people who do—like me—weren’t immediately slandered as white supremacists and transphobes. Constantly defending yourself from such accusations is not a great way to build a career. That’s why it’s almost impossible to get pre-tenure faculty to speak up about this.

Writing about it has significantly harmed my academic career. Not everyone can start a Substack and make money as a public commentator. I was fortunate to get into this topic early, before anyone was really talking about it. Many people simply can’t afford to jump into this debate. It would be terrible for their careers.

What Would Change Your Mind?

Q: What evidence would you need to change your view that there are only two sexes?

A: That’s a crucial question. In the skeptic community, you always need to have something that could convince you you’re wrong. If you don’t, you’re just a zealot, not doing science.

For me, it’s really easy: we define sexes by the type of gamete an individual is biologically capable of producing. You’d need to present a third novel gamete type—in addition to or intermediate between sperm and ova—that an individual’s reproductive system could have the function to produce. That’s the only thing that could make there be more than two sexes.

Reactions to Your Sexual Archives Commentary

Q: Your Archives of Sexual Behavior article has drawn critique from other commentators (Mahr, 2026). One central criticism is that your claim that there are only two sexes is not simply an empirical conclusion, but effectively an a priori assumption built into your framework.

A: My reply is that the my claim that there are only two sexes is not an a priori assumption. It’s an a posteriori inference based on the observable fact that sexual reproduction in anisogamous species involves only two gamete types — small gametes (sperm) and large gametes (ova). In the article, I explicitly frame the disagreement this way: the labels we give to individual organisms that produce either large or small gametes—female and male, respectively—is a human convention, but the things being labeled are recurring natural phenomena that we did not invent and cannot change.

So what I’m doing is not “assume two sexes, then define sex by gametes.” The order is the reverse: we observe a stable reproductive division (sperm-producers vs ova-producers) across anisogamous taxa, and we use that division to define the two reproductive classes in a way that is cross-taxon coherent and explanatorily useful.

Q: Another central criticism is challenging the idea that the gamete-centered definition is objective or universal, calling it an “illusion of view-from-nowhere.” How do you reply to that?

A: I grant the trivial point that science is a human activity with a long history. But that does not imply that biology cannot describe mind-independent features of the world. In the article, I make this point by analogy: humans discover facts (like the structure of water or the heliocentric organization of the solar system) and then represent them through language and models, but the truth of those facts doesn’t depend on culture or how individual scientists are socially situated.

If we were visited by an advanced alien society from another galaxy, they would have absolutely nothing in common with us culturally or even biologically. But they would still be able to make the basic observations that the Sun sits at the center of our solarsystem, that water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, and that certain species reproduce by fusing two distinct types of gametes.

The gamete-based classification is “objective” because it tracks a real functional distinction in nature—what reproductive role an organism’s reproductive system has with respect to sperm vs ova. That is precisely what makes “male” and “female” comparable across taxa rather than collapsing into shifting trait-bundles that vary from species to species. No other basis for the sexes is biologically coherent.

Q: Yet another criticism raised is that a binary framing of sex risks invalidating the lived experiences of intersex and gender-diverse individuals. What is your response to that concern, and how do you see the relationship between a biological classification claim and preferences or recommendations for specific policies?

A: First, I’d separate questions that are often blended. One question is descriptive: what “sex” is as a biological classification in anisogamous species. Another question is normative: what legal rights, accommodations, or social practices we should adopt in light of conflicts of interest, fairness concerns, compassion, and so on. The article is explicit that these are distinct domains: policy preferences should never be used to dictate biology, even if biology can and should, when necessary and appropriate, inform policy discussions.

Q: The critique also refers to the claim that around 2% of people are intersex. How do you assess that number, and how is it relevant to the claim that there are only two biological sexes?

A: I assess the “~2% intersex” figure as misleading because it depends on an overly expansive definition of “intersex” that counts many conditions that are not sex-ambiguous in any clinically meaningful sense—i.e., it treats “intersex” as any deviation from a “Platonic ideal” of dimorphism across chromosomes, genitalia, gonads, or hormones. That definitional move inflates prevalence by design.

In the article, I point to Leonard Sax’s response: if “intersex” is to remain clinically meaningful, it should be restricted to cases where chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or where the phenotype appears sexually ambiguous. This results in an estimate on the order of ~0.018% rather than ~2%.

But—and this is crucial—whichever estimate one prefers or is more accurate, it is not actually relevant to the question of how many sexes there are, because rare developmental conditions do not constitute additional sexes. They do not create new reproductive classes with the function of producing novel gamete types beyond sperm and ova. At most, they create atypical or ambiguous development relative to one of the two existing reproductive classes.

How to Engage

Q: How do you deal with people who seem impervious to evidence on this issue?

A: Very few can have their mind changed, but I’ve encountered some who were genuinely confused—they bought into activist rhetoric but weren’t themselves ideological. I’ve been able to explain things, and they’ll say, ‘I see what you’re saying. I’ll modify how I speak about this.’ That’s great.

But most people won’t change, because it has become political to them. So I’m not fixated on trying to change their minds. Instead, I try to model the legitimate scientific approach: stick to facts, make arguments, don’t call people names, don’t make ad hominem remarks. Be the calmest person in the room. Address the facts directly but politely.

If you do all this and you’re met with vitriol and name-calling, people watching can see there’s some weird dynamic—this guy is clearly not crazy, he’s intelligent and calm. That juxtaposition does a lot of harm to their cause. People can see who the ideologue is in the scenario. I think that’s valuable.

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About the Author

Jowan Mahmod, PhD, is a multidisciplinary researcher focused on how digital technologies, identity, and shifting social norms are transforming contemporary societies. Dr. Mahmod’s work challenges dominant narratives by examining the psychological and sociological forces behind polarization, perception, and collective behavior. She is currently writing a second book that shows why polarization makes more sense once the deeper dysfunctions driving it are understood. You can follow her work at wehavebeenfooled.substack.com.

The question of whether Islam is compatible with Western values has become particularly loaded, as the discussion is assumed to revolve around binaries such as “good versus bad” or “progressive versus backward.” Framed that way, it turns into a moral question. It trivializes—and often obscures—a conclusion that is fairly straightforward from a historical and rational perspective, even if we set aside Islam’s more extreme manifestations.

Value systems don’t emerge from nothing. They are shaped by the social, political, and economic conditions in which they develop, and by the incentives and constraints they were forced to navigate. A comparison with medieval Europe makes the point without triggering the same defensiveness. No one argues that the sacred and moral order of thirteenth-century Europe—a world of religious absolutism and patriarchy, where women were legally and socially subordinate to men and heretics were persecuted—could function within today’s secular democracies.

What works under one set of conditions often does not hold under another. Seen this way, asking whether an Islamic value system sits comfortably within modern liberal democracies should be no more inflammatory than asking whether medieval European values are compatible with contemporary Western society.

Values are not just private beliefs about right and wrong. They are highly consequential because they shape motives, attitudes, and goals. They form an ordered set of priorities that characterizes and orients people—what they pursue, what they tolerate, what they fear losing, and what they are willing to sacrifice, both individually and collectively. When a society’s value system shifts, those priorities shift with it—and so does the society.

The irony is that Western societies are, at this very moment, in the middle of their own value shift—one in which postmodern sensibilities increasingly compete with the ideals of modernity. That clash makes something easy to see: when incompatible value systems insist on shaping public life, conflict and polarization are the predictable result. The friction shows up not only in policy, but in the regulation of language and speech. Yet this basic logic is often treated as impolite—or simply ignored—when the conversation turns to Islam. The omission is even more striking given that many of the postmodern generation’s normative expectations rest on a worldview that is fundamentally at odds with the Islamic one.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

Author’s Note

In 2025, I published a Commentary in Archives of Sexual Behavior titled “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes,” in which I laid out the empirical case for the binary nature of sex and addressed several of the most common activist frameworks used to deny or obscure it. The piece has since been accessed more than 30,000 times on the journal’s website, making it the 11th most accessed paper in the journal’s 55-year history.

In January 2026, Dana Mahr, a German scholar of science and technology studies, published a Letter to the Editor critiquing my Commentary through the lens of “feminist epistemology.” I did not find the critique persuasive, to put it mildly. I was invited to respond, and respond I did.

Ever since I began writing publicly about the biology of sex in response to the spread of sex-and-gender pseudoscience, all I have wanted is serious academic debate. Instead, I and others who have tried to defend biological reality—among them Carole Hooven, Emma Hilton, Alex Byrne, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Tomas Bogardus, Heather Heying, and others—have routinely been met with personal attacks and sneering dismissal rather than substantive engagement.

That has begun to change. Over the last decade, as dissenting academics have refused to be silenced or driven out, activists have lost some of their ability to suppress debate through censorship, stigma, and institutional pressure. Increasingly, they are being forced to defend their ideas in public, such as in court and, at last, on the pages of academic journals. That is unlikely to end well for ideologies that treat the sexes as social constructs. Such ideas may survive within the insular ideological circles found in many humanities departments, but they collapse on contact with reality and serious criticism.

I am extremely pleased to have this exchange on the academic record. Some early reactions on X suggested that responding was pointless because scholars like Mahr are too ideologically committed ever to change their minds. Perhaps. But neither Mahr nor any other postmodern academic are ever my primary target audience. The audience I primarily write for is the broader scientific community and the general public, who I believe are still fully capable of recognizing the difference between a clear, good-faith argument and rhetoric designed to obscure, evade, or manipulate. Just as importantly, I hope this exchange helps model what scholarly disagreement should look like: direct engagement with arguments, not snark, slander, or character assassination.

If you enjoy my response below, please consider sharing it on social media.

I welcome Mahr’s (2026) Letter to the Editor critiquing my Commentary (Wright, 2025) on the nature and number of the sexes. Academic disagreement provides an opportunity to clarify points of dispute and potential confusion, and to equip both the scientific community and the broader public with a more accurate understanding of the underlying biology. Because debates about sex are increasingly consequential for public policy, I appreciate the opportunity to respond to Mahr’s specific points. For clarity, I address my disagreements in the order they appear.

Mahr’s first critique is that I allegedly treat the binary “two-and only two” nature of sex as an “a priori” assumption, and that this “presumes a neutral, context-free scientific fact.” Mahr writes that “The very act of defining ‘male’ and ‘female’ by gametes is not a purely descriptive truth but a choice shaped by historical and cultural norms.” While I agree that the labels we assign to things are human conventions—we could have used different words than male and female—the substantive claim at issue is not a label but the observable and recurring natural reproductive phenomenon of anisogamy.

My argument is not “a priori” in the sense of being asserted before observation. It is an a posteriori argument based on the observation that, across anisogamous taxa, individuals participate in reproduction via reproductive systems with the function to produce either small gametes (sperm) or large gametes (ova) (Hilton & Wright, 2023; Minot, 1888). The nomenclature we use for these reproductive classes is a human convention, but the underlying biology is not. Here’s an analogy: Humans named “water” long before we knew its composition, and only later discovered through experiment that it is a molecule composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (H₂O) (Edelstein, 1948; Eisenberg & Kauzmann, 1969). We could have chosen a different name for the molecule, but its structure was what it was before we discovered it and would remain the same regardless of what we called it. Likewise, the two reproductive strategies based on producing either small and large gametes predate any human categorization by over a billion years (Butterfield, 2000).

Mahr then rejects my claim that the gamete-centered definition is objective or universal, calling such claims a “god trick” and an “illusion of view-from-nowhere,” and appealing to feminist epistemology to argue that scientific categories are historically and socially situated. In the broad sense, science is indeed a human activity embedded in history. But it does not follow that biology cannot therefore describe objective, mind-independent features of the world. Many scientific claims are objective in the relevant sense: The Sun sits at the center of our solar system (Copernicus, 1543); water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen in a 2:1 ratio (von Humboldt & Gay-Lussac, 1805). Humans had to discover these facts and represent them through language and models, but their truth is not dependent on culture. Likewise, male and female as reproductive classes based on gamete size are an observable, general phenomenon that makes these categories coherent, comparable across taxa, and explanatorily useful (Hilton & Wright, 2023). The question is not whether or how scientists are “socially situated,” but whether the proposed classification tracks a real and recurrent functional distinction in nature. In anisogamous species, it does.

Mahr next argues that a gamete-based definition “ignores the many other biological features that vary (chromosomes, hormones, brain structures, etc.),” and claims that the “biological elements commonly linked to ‘sex’ (including cells, tissues, molecules, structures, and pathways) do not neatly divide into two distinct categories.” From this, Mahr concludes that defining sex “strictly by gamete size is a reduction that omits these complexities.” This objection is addressed directly in my original Commentary’s discussion of “polythetic” accounts of sex (Wright, 2025). There, I described the polythetic view as one in which sex is treated as “an aggregate of traits—chromosomes, gonads, gametes, hormones, neuroanatomy, secondary sex characteristics, and other sexually dimorphic traits—and individuals are assigned degrees of maleness or femaleness according to how their overall profile aligns with what is considered male-typical or female-typical.”

The difficulty with this view is not that trait variation is uninteresting, but that polythetic models conflate determinants and downstream correlates of sex with sex itself. As I wrote, “Traits are labeled ‘male-typical’ or ‘female-typical’ because they correlate with males and females already identified independently—ultimately by reference to gametes.” In other words, the polythetic view collapses in on itself because it depends on the very classificatory foundation—male and female as functional reproductive classes rooted in gametes—it seeks to replace.

The gamete-based definition does not deny biological variation; it organizes it. Chromosomes, hormones, genital development, and many dimorphic traits vary—sometimes substantially—within each sex, and development can produce atypical outcomes. But variation in correlates of sex is not the same thing as variation in sex itself. In anisogamous organisms, the universal distinction that makes “male” and “female” biologically comparable across taxa is reproductive function with respect to sperm versus ova (Bogardus, 2025). This is also why it is a mistake to treat any of these correlates, whether individually or collectively, as constitutive of sex.

For instance, there is nothing inherently “male” about a Y chromosome as such. In mammals, the Y chromosome happens to play a central role in triggering male development (Wilhelm et al., 2007); in birds, the sex chromosomes differ (ZW systems) (Ellegren, 2000); and many reptiles lack sex chromosomes entirely (Janzen & Paukstis, 1991). Yet despite the diversity of sex determination mechanisms (Bachtrog et al., 2014), the sex classes across taxa remain intelligible and comparable because they remain anchored in gamete size. This is also why sex change in sequential hermaphrodites is intelligible: We identify the transition precisely by a shift in which type of gamete the organism’s reproductive system has the function to produce (Avise & Mank, 2009). Without gametes as the universal defining trait, “male” and “female” lose all cross-taxon coherence and become nothing more than meaningless labels attached to shifting bundles of correlates.

Mahr then takes issue with my claim that definitional clarity has “scientific and societal benefits,” arguing that “rigid essentialism about sex often undergirds exclusionary norms,” including when “policy-makers or courts cite ‘science’ to restrict transgender rights.” This concern highlights an important distinction. One issue is descriptive: What an individual’s sex is as a biological classification in anisogamous species. Another is normative: What rights or accommodations a society ought to adopt for males and females. My claims about the number of sexes and how they are defined are not grounded in a preference for any policy outcome, but in what makes the categories biologically coherent and explanatorily useful. People are free to advocate for many different policies regarding sport, bathrooms, or even social recognition. But while biology can and should inform policy, policy preferences should never be used to dictate biology.

Finally, Mahr writes that the binary view “risks invalidating the lived experiences of intersex and gender-diverse individuals,” references “non-binary genders,” and invokes the claim that “a large body of research shows that about 2% of people have intersex traits that challenge a simple XX/XY schema.” My Commentary was intentionally about the biology of sex, not gender identity, roles, or expression. Those are separate topics that are irrelevant to how many sexes there are and how they are defined in evolutionary and reproductive terms.

With respect to the claim that “about 2% of people have intersex traits that challenge a simple XX/XY schema,” it is both misleading and, as presented, poorly supported by the citations provided (Fausto-Sterling, 1993, 2025). The widely repeated “2%” figure is arrived at by adopting an overly expansive definition of “intersex” as deviation from a “Platonic ideal of physical dimorphism at the chromosomal, genital, gonadal, or hormonal levels” (Blackless et al., 2000). Because conforming to a “Platonic ideal” is an impossibly high standard, this approach dramatically inflates prevalence by counting many non-ambiguous conditions as “intersex.” In response, Sax (2002) argued that if “intersex” is to retain a clinically meaningful definition, it should be “restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female.” Under this narrower, realistic, and clinically useful definition, the prevalence estimate drops two orders of magnitude to approximately 0.018%. However, the existence and prevalence of DSDs or “intersex” conditions are irrelevant to the question of how many sexes there are. While developmental variation may produce sexually ambiguous phenotypes in extremely rare cases, they do not constitute additional or intermediate sexes because they do not result in reproductive anatomy with the function of producing novel gamete types beyond sperm and ova.

In sum, Mahr’s critique is mainly about the sociology of categories and the policy implications of scientific debates. Those are fair topics to discuss, but they do not change the biological basis for how the sexes are defined. The sex binary is not an “a priori” assumption, but an empirical observation that there exist only two distinct gamete types in anisogamous species. Treating sex as a polythetic bundle of correlates confuses the determinants and downstream effects of sex with sex itself, and ultimately relies on the gamete foundation it seeks to undermine.

The renowned geneticist, Dobzhansky (1973), wrote that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” highlighting evolution as the unifying framework that makes life’s diversity, complexity, and interconnectedness comprehensible. I contend that a parallel statement applies similarly to reproductive biology: Nothing in the biology of the sexes makes sense except in the light of gametes.

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References

Avise, J. C., & Mank, J. E. (2009). Evolutionary perspectives on hermaphroditism in fishes. Sexual Development, 3(2–3), 152–163.

Bachtrog, D., Mank, J. E., Peichel, C. L., Kirkpatrick, M., Otto, S. P., Ashman, T.-L., Hahn, M. W., Kitano, J., Mayrose, I., Ming, R., Perrin, N., Ross, L., Valenzuela, N., Vamosi, J. C., & Tree of Sex Consortium. (2014). Sex determination: Why so many ways of doing it? PLoS Biology, 12(7), Article e1001899.

Blackless, M., Charuvastra, A., Derryck, A., Fausto-Sterling, A., Lauzanne, K., & Lee, E. (2000). How sexually dimorphic are we? Review and synthesis. American Journal of Human Biology, 12(2), 151–166.

Bogardus, T. (2025). The nature of the sexes: Why biology matters. Taylor & Francis.

Butterfield, N. J. (2000). Bangiomorpha pubescens n. gen., n. sp.: Implications for the evolution of sex, multicellularity, and the Mesoproterozoic/Neoproterozoic radiation of eukaryotes. Paleobiology, 26(3), 386–404.

Copernicus, N. (1543). De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Johannes Petreius.

Dobzhansky, T. (1973). Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. The American Biology Teacher, 35(3), 125–129.

Edelstein, S. M. (1948). Priestley settles the water controversy. Chymia, 1, 123–137.

Eisenberg, D., & Kauzmann, W. (1969). The structure and properties of water. Clarendon Press.

Ellegren, H. (2000). Evolution of the avian sex chromosomes and their role in sex determination. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 15(5), 188–192.

Fausto-Sterling, A. (1993). The five sexes: Why male and female are not enough. The Sciences, 33(2), 20–24.

Fausto-Sterling, A. (2025). Rethinking gender/sex identity. American Journal of Human Biology, 37(4), Article e70044.

Hilton, E., & Wright, C. (2023). Two sexes. In A. Sullivan & S. Todd (Eds.), Sex and gender (pp. 16–34). Routledge.

Janzen, F. J., & Paukstis, G. L. (1991). Environmental sex determination in reptiles: Ecology, evolution, and experimental design. Quarterly Review of Biology, 66(2), 149–179.

Mahr, D. (2026). Response to Wright’s (2025) “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes.” Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Minot, C. S. (1888). Sex. In A. H. Buck (Ed.), A reference handbook of the medical sciences embracing the entire range of scientific and practical medicine and allied science (Vol. 6, pp. 436–438). William Wood and Company.

Sax, L. (2002). How common is intersex? A response to Anne Fausto-Sterling. Journal of Sex Research, 39(3), 174–178.

von Humboldt, A., & Gay-Lussac, J. L. (1805). Expériences sur les moyens eudiométriques, et sur la proportion des principes constituans de l’atmosphère. Journal De Physique, De Chimie, D’histoire Naturelle Et des Arts, 60, 129–168.

Wilhelm, D., Palmer, S., & Koopman, P. (2007). Sex determination and gonadal development in mammals. Physiological Reviews, 87(1), 1–28.

Wright, C. M. (2025). Why there are exactly two sexes. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 54, 3941–3945.

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About the Author

Black Stag is the pseudonym of a writer and independent researcher, historian, and media scholar documenting the emergence of extremist ideologies historical trends, and media aesthetics in the furry fandom. He offers a first person perspective on the ground perspective of the fandom’s influence on society. He writes under a pseudonym due to the contentious nature of the subject and the documented hostility directed toward critics within the community. Subscribe to his Substack.

I’m a furry.

That’s probably not the sentence most readers expect to see at the beginning of an essay in Reality’s Last Stand. But it’s the truth, and it’s the place I have to start.

For more than two decades I’ve been part of the furry fandom—an online and offline subculture centered around anthropomorphic animal characters, artwork, role-playing, and elaborate costumes called “fursuits.” For most people on the outside, that description probably sounds odd, maybe even absurd and juvenile. But for those of us inside it, the fandom has often felt like something closer to a home: a place where creative people who never quite fit anywhere else could build their own communities.

For a lot of us, it still does.

But over the past several years I’ve watched something inside that community begin to change. Slowly at first, then more visibly. The shift has been subtle enough that many outsiders would never notice it, but those of us who have spent long enough in the fandom can feel it.

And in a few deeply disturbing cases, that shift has spilled out into the real world.

Thomas Crooks, the man who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump frequented in online spaces known for their furry fandom. Charlie Kirk’s likely assassin, Tyler Robinson, had a documented furry fixation, including a FurAffinity account, and even engraved one of his bullet casing with a well-known furry meme. The Dallas ICE facility shooter, Joshua Jahn, also appears to have been involved in the furry community based on several of his social media posts.

The details of those crimes are still being investigated and debated, and this essay is not an attempt to litigate any of those cases. I leave that for others to do.

What I want to explain, speaking as someone who has lived inside the fandom for more than twenty years, is the environment those individuals emerged from. The social dynamics, sense of identity, and ideological pressures that have slowly transformed parts of what was once a harmless, if eccentric, creative community into something dangerous.

Most furries are still exactly what they have always been: artists, hobbyists, animators, or ordinary people blowing off steam after work by inhabiting imaginary animal characters. But like many online subcultures, the fandom has developed pockets where extreme ideologies and apocalyptic ways of thinking fester unchecked.

This essay isn’t meant as an attack on the furry fandom as a whole. It is an attempt to explain how a subculture build around creativity and friendship has, in some corners, become vulnerable to ideological radicalization, social isolation, and increasingly dangerous rhetoric.

The fandom makes for a strange case study. It’s poorly understood by the public and frequently misrepresented by the media. But precisely because of that confusion, it offers a revealing window into how modern online communities can drift toward extremism without many people noticing.

I’ve spent twenty years inside this world. That comes with a certain responsibility to speak up when something is clearly going wrong.

And something is clearly going wrong.

A Subculture Much Larger Than People Realize

Most people have only the vaguest sense that furries exist at all. When they do hear about the fandom, it’s usually through jokes or sensationalized media coverage.

The reality is that the community is far larger and more economically significant than outsiders tend to assume.

Take conventions, for example. These gatherings are the public face of the fandom, and their scale surprises almost everyone the first time they see the numbers.

According to Wikifur, the flagship convention Anthrocon drew 18,357 attendees in 2025. Furry Weekend Atlanta reported 17,736, and Midwest FurFest nearly 16,800. Dozens of smaller conventions attract five thousand attendees or more. Worldwide, there are more than fifty major furry conventions.

For a few days each year, entire hotels—and sometimes entire downtown districts—fill with people wearing elaborate animal costumes.

Cities have learned to expect the surge. Pittsburgh, which hosts Anthrocon, has embraced the event so enthusiastically that local restaurants and bars treat it as a themed weekend. Bartenders stock extra straws so fursuiters can drink without removing their oversized costume heads. The convention’s estimated economic impact on the city approaches ten million dollars in just a few days.

At Anthro New England, some local businesses even offered a Furry discount.

This pattern repeats wherever large furry conventions appear. What looks like a quirky hobby from the outside is, in reality, a substantial cultural ecosystem.

And conventions are only part of it.

The Creative Economy of the Fandom

An enormous cottage industry exists around the fandom’s creative output.

Fursuits themselves are highly specialized custom costumes. According to people in the industry, there are roughly a hundred full-time professional suit makers. Some have waiting lists that stretch years into the future.

The prices reflect that demand. It’s not unusual for a suit to cost $10,000 or more. A recent commission slot from the well-known maker GlitzyFox Studios sold at auction for $21,700. Another reportedly went for $50,000 in 2024.

Artwork is equally central to the fandom. Most members create an original character—called a fursona—that represents them within the community. Artists then produce custom illustrations of those characters.

Typical commissions might cost $200, but high-profile artists sometimes charge thousands. In rare cases, single illustrations have sold for $7,500 or more.

The digital world has expanded the economy further. Platforms like VRChat allow people to embody their fursonas as animated avatars. Base avatar models sell for $50 or more, while custom models can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Some creators specialize in accessories, clothing, or animation systems for these avatars.

Then there are VRTubers—streamers who broadcast on Twitch, YouTube, or TikTok using animated animal avatars. Successful ones run entire small businesses around their online persona, selling merchandise and subscriptions. I’ve heard about someone leave a professional career as a chef to stream as a fox character online. With moderate success, a VRTuber can make close to $90,000 a year streaming a few days a week.

In other words, the fandom isn’t just a hobby. It’s an interconnected digital economy.

Most participants, however, still treat it as exactly that—a hobby.

Hobbyists and “Lifestylers”

For the majority of people, being a furry is something they do in their spare time. They have careers, families, and other hobbies. Maybe they commission artwork occasionally or attend a convention once a year. Many never wear a fursuit at all.

If you met them in everyday life, you might never know they were involved in the fandom.

But there is another category of participant that has grown more prominent in recent years: what insiders sometimes call the “furry lifestyler.”

For these individuals, the fandom—and their fursona—becomes the center of their identity.

Their day often begins when they return home, surround themselves with objects and art that reflect the furry life they created, and leave their everyday self behind. Their social circles consist almost entirely of other furries. They may live together in shared housing. Their online presence revolves around their fursona rather than their real identity.

The culture surrounding these groups can become intensely insular. Sexual subcultures, heavy drinking, and sometimes drug use are common elements. Normal social boundaries blur. The outside world becomes distant, even hostile.

At that point, the fandom stops being a hobby and starts functioning more like a closed social ecosystem.

And closed ecosystems are vulnerable to radicalization.

Social Isolation and Radicalization

The furry community attracts a disproportionately large number of people who already feel socially isolated.

Many are neurodivergent. Many struggle with mental health issues. Some are simply individuals who never felt comfortable in traditional social settings.

None of that is inherently bad. Communities built around shared interests often provide support for people who might otherwise feel alone.

But isolation can also make people susceptible to ideological pressure.

Within insular online communities, political narratives can spread quickly and go largely unchallenged. Friend groups often reinforce those narratives rather than question them.

Over time, identity politics and extreme ideological positions have become increasingly common in certain parts of the fandom. Criticism of those beliefs is often interpreted not as disagreement but as a direct attack on personal identity.

And that reaction makes sense if you understand how identity works within furry culture.

The Fursona and the Inverted Social World

Most social relationships develop gradually.

Psychologists sometimes describe this process using social penetration theory, often visualized as an onion. People start with superficial conversation—weather, hobbies, small talk—and gradually move toward deeper personal disclosures over months or years.

Furry culture often inverts that process.

Because much of the community developed online, interactions frequently begin with highly personal information. Someone’s profile might immediately reveal their sexual interests, kinks, political views, hobbies, and emotional struggles.

When furries meet each other online, they often begin conversations already deep inside the “onion.” Sexual topics may appear within the first few exchanges. We see their erotica, their porn, often in the form of art related to their fursonas.

Ironically, the most basic personal details—like someone’s real name—may remain unknown for years.

I’ve known people in the fandom for decades whose real names I still don’t know. They know me only by my fursona. I might know roughly what city they live in, but not their address.

Yet those friendships can feel intensely personal.

That inversion—deep emotional exposure paired with anonymity—creates a strange social environment.

It can foster intimacy. But it can also create instability.

Identity and Perceived Threat

For many participants, the fursona becomes deeply intertwined with their sense of self.

Criticism directed toward the culture surrounding that identity can feel like a personal attack. If someone perceives the outside world as trying to erase that identity, the emotional response can be extreme.

Political events sometimes amplify those fears.

For example, the overturning of Roe v. Wade triggered widespread panic within parts of the fandom. Some members interpreted it as evidence that broader LGBT rights—including same-sex marriage—were under immediate threat.

Many furries identify somewhere within the LGBT spectrum. According to surveys conducted by FurScience, roughly 60–70 percent of participants report same-sex attraction, with about 30 percent identifying as exclusively gay. The same surveys show relatively high numbers of respondents identifying as transgender or non-binary compared to the general population.

In a community with those demographics, political rhetoric can quickly become extreme and construed as existential.

Public figures like Donald Trump or Charlie Kirk are sometimes framed not simply as political opponents but as avatars of a movement bent on destroying the people within the fandom.

Most participants express that anxiety through rhetoric—angry posts, exaggerated language, dramatic memes.

But occasionally, individuals take that rhetoric seriously.

In hindsight, it is obvious that the fandom in its current form was predestined to create people like Thomas Cooks, Tyler Robinson, and Joshua Jahns.

Media Distrust and the Closed Circle

Another factor complicates the situation: the fandom’s long history of distrust toward the media.

In the early 2000s, most mainstream coverage of furries was sensationalistic or mocking. Television segments often focused exclusively on sexual aspects of the fandom or portrayed participants as strange curiosities.

Those portrayals left a lasting mark.

Convention organizers began actively training volunteers to keep reporters away from attendees. Media access was restricted. Online spaces locked down privacy settings. Communities closed ranks.

The intention was understandable—protect members from ridicule.

But the unintended consequence was an information vacuum. When communities isolate themselves from outside scrutiny, internal problems become easier to ignore.

Only recently has more positive media coverage begun appearing, often from outlets sympathetic to progressive politics. But even that coverage hasn’t fully rebuilt trust.

Many furries still instinctively assume that journalists are hostile.

How I Got Here

Ironically, the media coverage that introduced me to the fandom was exactly the kind that caused so many problems.

In 2001, MTV aired a short documentary by filmmaker Rick Castro titled “Plushies and Furries” as part of its Sex2K series. It portrayed the community in a lurid, voyeuristic way.

Yet it caught my attention.

Like many people who eventually join the fandom, I had grown up fascinated by anthropomorphic characters—Disney’s Gargoyles, episodes like “Tyger, Tyger” from Batman: The Animated Series, characters like Slappy Squirrel from Animaniacs.

Seeing adults who shared that fascination felt liberating.

I went looking for the community online and quickly found it: DeviantArt, early art forums like VCL, and eventually FurAffinity, which became one of the fandom’s central hubs.

I created my own character. I commissioned artwork. I started reaching out to artists whose designs I admired.

And something unexpected happened: I made real friends.

For years, the fandom felt genuinely inclusive. Creativity mattered more than politics. Artists and fans collaborated freely. People from different backgrounds connected through shared imagination.

Politics existed, but it stayed mostly in its own corners.

That began to change in the 2010s.

The Cultural Shift

Over time, ideological activism started permeating the fandom’s spaces.

Neopronouns, new sexuality and identity labels, and political slogans became increasingly prominent on profiles and banners. Social dynamics shifted toward enforcing ideological conformity.

At the same time, parasocial relationships—intense emotional attachments to online personalities—became more common.

The community grew more polarized. The middle ground shrank.

I watched as friend groups fractured, as harassment campaigns targeted dissenters, and as internal conflicts escalated—often between furries themselves.

Pornography remained abundant and often functioned as a distraction from deeper problems.

But beneath the surface, the culture was changing.

A Community at a Crossroads

None of this means the furry fandom is inherently violent or extremist. The overwhelming majority of participants are harmless hobbyists who just enjoy art, costumes, and imaginative characters.

But the structural conditions that exist within the fandom—social isolation, identity fusion, ideological echo chambers, and distrust of outside scrutiny—can create fertile ground for radicalization.

That’s why confronting these issues matters.

The goal is not to destroy the community. It’s to prevent it from destroying itself.

For me personally, speaking out about this is uncomfortable. It means criticizing a culture that shaped much of my adult life.

But silence would be worse.

Communities survive only when they’re willing to confront their own failures.

I hope the furry fandom can still do that.

And if it does, perhaps it can rediscover the creativity and openness that drew so many of us there in the first place.

This essay only scratches the surface.

In the weeks and months ahead, I will be publishing a series of longer essays on my Substack examining the culture of the fandom in detail: how its social networks operate, how ideological factions developed, and why certain online dynamics can push vulnerable people toward extreme worldviews.

I’m writing those pieces for readers primarily outside the fandom.

The uncomfortable truth is that furries are unlikely to solve these problems on our own. Communities that become insular often lose the ability to correct themselves. What is needed now is informed, thoughtful engagement from people willing to understand what is happening rather than dismiss it as a fringe internet oddity.

If you would like to follow the series as it develops, you can do so here:

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About the Author

Joseph Burgo, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist with over 40 years of experience, specializing in narcissism, shame, and psychological defense mechanisms. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including The Narcissist You Know and Why Do I Do That?, and has written for mainstream outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Psychology Today.

Thanks in large part to Dr. Anna Hutchinson speaking and writing extensively about her experience at the Tavistock’s GIDS, we know how difficult if not impossible it can be to maintain and pursue an open-minded, questioning approach to trans-identified clients within an institute devoted to gender ideology. One remedy, she notes, is for psychologists to move into private practice to escape institutional environments that discourage traditional psychotherapeutic approaches.

Such a move might offer relief from institutes captured by gender ideology, but psychotherapists can’t escape a society saturated in the same belief system. Even solo practitioners today find it challenging to practice as we might once have done because the world around us disputes our authority as experts, undermines family structures that have traditionally supported our work, and replaces long-held understandings of human nature with newly minted and unevidenced theories presented as unassailable truth.

In other words, it’s difficult to practice traditional psychotherapy in a milieu so different from the social and scientific environment which gave birth to our ideas about human psychology and the drivers of psychopathology. The three main areas where these differences stand out most clearly are: (1) changes in school curricula; (2) the democratization of knowledge via the Internet; and more subtly (3) a pervasive disbelief in the concept of legitimate authority.

Let’s begin with the schools.

Back in 2015, Stephanie Davies-Arai founded Transgender Trend, a parents’ and teachers’ campaign group challenging the introduction of gender ideology into British schools. Davies-Arai has tirelessly tracked down evidence that this ideology permeates the educational system; it shapes curricula, resources, and school policies in ways that pressure children to accept gender identity as indisputable fact. This ideology is now so entrenched that it influences teacher training, classroom teaching, and pastoral care, leaving educators afraid to question its claims. Schools have become a primary channel through which children are indoctrinated into gender ideology, treating contested beliefs as scientific truth and discarding dissent as “unkind” or “transphobic.”

Writing about the educational system here in the United States, Logan Lancing and James Lindsay set forth parallel evidence in their 2024 book The Queering of the American Child. “Queer Theory,” they argue, has evolved into a pervasive ideological force within American education, healthcare, and youth-culture institutions. As Davies-Arai described in the UK, these authors show how Queer Theory has effectively infiltrated schools and teacher-training programs in America, with the goal of reconfiguring children’s understandings of sex, gender, and identity. Advocates of Queer Theory use educational policy and curricula to destabilize traditional categories of male/female, parent/child, and normal/abnormal, in the process promoting “social and medical transition” as a normative path for children.

Many of the adolescent clients who come to us in our private practices have already spent years in school environments permeated by gender ideology and Queer Theory. As a reader of Reality’s Last Stand, you probably believe, like me, that there are two and only two sexes, that one’s sex is immutable and that nobody can change from one sex to the other. Our adolescent clients have often heard a different story from adults they respect–their teachers–and have read books and handouts describing sex as existing along a spectrum. They’ve been told that one’s gender identity sometimes doesn’t align with one’s birth sex, in which case hormones and surgery can bring them into alignment.

In short, we often have very different “priors” from our teenage clients, and they will bolster their own views by reference to the revered teachers who trained them, or the textbooks they have read. They also find support on the Internet.

Whenever I consult with parents of a trans-identified teen, I almost always tell them to stop arguing about gender with their child. No matter how many articles and online resources they ask their kid to read, he or she will claim that those resources must have been culled from a “transphobic” site pedaling fake science. Or they’ll produce articles of their own, even research published in supposedly reputable scientific journals. Noted trans advocate Jack Turban has an impressive list of publications on his CV, most from high status publications such as Pediatrics and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Despite claims that “the science is settled,” there is no authoritative consensus among scientists in this contested area, at least not one that will be acknowledged and accepted by a majority of laypeople across the political spectrum. Each side promotes its own expert consensus; each side refers to a different set of publications to support its own point of view. At times, it can seem like the opposing camps occupy different realities or thought silos, with no possible bridge between them. When children fall into the gender matrix online, they come to believe that all efforts to explore the psychological roots of their trans-identification must be a form of conversion therapy (a discredited treatment modality), and that organizations such as Therapy First which promote traditional psychotherapeutic approaches are patently trans-phobic.

When a parent manages to persuade an adolescent child to engage with an exploratory therapist, most of them will immediately undertake an Internet search and likely land at some point on the Transgender Map website. According to that site, I am an “anti-trans activist” who promotes gender exploratory therapy as well as “gender identity change efforts.” Over the years, I’ve met with many parents as a prelude to working with their child, only to have that child refuse to meet with me after doing a little online research.

Even when a trans-identified teen agrees to meet with me, there’s little chance they’ll regard me as a trusted authority upon whose opinion and expertise they can rely. Yes, they might dismiss me as transphobic if they find me online, but even more, they reject the idea of a professional like me wielding legitimate truth-telling authority. When I began practicing decades ago, the Ph.D. after my name and my status as a licensed mental health professional gave me standing; today, when belief in the concept of legitimate authority has badly eroded, I’m often just another person with a point of view no more valid than what my trans-identified clients carry with them into the room.

How did we get here?

The questioning of authority in Western societies gained significant momentum during the 1960s countercultural movements. Sparked by opposition to the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, and second-wave feminism, young people began to challenge the legitimacy of political, institutional, and familial authority. The slogan “Don’t trust anyone over 30” captured the era’s suspicion of entrenched hierarchies. Universities, churches, and the nuclear family were all subjected to critique; radical movements argued that these institutions existed to perpetuate oppression. This cultural upheaval set the stage for a broader skepticism toward the very notion of authority as inherently trustworthy.

In the decades that followed, this anti-authoritarian ethos was amplified by scandals that exposed abuses of power in institutions once thought to be unassailable. The Watergate scandal in the 1970s undermined faith in government; revelations of clergy sexual abuse eroded trust in religious authority; and public disillusionment with psychiatric institutions and coercive treatments weakened confidence in medicine and the mental health professions. Meanwhile, postmodern theory in the academy further eroded the idea of stable, objective truths upon which authority traditionally rested, instead emphasizing social construction, power dynamics (oppressor-oppressed), and the relativity of knowledge.

In the present era, the digital revolution and the rise of social media have accelerated this process. Authority is no longer monopolized by credentialed experts or established institutions but is continually contested in an open, decentralized information environment. “Alternative facts,” influencer culture, and algorithmic echo chambers make it increasingly difficult for therapists—or any professionals—to claim the kind of authority once conferred by training and institutional affiliation. This cultural shift leaves psychotherapists working with clients who may be deeply suspicious of their expertise, more inclined to trust peer networks or online communities, and less receptive to the therapeutic professional as a legitimate source of guidance.

Even within my own profession, the notion of legitimate authority has been subjected to sustained critique. Humanistic and existential therapists, for example, explicitly rejected the image of the clinician as an expert, repositioning the therapist instead as a collaborator or “fellow traveler.” Carl Rogers’ insistence that personal experience is the highest authority undermined reliance on the therapist’s training or institutional position, while R.D. Laing went further in urging psychiatrists to relinquish the fantasy that they are the possessor of special knowledge or authority. These perspectives, while empowering to clients, also reflect how deeply the erosion of authority penetrates: even psychotherapists themselves, once seen as authoritative guides, have increasingly questioned and redefined the legitimacy of their professional stance.

So where does that leave us today? How are therapists to practice traditional psychotherapy with our trans-identified clients when much of the world, even colleagues in our own profession, disputes the idea that we’re legitimate authorities who have valuable skills based on training and experience? How can we deliver difficult truths or special insights to our clients when we lack standing to deliver them? In many situations, questioning authority is a very good thing, but have we dispensed with the idea of reliable expertise altogether?

Here’s an example of what I mean. With more than one of my clients–I’m talking about trans-identified adolescent males–persuasive material from their sessions has led me to an inescapable conclusion; I’ve wanted to say: “I think you felt deeply ashamed of feeling like an outsider as a kid growing up–friendless, out of sync with all your peers, someone rejected by almost everyone as weird or strange. When trans came along, you found a way to ‘explain’ all your pain, with a built-in answer for how to escape it.” Although I could readily point out all the things said during our sessions that demonstrate why this formulation must be true, I’ve never been able to say those words to a client, not even to boys I’ve worked with for many months and with whom I’ve established a relationship based on trust and affection. I know that if I do, it could easily be the last time I see him.

Why? Because a large part of the outside world, his friend group online, and his preferred “facts” will contradict me. I have no standing as an authority to encourage his trust, or even to give me the benefit of the doubt by keeping an open mind.

I was trained as a Kleinian psychoanalyst, and I’m usually comfortable making interpretations about deep unconscious process, then making further interpretations about defensive reactions to my first intervention. Many therapists and even other analysts will say such interpretations are premature, that one should wait until the client is about to come to the same conclusion.

Even my most revered forebear, W.R. Bion, believed that an interpretation given too soon, before the patient is able to use it, may be felt as an attack; one given too late will have lost its force. In other words, the analyst must wait until the patient is on the verge of reaching the realization himself.

Okay, so we should wait until the client is fully prepared to hear what we have to tell him. That might take years. Meanwhile the clock is ticking. Parents are desperate because their child is determined to begin taking cross-sex hormones once they turn 18. Or they’re threatening to estrange themselves from their families, knowing that many liberal colleges and universities will foot the gender-affirming care bill for students whose parents are deemed “trans-phobic.” Many therapists like me decided to work with this specific population due to personal experience with a trans-identified son or daughter; we want desperately to spare the families we work with the pain that tore our own families apart. But we must nonetheless wait for their trans-identified child to be ready to hear what we have to tell them, even when we don’t have the time to wait.

Because of my own desire to “save” my clients, I made some inept and not very useful interventions early on when I began working with this cohort. One example: I’d been meeting with an adolescent girl for about six months on a weekly basis and we had a warm working relationship. She went on at length during one session, lamenting that she’d never pass as a boy, and how painful she found it to admit the truth; I eventually asked, “Does that ever make you wonder whether transitioning is right for you?” Without quite knowing it, I’d been on the lookout for opportunities to encourage doubt.

My unhelpful question prompted her to go home and do an Internet search for my name; the next day she wrote me a terse email, called me a transphobe, and fired me.

The lesson I learned that day was to treat my trans-identified clients as I would treat any other client, and to practice psychotherapy “without memory and desire,” quoting W.R. Bion once again. That is, without having an agenda and without being overly influenced by what you already know about a client. My job, as I often say to trans-identified teens, is neither to affirm their identity nor talk them out of it. My role is to help them understand themselves as deeply as possible so that when they turn 18 and can choose for themselves, they make the best decision they can. I really do try to practice without memory or desire.

I also find it to be nearly impossible at times. Too often when searching for the right words to articulate an insight, I’m anxiously aware of the pitfalls. I often conceal the full truth as I’ve come to understand it. For example, when listening to an awkward-misfit kind of boy like the one I described above, I don’t spell it out–how identifying as trans helped him to escape from unbearable shame. Instead, I say: “After all those years of hating yourself for being a geek [incorporating the client’s own words], it must feel so good to have become someone you actually like.”

While that comment is also true, it’s capable of misinterpretation. It might be construed as affirmation, and I sometimes worry that parents who’ve entrusted their child to me might feel betrayed if they overheard such a session. They might believe I should be more hard-hitting in what I say, deploying my authority as licensed psychotherapist with a doctorate after his name in order to persuade.

If only that were possible in the current pathogenic culture.

I want to maintain contact with my client, and I know that if I say the wrong thing, the affirming world around us will encourage him to bolt. As a result, I struggle to speak plainly; sometimes I feel I’m not entirely honest about what I believe because I’m too scared to say it. I never used to feel that way. The world around me has changed so much that my former ways of practicing don’t fully apply.

At the same time, many therapists I know seem comfortable deploying their familiar conceptual toolbox, operating as if these families with trans-identified teens are no different from the other families they worked with earlier in their careers, focusing on the separation-individuation issues that are always a part of adolescence. Many times, I’ve heard therapists describe mothers as overly controlling, unable to allow their child to separate and discover an independent identity; becoming trans, these therapists will argue, may have been the only way that child could separate from the mother and develop an identity of her own. The fact that Mom micro-manages access to the Internet and friend groups, clothing choices, pronouns, haircuts, and college funds, unwilling to make even the smallest concession to her child’s new identity and belief system, just proves the point. So they say.

Maybe those moms and dads wouldn’t be so controlling if they weren’t terrified of their child doing irreversible damage to their bodies with hormones and surgery. Maybe the control isn’t the cause but the result of their child’s trans-identification. Maybe the parents would have more easily tolerated a son or daughter’s efforts to individuate if the path chosen didn’t involve sterility, amputation of body parts, and diminished life expectancy. They might have behaved quite differently many decades ago, in an entirely different social milieu.

I’m also convinced you can’t understand a large number of trans-identified teenage boys without taking into account the misandrist world in which they came of age.

Boys and young men today have absorbed decades of cultural messaging that painted masculinity as a largely negative trait. The Patriarchy. #MeToo. Rape Culture on Campus. Toxic Masculinity. Male Privilege. And so on. Trans-identification in teenage boys may have its roots in family dynamics and individual psychopathology, but you can’t fully understand it if you don’t appreciate how ashamed these boys feel simply to be male. And as a psychotherapist, how can you help a teenage boy to feel good about himself as male when much of the outside world tells him he should feel bad? Or guilty for the sins of his ancestors? Or ashamed of what gives his body pleasure?

I grew up in a different world, and I learned to practice in a socio-cultural environment with very different rules and assumptions. As a result, I’ve had to adapt, and the way I practice today is subtly different from the way I practiced 30 years ago. Back then, without even needing to acknowledge it, I understood that society supported my work and valued me as an expert with useful skills to offer. Clients who came to me for help regarded me as a benign authority upon whose judgment they might rely. And I could articulate painful truths without worrying that my client’s friend group or her teachers or random online “authorities” would tell her I was illegitimate. I took our shared reality for granted and felt more confident as a result.

Today, when I reach into my professional toolbox, I often second-guess myself. Maybe I’ll leave the more incisive insight for another day and opt for something less penetrating. I place more emphasis on maintaining friendly contact with my trans-identified clients than on telling them the truths I think they need to hear. By contrast, I feel much safer with my detransitioned clients, and confident that we occupy the same reality. With trans-identified teens, I’m always aware at the back of my mind that our priors are quite different, and if that difference becomes too apparent, it might mean the end of our work together.

And when I lose a client, I take it harder. Not only did I fail to help that struggling young person, but I’ve also let down his or her parents, and lost ground to a pernicious ideology wreaking havoc within our pathogenic culture. That’s why I now prefer to work with detransitioned young men or offer guidance to the parents of trans-identified boys rather than therapy to their indoctrinated sons. With the young men making peace with their bodies, I can practice “ordinary psychotherapy” the way I’ve always done, and with the parents, I can offer advice, support and deep empathy; like them, I’ve gone through one of the worst betrayals and losses a parent can face in this pathogenic world. In those ways, with these clients, I still feel useful and effective.

I also feel hopeful when I listen to the therapists I supervise, presenting sessions with 16-year-old clients they began seeing two years back. It often takes that long, two years, before you can make headway with these trans-identified kids, to develop a trusting relationship that enables them to question. When you begin work with a 14-year-old, the ticking of the clock isn’t quite so loud. You just might have enough time.

Rather than succumb to pessimism, I hold tight to a quote from Jordan Peterson. “Truth is the antidote to suffering.” In the end, I believe the psychologist’s authority endures not by shouting into the storm, but by remaining steadfast and shining a steady truthful light into the suffering all around, waiting for those ships lost at sea to find us, and for this culture-wide pathology to finally pass.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

Over the last decade, it’s become normal to hear academics say things like “science is political,” that objectivity is impossible, and that the purpose of scholarship isn’t just to understand the world but to “change” it. That might sound nice, since most people like scientific breakthroughs that improve our lives. The problem is what happens when moral urgency begins to replace logic and evidence. That is, when ought gets prioritized over is. When emotions and politics take precedence, the range of permissible questions and answers shrinks. Certain hypotheses become off-limits, not because they’ve been tested and falsified, but because they’re seen as morally taboo. Over time, the construction of too many moral guardrails can make entire fields incapable of investigating a claim objectively.

That’s the concern John D. Haltigan—an evolutionary and developmental psychopathologist at the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham—takes up in his new Theory and Society article, “Retrospect & prospect: a post-progressive developmental evolutionary psychopathology.” In it, he claims that developmental psychopathology, a field designed to integrate biological, psychological, and social explanations of mental disorder across a person’s life, has been corrupted by what he calls “a significant ideological distortion,” driven by progressive social-justice norms that have embedded themselves in the scientific process.

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About the Author

Steven Gussman is a scientist and video game developer on the east coast of the United States. He is the author of The Philosophy Of Science. He can be found on X at @Schwinn3.

I have lived with obsessive-compulsive disorder since childhood; it became especially intense just before puberty. In OCD, a person is gripped by obsessions—say, the fear that the next bite of food is poisoned—and the anxiety is temporarily relieved by a compulsion or ritual, such as throwing the food away and starting over. The relief is real, but it comes at a cost: In the long run, giving in to compulsions tends to strengthen the obsession and deepen the anxiety. It is no surprise, then, that one of the most effective treatments is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), particularly exposure therapy in which the patient repeatedly resists the compulsion, endures the panic, and eventually learns that the feared outcome never arrives. The age old advice to “face your fears” turns out to be clinically sound.

OCD is hardly the only condition that can be alleviated through this kind of confrontation with reality. CBT is also used to treat depression. Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran famously treated phantom limb syndrome—a condition in which amputees still feel sensations in a missing limb—using mirrors that allowed a patients to “see” the limb on their healthy side reflected where the missing limb would be. In different ways, these therapies all push the mind back into contact with the world as it is, rather than as it is feared or imagined to be.

But why does exposure work so often, and so well? And why should exposure therapy treat mental disorders for which the terms clinical psychologists use to describe a subject’s symptoms are often occult, with two common descriptive phrases being, “magical thinking” and “ritualistic thinking”?

One possible answer comes from epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with how we form and justify beliefs. At both conscious and unconscious levels, the mind is constantly making judgments about what is likely to be true and what is likely to happen next. Bayes’ theorem is the algebraically correct way to update probabilities in light of new evidence and prior knowledge. A familiar example is taught to medical students: A doctor interpreting a positive test result has to consider not just the test’s sensitivity and specificity, but also the prevalence of the disease in the population. Those inputs together determine how likely it is that the patient actually has the disease. The math is exact, but the information plugged into it never is. But Bayes still gives the best possible way to revise beliefs under uncertainty.

When a person’s reasoning strays too far from Bayes’ Theorem—for example, when someone with OCD grossly overestimates the risk of not triple-checking that the oven is off—he may be engaging in what clinicians describe as “magical” or “ritualistic” thinking. And if repeated exposure to the feared situation (for example, going to bed without checking the oven) without the feared consequence (waking up to a house fire) reduces the obsession, then it is reasonable to infer that, somewhere in the patient’s mind, a Bayesian prior is being updated. The feared outcome comes to feel less probable because repeated experience shows it is. For exposure therapy to work as well, as quickly, and as broadly as it often does, the brain must be estimating risk in a Bayesian way.

If that’s right, then exposure therapy works in part because the brain is already built to learn from repeated evidence. Indeed, evolutionary psychology suggests that natural selection would favor something like a Bayesian risk estimator. Ancestors who made better use of past experience and sensory information would, on average, leave more—and fitter—offspring. A further prediction of this view is that these estimators would not be perfectly calibrated for accuracy in every case. They would be biased in ways that improve fitness, depending on the costs and benefits of the behavior in question. A male, for example, might be expected to take greater risks to attract a mate than to obtain a small amount of food. Most of us can think of anecdotal examples: feeling braver in front of someone we are trying to impress, or taking more social risks early in courtship than later, once the relationship is secure. Across the animal kingdom, parents also often behave fearlessly when defending their young; in many species, the difference in violence between a female without offspring and a mother whose young are threatened, is striking.

Of course, it is easy to conflate ultimate explanations (why a trait evolved) with proximate ones (the everyday mechanisms by which it is expressed). No one thinks hunter-gatherers—much less birds—are consciously calculating coefficients of relatedness when they behave nepotistically. Likewise, the claim here is not that the human brain contains a homunculus consciously doing algebra. The better way to put it is that the mind may have evolved subconscious “as-if” estimators that operate in ways that approximate Bayesian updating. Whatever the brain’s actual computational machinery may be, it may have evolved to reach conclusions similar to those predicted by Bayes’ theorem, because accuracy in prediction generally improves fitness.

If that is right, then disorders such as OCD and perhaps some forms of depression can be modeled, in part, as disorders of one or more Bayesian-like estimators in the mind, and in particular as cases of miscalibrated priors. In practical terms, that means unrealistically negative beliefs about everyday risks or about one’s prospects for happiness. People who are fully detached from reality may require antipsychotic medication and other interventions. But those who maintain a stronger grip on reality, despite this kind of miscalibration, often appear to be good candidates for CBT. It is even possible—though this remains speculative—that some more severe conditions, including forms of psychosis such as schizophrenia, might be more effectively contained if caught earlier and treated in part through carefully designed exposure-based approaches.

Provocatively (though far from conclusively), some researchers have proposed a link between the cat-borne parasite Toxoplasma Gondii (“toxo”) and schizophrenia. Toxo is known to alter behavior in its hosts—rodents and potentially humans as well—pushing them toward greater risk-taking. This is called an extended phenotype: a trait expressed in one organism that is ultimately driven by the genes of another. Because toxo’s life cycle depends on cats, an infected mouse is made to be more likely to expose itself to predation, making it easier prey. In exchange, the cat provides the parasite with the host environment it needs, and when the parasite is later shed into the environment, it can infect new mice—continuing the cycle. The details here matter less than the broader point: extreme risk-taking is the opposite of extreme anxiety or avoidance, and both can be modeled as miscalibrated Bayesian priors about danger. The adaptive middle would be closer to reality: a more accurate estimate of the moderate risks most behaviors actually pose to one’s fitness.

As cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has argued, other evidence also points to a natural tendency toward Bayesian-style reasoning in humans—at least when factual accuracy aligns with practical success (i.e., evolutionary fitness). Biologist Louis Liebenberg, for example, has found that hunter-gatherers use remarkably sophisticated inference in animal tracking that accords with Bayesian principles.

That effective exposure therapy is built on the same logic as Bayes’ Theorem suggests that the human mind evolved to obey it. Exposure therapy brings a mind trapped in fear or fantasy into repeated contact with reality until the mind updates towards more realistic beliefs. The subconscious appears to learn by testing its predictions against the world. And when it does, the point isn’t to become fearless—it’s to become properly calibrated.

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Reality’s Last Stand is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a one-time or recurring donation to show your support.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

Clinical practice guidelines sit in the background of medicine, but they have outsized influence. They shape what doctors do in the exam room, how hospitals write protocols, and what insurers decide to pay for. And in politically charged areas, guidelines often carry even more weight, because people treat them as proof that a particular approach reflects professional consensus and “the standard of care.”

That dynamic is especially strong in so-called “gender medicine.” Activists and advocacy groups frequently cite guidelines as the final word more than they cite the underlying studies those guidelines are supposed to reflect. Which is why the quality of the guideline itself matters. If a document functions as a shortcut to “what experts say,” it ought to meet basic expectations of transparency, rigor, and independence.

A new paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior (published February 19, 2026) takes a direct look at that question for one of the most influential documents in transgender health care: the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care, Version 8 (SOC8), released in 2022. The authors, led by Yuan Zhang, aren’t evaluating whether specific treatments are right or wrong. They’re instead asking a much narrower and more fundamental question: do key SOC8 chapters look like competently-built medical guidelines?

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

Over the past decade, pediatric “gender-affirming care” has been adopted widely in clinical settings despite a remarkably weak evidence base. Systematic reviews from several countries have consistently found that the research supporting puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and related interventions in minors is of low quality, lacking reliable long-term data on physical or psychological outcomes. Meanwhile, the severe and often irreversible side effects of these treatments are well documented. Chief among them is the loss of fertility.

Because of this risk, clinical guidelines recommend that adolescents be counseled about infertility and offered fertility preservation before beginning medical transition. In theory, this gives them the choice to protect their ability to have biological children in the future. In practice, however, only a vanishingly small number of “transgender and gender-diverse” (TGD) adolescents actually pursue fertility preservation, even when counseling is provided.

This creates an odd set of seemingly contradictory facts. Survey-based studies show that while few adolescents choose to preserve their fertility, a significant number hope to become parents later in life. Follow-up studies of adults who began medical transition as teenagers confirm that the desire for children often increases with age, leaving many to deeply regret not preserving their fertility when they had the chance.

Until now, research has failed to explain exactly where the drop-off occurs between a patient expressing interest in future children and actually completing the preservation process. It has also remained unclear whether these abysmally low rates reflect genuine personal preference, or practical barriers such as high cost and the complexity of the procedures involved.

A new retrospective cross-sectional study published in the Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology helps clarify this issue by tracking patients from their first counseling visit through referral, specialist consultation, and—if it occurred—completion of a fertility preservation procedure.

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About the Author

Brooke Laufer, Psy.D. is an independent scholar, writer, and clinician with a group practice in Evanston, Illinois. She works from a Jungian orientation and applies depth psychological perspectives to contemporary sociopolitical issues.

The nature of political violence has changed. What once looked like moral struggle—however misguided—has increasingly given way to something more chaotic and disturbing. Among many young adults, a powerful “revolutionary impulse” has taken hold: not just the urge to protest, but the belief that one is personally called to carry out sweeping, often violent acts in the name of social change. In a growing number of cases, individuals drawn toward extremist violence also identify as transgender. This is a pattern that warrants careful examination rather than reflexive dismissal.

To be clear, identifying as transgender or exploring the concept of “gender identity” does not cause violence or criminal behavior. But the pattern raises important psychological questions about identity and instability. For some individuals, a fragile or fractured sense of self—often shaped by a felt conflict between biological sex and gender identity, and reinforced by narratives of constant threat or victimhood—may intensify alienation, urgency, and emotional volatility. When a person’s identity becomes detached from embodied reality, personal history, and stable relationships, it can drift toward nihilism: the belief that life itself has no inherent meaning or value. In that state, ideology can rush in to fill the void. For a small but notable subset of radicalized individuals, the combination of identity instability, existential fear, and moral absolutism can make violence feel not only permissible, but purposeful.

Friedrich Nietzsche described nihilism as the collapse of a society’s highest values—its moral frameworks, religious beliefs, and metaphysical assumptions—once they no longer command trust or authority. When those structures dissolve, what replaces them is not liberation but disorientation. The familiar landmarks that once anchored meaning disappear, leaving behind anxiety, emptiness, and a deep uncertainty about how to live or who to be. It is within this vacuum that destructive ideologies—and destructive acts—can take root.

This internal collapse is starkly visible in the manifesto left by Robert Westman, the shooter who opened fire at a Catholic school and identified as a transgender woman named Robin. “The message is that there is no message,” Westman wrote—a line that captures the nihilistic void Nietzsche warned about. In this worldview, meaning itself has evaporated. Violence becomes a grotesque substitute for communication: a way to project inner emptiness outward, replacing empathy, faith, and human connection with destruction and chaos.

For violence to override moral restraint and the sanctity of life, something must first give way internally. Meaning must collapse. Despair must set in. The world must come to feel irredeemably corrupt. For some individuals, gender ideology may deepen this void by undermining psychological grounding, weakening trust in reality, and fragmenting the self. Over the past five years, the emergence of violent actors who identify as transgender has formed a troubling and complex pattern—one that remains largely unexplored in mainstream discourse, in part because of the understandable discomfort around acknowledging it. But when patterns appear, especially in matters of violence, they demand examination. From a psychological perspective, these acts are best understood as symptoms signaling deeper disturbances that require careful interpretation.

Public awareness of this pattern first emerged through a series of school shootings beginning in 2019. That year, Alec McKinney—a boy who identified as a girl named Maya—carried out an attack at a Colorado high school. In 2022, Lee Aldrich, who identified as nonbinary, opened fire at a Colorado Springs nightclub. The following year, Audrey Hale—who identified as a boy named Aiden—killed six people at a Christian school in Nashville. Additional cases followed in 2024, including Dylan Butler, who identified as “gender-fluid,” and Natalie Rupnow, who used they/she pronouns, both of whom targeted their schools.

The pattern is not limited to school violence. In 2020, Ronald Watson firebombed an ICE facility in Atlanta before later legally transitioning and changing his name to Emily Smith. Nicholas Roske, who transitioned while in custody and now goes by Sophie, became fixated on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, believing that assassinating him might preserve abortion rights. In 2024, a small extremist group known as the Zizians—led by Jack LaSota, who transitioned and adopted the name Ziz—coalesced around apocalyptic fears of an AI-driven collapse, drawing a mostly young and largely transgender following into violent plots. The trajectory culminates, at least for now, in the 2025 case of Robert Westman.

The emergence of the Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF) further complicates this picture. The network—composed largely of transgender-identifying activists—combines anti-capitalist and pro-Palestinian ideology and has been accused of plotting attacks on ICE facilities. Although these cases do not constitute statistical evidence, the concentration of transgender-identified perpetrators within a small cluster of recent extremist attacks appears disproportionate to their share of the population. At minimum, it’s a pattern that merits further scholarly attention.

Gender Identity

Over the past decade, transgender identification in the United States has risen sharply. By 2025, an estimated 2.8 million Americans—roughly 1 percent of the population aged 13 and older—identified as transgender, nearly double the share reported in 2016. In clinical settings, this surge was obvious. Adolescents and young adults seeking help for issues related to their “gender identity” arrived in growing numbers, often presenting alongside acute anxiety, depression, and psychological distress.

The trend spiked during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. At the same time, educational, psychological, and medical institutions rapidly embraced a “gender-affirming” model of care. This framework rests on the premise that young people can “become who they truly are” through social transition, hormones, or surgery. A key linguistic shift accompanied this approach: the widespread adoption of the phrase “sex assigned at birth,” which subtly recast biological sex as a subjective label rather than an objective and immutable physical reality. Under this model, self-identification became paramount, while traditional forms of psychological evaluation and caution—often derided as “gatekeeping”—were sidelined.

What was initially framed as a compassionate advance in care was quickly turbocharged by social media. Platforms turned personal transition into public performance. Influencers documented their journeys in real time—“Day 1 on testosterone,” “Day 35: no menstruation”—transforming what had once been a clinical intervention into a contagious cultural script. Identity formation became not just affirmed, but celebrated and broadcast, with powerful institutional backing from medicine and academia.

Yet the promise underlying this movement—limitless self-reinvention—rested on a fragile logic of act first, think later. As detransitioners began to emerge, many described a collision with biological reality. Gender expression, they discovered, may be flexible, but biological sex is not. The friction between those two truths became impossible for them to ignore.

During these years, a familiar pattern began to surface in our therapy practice. Anxious mothers came in seeking help for withdrawn, depressed, or increasingly oppositional teenagers and young adults. They described children who spent most of their time alone in their bedrooms, glued to their phones, with few friends and growing irritability. Lying was common. So was emotional volatility. In many cases, these same children later told their parents they identified as a different gender.

In an era of boundary-less, “gentle” parenting, many parents—especially mothers—took their children at their word, even when something felt deeply wrong. This can’t be happening, they thought. This is my son. But saying so out loud felt risky. Parents worried about being labeled transphobic, damaging their relationship with their child, alienating friends, or betraying their self-image as open-minded, compassionate people.

It gradually became clear that therapy was not just about a child’s behavior. It was also about maternal anxiety, paternal passivity, and family dynamics shaped by contemporary parenting trends where the word “no” quietly disappeared and had been replaced by endless conversations about emotions, identity, and affirmation.

Gender Nihilism

Many young people seeking to change their gender arrive at therapy in a state of psychological impasse. Their lives feel empty, fractured, and unlivable. What often presents as a search for liberation is, at its core, an attempt to escape despair. Rejecting the former self—often symbolized by the discarding of a “dead name”—becomes a way to survive a reality that feels intolerable. This crisis is frequently accompanied by suicidality. In 2021, more than half of transgender-identified youth reported seriously considering suicide, a sobering statistic that points to the depth of the distress involved.

Within this context, “gender affirmation” is often presented as a curative for nihilism: a way to kill off the old identity and replace it with a new, supposedly more authentic one. Some queer and psychoanalytic theorists explicitly frame this process as a kind of symbolic death—the killing off of an unlivable self in order to go on living.

But this promise often goes unfulfilled. Affirmation attempts to solve an existential and spiritual crisis with material and external changes. By encouraging the severing of one’s past identity, it breaks the thread of personal continuity—disconnecting individuals from their own biological and biographical reality. When the “new self” is finally achieved but the emptiness remains, the result can be a destabilizing sense that nothing is solid or real. Rather than resolving nihilism, radical self-reinvention can deepen it.

When this constructed identity fails—when it does not deliver the meaning, peace, or wholeness it was meant to provide—the collapse can be devastating. Robert Westman, captured this despair in a manifesto written before his attack:

“I only keep [the long hair] because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brainwashed myself.”

Again, it bears repeating: exploring one’s “gender” does not inherently lead to violence or nihilism. But gender ideology—as it has been promoted by Western institutions over the past decade—has played a significant role in amplifying nihilistic thinking. From schools and medical authorities to social media platforms, the message has often been the same: your body is wrong as it is; you would be better, more complete, in a different form. When people are taught to see their own bodies as mistakes—or the world as hostile to their “true” selves—nihilism doesn’t arrive from the top down. It grows from the ground up.

Internalized this way, gender ideology encourages a rejection of objective reality, beginning with the biological body itself. Once existence is framed as fundamentally inadequate, it becomes easier to conclude that nothing is fixed, nothing is given, and nothing carries inherent value. Moral and social meaning begin to erode. The foundations of reality feel negotiable. The implicit question becomes unavoidable: If my sex isn’t real, then what is?

The trajectory of Jack LaSota, who later adopted the name “Ziz,” illustrates how this collapse can unfold. LaSota, a 34-year-old man who identified as a woman, described puberty as “evil” and wrote online about fearing he would be “killed—overwritten” by a new self. On his blog, Sinceriously, he wrote that he had begun to feel as though “the world was a hypothetical”—language drawn straight from the gender ideology playbook.

Friends once described LaSota as bright, idealistic, and deeply earnest—a rationalist and “geeky optimist hoping to save the world.” But that idealism gradually turned into obsession. His writings grew increasingly detached from reality and increasingly apocalyptic in tone. He became consumed by fears of an imminent AI-driven extinction event and began to frame violence as a regrettable but necessary tool in service of a higher moral end. For years, friends and acquaintances warned about his increasingly erratic and menacing behavior.

Now, six people are dead. LaSota and several followers—calling themselves the Zizians—are in jail awaiting trial. What remains is a grim lesson. Severed from an integrated sense of self, untethered from shared reality, and animated by moral certainty stripped of empathy, reason became detached from restraint. Idealism gave way to annihilation. And once meaning collapses completely, there is nothing left to stop it.

For Robert Westman, whose family supported his transgender identification and who had no serious criminal record, the warning signs were largely internal. Manifestos, videos, and journal entries revealed long-standing fixations on violence, depression, and suicide. Friends described him as quiet and socially isolated, prone to what they called “odd obsessions.” He had recently gone through a breakup with a live-in partner active in the furry subculture—an online world that figured prominently in Westman’s writings and digital life.

Westman’s final posts oscillated between remorse and detachment.

I don’t expect forgiveness. … I have to hold much weight. … I care for all of you so much, and it pains me to bring this storm of chaos into your lives.

His words echo that of a young boy—earnest, lost, and apologetic:

I have wanted this for so long. I am not well. I am not right. I am a sad person, haunted by these thoughts that do not go away. I know this is wrong, but I can’t seem to stop myself. I am severely depressed and have been suicidal for years. Only recently have I lost all hope and decided to perform my final action against this world.

Friedrich Nietzsche warned that when a culture’s highest values lose their authority, the result is not freedom but a terrifying disorientation. In the context of gender ideology, this collapse begins at the level of the body itself. When the most basic binary of human existence—male and female—is treated as a linguistic choice rather than a biological reality, the individual is left with total responsibility for defining reality.

Once the self is no longer anchored in the body or in inherited meaning, identity becomes a project of pure will. For a vulnerable young adult, that burden can be crushing. As Nietzsche put it in The Will to Power:

Nihilism is... that the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer. (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 9)

When the promised liberation of a new identity fails to materialize, the revolutionary impulse can offers a final, desperate escape. The emptiness is filled with political absolutism. By identifying as a soldier for a righteous cause—whether radical anti-capitalism, anti-ICE activism, or another absolutist ideology—internal fragmentation is projected outward as a kind of moral war. Violence becomes a way to feel real, powerful, and purposeful in a world that has come to feel like a simulation.

Revolutionary Impulse

The moral outlook of many young adults has been shaped less by lived experience than by a constant stream of ideological messaging delivered through their phones. Daily exposure to images of police brutality, online harassment, and claims of systemic injustice can make oppression feel everywhere and inescapable. Over time, this erodes faith that democratic institutions can correct themselves or that history bends toward justice at all. High-profile events—such as the reversal of Roe v. Wade or state-level restrictions on transgender medical care—are often framed in apocalyptic terms, with comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale blurring the line between constitutional democracy and dystopia. The result is cynicism, mistrust, and the growing belief that morality itself is merely performative.

This outlook is reinforced in classrooms as well as online. Many students are taught that the central story of American history is one of unbroken oppression—colonization, slavery, genocide—carried out by the same institutions that govern today. If the system itself is irredeemable, then moral restraint starts to feel like complicity.

For transgender individuals in particular, this atmosphere is intensified by the way their identities have been placed at the center of a highly charged political spectacle. During Trump’s reelection campaign, claims of an ongoing “trans genocide” circulated widely online. The term was used not to describe mass violence, but restrictions on access to medical transition. Yet it was framed as an existential threat, implying that transgender lives were under direct and imminent attack. While no genocide was occurring, the rhetoric was effective. Repeated often enough, it fostered fear, hyper-vigilance, and the sense of living in permanent danger.

When mainstream institutions lose moral credibility and young people stop trusting the law, the media, or the government, a moral inversion often follows. The system itself is recast as the villain, while those who stand outside it—even criminals—are seen as more authentic, courageous, or “real.” In this climate, a revolutionary impulse takes hold. It shows up in the surge of mass protests across the Western world, as people search for meaning amid disorder and, in some cases, drift toward violence as a way of striking back at a perceived oppressor.

By the fall of 2025, protests had reached a fever pitch, with figures and institutions like Trump, the IDF, and ICE serving as central symbols of grievance. Beneath the anger lies something real: a genuine longing for justice and a shared insistence that the world can and should be better. In that sense, today’s demonstrations echo earlier movements—against the Vietnam War, against the Iraq War—that were rooted in moral outrage. But contemporary protests have become increasingly tangled in confusion and moral ambiguity. Is all of Israel truly responsible for the crisis in Gaza? Are all immigration arrests acts of cruelty, or are some aimed at disrupting drug trafficking and violent crime? As disparate grievances collapse into a single, undifferentiated scream of rebellion, nuance gives way to intensity, and intensity is mistaken for moral clarity.

That confusion was on full display during the hostage negotiations, when a ceasefire was under discussion and Israeli hostages held by Hamas were, after two years, finally being released. At that very moment, “Free Palestine” protests reached their loudest and most volatile point. In Boston, thousands filled the streets and refused to disperse even as emergency vehicles tried to get through. The situation escalated quickly into violence. Protesters surrounded police cruisers, kicked in doors, and ripped radios and body cameras from officers. Four officers were hospitalized, suffering injuries ranging from broken bones to a severe back strain sustained while carrying a suspect. In the days leading up to the protest, organizers had circulated a flyer depicting a burning police car, foreshadowing the intensity that followed.

Similar scenes unfolded across Europe. There was vandalism in Milan, clashes with police in Barcelona, and mass arrests in London, where more than 800 people were detained after a protest organized by Palestine Action turned violent. Police later said “the violence we encountered was coordinated and carried out by a group […] intent on creating as much disorder as possible.”

In this psychic climate, Gaza functions less as a concrete geopolitical conflict and more as a specter—something onto which largely middle-class Western protesters project rage, moral absolutism, and a hunger for meaning.

New Years 2026

In December 2025, federal authorities disrupted what they described as a potentially catastrophic terror plot linked to the Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF). The group had allegedly planned coordinated bombings across the Los Angeles metropolitan area, targeting logistics hubs and technology centers with improvised explosive devices. The attacks were timed for midnight on New Year’s Eve—chosen, prosecutors said, to blend mass violence into the cover of holiday celebrations.

Investigators identified TILF as a far-left, anti-capitalist network organized around a doctrine of “liberation through decolonization.” At the center of the group were two figures: Audrey Illeene Carroll, who went by the alias “Black Moon,” and Zachary Aaron Page. In the group’s view, the United States was an “illegal empire,” and violence was a legitimate and necessary response. Members circulated slogans like “Death to America” and “Long live Palestine.”

The group’s drift from activism to militancy had been visible well before the arrests. Months earlier, TILF members participated in a volatile protest outside the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, where speakers allegedly called for “direct action” and declared that “peaceful protest will never be enough.” Online manifestos urged followers to be “ready” for “Revolution.” They were not calling for policy change or reform, but the total annihilation of the existing order.

Page, a 32-year-old who identified as a transgender woman, lived in an upscale home in Oak Park, California. Prosecutors allege that Page helped disseminate explicit calls for violence, including posts reading: “death to Israel death to the USA death to colonizers death to settler-colonialism [sic].” After authorities dismantled the Los Angeles plot, Page formally requested transfer to a women’s correctional facility, mirroring the high-profile legal requests made by Nicholas/Sophia Roske.¹

The network extended further. Among those linked to TILF was Micah James Legnon, a 29-year-old transgender Marine veteran who used the alias “Ketari.” Former classmates and neighbors described Legnon as an “outcast.” Unlike many others in these circles, he brought something distinctive: a background in the United States military, and with it a base of tactical knowledge. In the period following the death of Charlie Kirk, Legnon—who also identified as “Black Witch” and was deeply involved in pro-Palestinian activism—underwent a sharp pivot toward anti-government militancy. His social media presence became a conduit for radicalization, blending identity-based grievance with an increasingly explicit commitment to dismantling federal authority.

It is possible to understand the prominence of several transgender-identified individuals within TILF’s leadership as a response to intense feelings of marginalization and perceived oppression. By tying gender identity to anti-capitalist and anti-government ideology, personal struggle is reframed as part of a sweeping revolutionary narrative. Within that framework, extreme or violent actions can begin to feel justified—not merely as political resistance, but as a fight for survival and liberation.

More troubling, however, is the broader cultural backdrop against which this radicalization is unfolding. Contemporary gender ideology increasingly treats the physical body as incidental and something to be overridden by internal identity rather than integrated and accepted. This shift is not just philosophical. It is reflected in concrete practices such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries such as double mastectomies, now framed as forms of “gender-affirming” medical care for both minors and adults. When focus moves away from the body as a given fact of human life and toward an abstract idea or project of identity, people can become psychologically untethered from biological reality.

This is not simply a matter of private belief. It is a systemic change, reinforced by medicine, education, and public policy. Over time, detachment from embodied reality can weaken a person’s connection to the natural world and to the fundamental fact of human vulnerability that underlies limits, empathy, and respect for the lives of others.

No Guiding Authority

We are operating in a cultural and emotional environment that increasingly produces the politically violent nihilist—a figure for whom no authority exists beyond their own personal will. Religious belief and practice have fallen to historic lows, and traditional structures of guidance—from parents and families to civic institutions and the state—are widely treated as illegitimate or actively oppressive.

This collapse is measurable. A recent Gallup poll shows that trust in major American institutions has dropped to its lowest level in nearly half a century. That collective loss of faith closely mirrors the more personal loss of trust in the biological body itself. In both cases, something once understood as given, stabilizing, and real is reinterpreted as arbitrary or imposed. Both losses are psychologically destabilizing. When people cannot trust either their embodied reality or the institutions meant to order social life, sanity and social trust weaken together, deepening the experience of nihilism.

What follows nihilistic violence is often a visible and desperate longing for transcendence—a desire to escape the limits of the human condition altogether. This appears in the rejection of the physical body, biological sex, birth name, and even family lineage, as evidenced in record-high rates of family estrangement. When no guiding authority is trusted, whether it be biological, moral, or social, the impulse to transcend humanness manifests as a primal impulse to act upon the world through destruction, seeking to force a sense of meaning out of the ashes of the existing order.

Restoring Meaning

For many of the transgender extremists discussed here, early “adventures” unfolded not in the real world but in digital ones—video games, online subcultures, and ideological spaces—while their paths were often softened by well-intentioned parental intervention. Many struggled deeply with identity, but few were required to confront the kinds of challenges that traditionally test endurance and character: independent living, physical labor, sustained responsibility, or service to others. When these rites of passage are bypassed, society risks denying young people something essential—the chance to undertake a true hero’s journey.

A purposeful life requires confrontation with limits. It demands a personal journey marked by challenge, failure, responsibility, and eventual self-knowledge. Without these experiences, identity remains fragile, easily captured by ideology or reshaped by despair.

Today, the overlapping forces of social disconnection, identity confusion, ideological fixation, and an overreliance on psychiatric labels, have left many young people disoriented and spiritually unanchored. It falls to us—teachers, therapists, parents, writers—to restore a sense of moral orientation and expectation, to help the next generation face the inevitable trials that give rise to maturity and meaning.

Only by reconnecting young people to embodied reality, responsibility, and shared moral limits can we begin to renew a sense of purpose—and, ultimately, a shared understanding of the sacredness of human life itself.

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About the Author

James Smoliga, D.V.M., Ph.D., is a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine who studies translational science, sports medicine, and how scientific evidence is applied in clinical practice and public health policy. He writes the Substack newsletters “Beyond the Abstract,” about the intersection of research, academia, and society, and “Human Limits,” focused on sports science.

A new paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine has been making the rounds this week, promoted as evidence that sex differences in athletic performance largely disappear once testosterone is suppressed.

The headline version goes something like this: After hormone therapy, performance differences shrink. Therefore, biological differences must not matter very much.

On first read, that sounds plausible. Reasonable, even.

And to be fair, the study isn’t junk science. It has real strengths: a large pooled analysis, longitudinal hormone measurements, objective fitness testing, and—in some of the included studies—repeated assessments over time. On the surface, this is careful, methodical work.

But the paper quietly answers a very different question than the one people are using it to settle.

This is not a study about athletics or competitive sports performance. It’s a study about general physical fitness.

And that mismatch—more than anything about hormones or politics—is where the problem begins. The authors conclude that there is no evidence of “inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender,” a claim that goes well beyond what their data can actually support. That’s because the study is looking at recreational fitness, while elite sport lives in an entirely different physiological universe.

What the Study Actually Measures

Start with who’s being tested, and how.

These are not elite athletes. They’re not NCAA runners. They’re not national-level competitors. The participants are mostly:

• military personnel

• recreationally active adults and “amateur” athletes

In other words, people with mild to moderate training loads, often performing general fitness tests. Think push-ups, grip strength, VO₂ max, and 1.5-mile runs. For military recruits, these tests exist to ensure basic physical readiness for job-related tasks—not to measure athletic performance in a competitive sense.

To keep things concrete, consider the studies using the 1.5-mile run.

In Chiccarelli et al (2023), the average 1.5-mile time for women was 14:36. Transgender women (males who identify as women), by contrast, had a baseline time of 12:00. That’s almost identical to the men’s average in the study (11:59).

After up to four years of hormone therapy, transgender women’s 1.5 mile run times slowed to about 14:34, nearly matching the women’s average. In other words, after several years of cross-sex hormones, performance converged.

Roberts et al report a similar pattern. Transgender women ran 1.5 miles in 11:48 before treatment and about 12:45 after two to two-and-a-half years of cross-sex hormones—still faster than the female group in that study.

So yes, transitioning from male to female is associated with slower 1.5-mile run times. And this point is important: suppressing testosterone clearly reduces performance. If you take an elite male athlete and remove testosterone, performance will almost certainly decline. No serious person disputes that.

But neither study followed the female participants over time as matched longitudinal controls. Instead, the comparisons were largely made against population averages or separate groups.

That may sound like a technical quibble, but over two to four years, a lot can change. Training habits shift. Body composition changes. General fitness levels rise or fall. Any of that can affect performance. Still, this is a relatively minor concern compared to the larger problem.

And here’s the larger problem: this is fitness, not sport.

Yes, the participants engage in physical training. But these studies are not looking at athletes deliberately training at high intensity to optimize competitive performance in sports.

To see why this matters, consider Beatrice Chebet, the women’s world-record holder in the 5,000 meters. Her time is 13:56. That’s more than double the distance—about 3.1 miles—covered in roughly the same time it takes participants in these studies to run 1.5 miles.

In other words, she isn’t just a little faster. She’s operating on a completely different physiological plane than the “fit” people in these studies.

The women in these studies are not out of shape, but they aren’t athletes either. And that distinction isn’t merely semantic. Once you move from general fitness to elite competition, the factors that dominate performance change dramatically. (For context, the men’s 5,000-meter world record is 12:35).

What all of this means is that the BJSM paper is effectively examining general physical readiness in mildly trained adults under hormone manipulation. That’s a perfectly legitimate scientific question, but it is not the same as asking how much athletic performance changes when hormone therapy is applied to highly trained athletes competing at the limits of human performance.

We wouldn’t study the driving habits of daily commuters and then use those findings to set safety policy for Formula One drivers. Yet that is, in essence, what’s happening here.

A 14-minute 1.5-mile run isn’t an elite performance test. It’s a general fitness test. At that pace, a wide range of reasonably healthy adults overlap (more on that in the next section). Hormone-mediated biological limitations haven’t begun to show up yet.

Elite sport is different. It pushes athletes to their physiological ceiling—maximal oxygen delivery, maximal muscle power, minimal margins. Near those limits, small biological differences stop being small. They decide podium placement.

And those differences—observable only in elite populations performing at the edge of human capability—are what should drive policies aimed at preserving competitive fairness.

So even if hormone therapy may equalize recreational fitness metrics, it does not demonstrate biological equivalence at the ceiling. And that ceiling is where elite sport is actually decided.

The Mistake Most Interpretations Make

Most debates about performance assume differences behave like a single number.

They don’t.

Athletic performance is a distribution, and where you sample that distribution changes everything.

To illustrate this, I pulled a large public marathon dataset and plotted men’s and women’s finishing times.

Here’s what the distribution actually looks like:

The top panel shows the full population. Each bar represents the percentage of runners within each sex who finished in a given time range. The solid lines mark the median—the “typical” runner.

And right away, something important jumps out.

Men and women overlap—a lot. The curves largely sit on top of each other. The medians aren’t wildly different. The median male finished (red line) in about 275 minutes—roughly four and a half hours. Plenty of women ran faster than that. Likewise, many men finished slower than the median female runner, who clocked in around 310 minutes, just over five hours.

If you stopped here, you might reasonably conclude: Men and women aren’t that different.

For recreational runners, that’s largely true. On average, men finish about 30 minutes faster, but there is substantial overlap, and many women beat many men.

The mistake comes from assuming that what’s true in the middle of the distribution remains true everywhere else.

Now look at the dashed lines, which mark the top 1 percent of male and female finishers. On the surface, the separation looks similar to what we saw at the median. But to understand why it matters, you have to zoom in on the bottom panel.

Those dots represent the fastest 100 finishers—the extreme tail of the distribution. Only a small fraction of them ever contend for podiums, records, or prize money. Those are the athletes competition policy actually affects.

And here, the overlap nearly disappears.

The fastest men cluster far to the left. The fastest women cluster clearly to the right. No statistics are required. You can just see it.

That contrast is the entire point. Elite sport does not sample the middle of the bell curve. It samples the extreme tail—where small physiological differences suddenly matter a lot.

Studying the middle (as the BJSM article focuses on) and making claims about the edge is is not how competitive policy should be built.

The Recipe for Sports Performance

This isn’t mysterious. It’s just physiology.

Athletic performance isn’t the result of one ingredient. It’s the product of a layered “recipe” of physiological traits working together.

Genetics and early development establish the basic hardware. Puberty then permanently sculpts that hardware—heart size, lung capacity, skeletal structure, limb length, lever arms—in ways that are at least partly irreversible. Those developmental changes largely determine an athlete’s physiological ceiling: the maximum performance they can ever reach.

And that ceiling is what competitive sport actually tests. Not average fitness. Not casual training responses. The limits.

Adult hormone levels, by contrast, are more modulatory. They affect recovery, muscle and connective tissue maintenance, and—crucially—how efficiently the body adapts to training. But intense, sustained training is the mechanism that reveals where the biological ceiling actually lies.

This distinction matters because recreational fitness studies—the bulk of those included in the BJSM analysis—and elite sport operate in entirely different biological worlds.

In recreational populations, training varies widely and most people are nowhere near their physiological ceiling. Lifestyle noise and modifiable factors dominate. Many marathoners who finished in around 275 minutes could run 10, 20, or even more percent faster if they devoted their lives to training the way elite athletes do.

That isn’t an insult or calling them lazy. It’s just reality. Elite marathoners routinely run 90 or more miles per week for many years, layering in mentally and physically punishing interval sessions and threshold workouts. Most recreational runners aren’t training at that volume or intensity, nor should they feel any obligation to.

At the elite level, everyone is already training at or near their maximum. Training variability shrinks, and what remains are the hard limits set by biology and development. At that point, training no longer masks biological differences—it exposes them.

The best men run faster than the best women. Even “pretty good” males (i.e.,top American high school boys) often run faster than the best women. That’s just biology.

This is why the middle of the bell curve and the extreme tail aren’t just slower and faster versions of the same thing. They are, functionally, different physiological worlds.

I’ve focused here on running, but the same logic applies to other traits examined in these studies. Removing testosterone and adding estrogen may reduce grip strength in transgender women, bringing average values closer to those of biological females. But if both groups were subjected to serious, competition-focused training, individuals who went through male puberty would likely retain at least some performance advantage.

We can’t prove that from the available data—and that’s precisely the point. We also cannot assume the advantage disappears. The existing studies simply never test elite athletes operating near their physiological limits. They test people far below them.

The bigger point is that training has an enormous effect on maximal performance, and the BJSM study isn’t measuring that. It’s measuring how hormone manipulation affects basic fitness, often alongside modest training.

If the goal is to inform policy for elite sport, the relevant question isn’t how hormones affect recreational fitness. It’s how hormones interact with years of high-level training at the edge of human performance.

Adult Hormone Levels Are Permissive, Not Determinative

This is where many discussions go off the rails.

People implicitly think the relationship is simple:

hormones → performance

But that’s not how sport works.

The real chain looks more like this:

hormones → capacity to adapt → training response → performance

Hormones mostly act upstream. They shape how much muscle someone can build, how quickly they recover between hard sessions, and how much training stress they can absorb over time. Faster recovery means more high-intensity workouts. More high-intensity workouts mean greater cumulative adaptation.

This is also why performance-enhancing drugs work the way they do. They don’t magically turn someone into an elite athlete. They improve recovery and adaptation, allowing athletes to train harder, more often, and for longer—and to reap the benefits of that training.

No one believes you can take testosterone and instantly become elite. You still have to train brutally hard for years. Drugs amplify adaptation; they don’t replace it.

Which is why all of the following can be true at the same time:

• a well-trained woman can beat an untrained man

• a well-trained woman can beat an untrained man even if he’s using PEDs

• a highly trained woman can beat a moderately trained man, even if he’s using PEDs

  • Halfway-decent female college distance runners (i.e., 17:45 5K) can beat most male entrants at any given local road race, even those who regularly train

• But a highly trained woman will still not match a highly trained man, because of differences in the biological ceiling. That is why world records differ between men and women in virtually every sport.

Training differences dominate until biological ceilings come into play. Then biology decides.

Among recreational runners, the gap between someone finishing a marathon in 3.5 hours versus 4.5 hours is mostly about training. A woman running 60 structured miles per week can easily beat a man running 20, despite his biological advantage. Likewise, a man running 60 miles per week will almost certainly beat a man running 20. At this level, training volume and quality overwhelm biology.

But change the conditions, and the outcome changes.

Take a world-class male and a world-class female. Give them the same coach, the same training program, the same resources, and the same commitment. The male will win—by a lot. That isn’t because elite athletes train differently in some fundamental way. At that level, training volume and intensity distributions are already broadly similar. What separates outcomes are biological differences set by development.

Suppressing testosterone in adulthood can absolutely shift general fitness and recreational performance. That is exactly what the BJSM study demonstrates.

Take a biological male from the middle of the marathon distribution, suppress testosterone, and performance moves closer to that of a woman from the same middle of the distribution.

But elite sport isn’t decided in the middle. It’s decided at the biological ceiling, which is mostly shaped by genetics and development (i.e., puberty) not by day-to-day adult hormone levels. Altering hormones in adulthood, even for years, is very unlikely to fully remodel structures set during development.

That means equivalence between “transgender women” and biological women cannot simply be assumed. At best, the size of any remaining advantage is uncertain—and small residual differences are precisely what decide elite outcomes.

We would expect suppressing testosterone in an elite male athlete to reduce performance. The question is: by how much? We don’t know. The BJSM study doesn’t answer that question, because it never tests elite athletes near their limits.

It is likely that some athletic advantage persist even years after testosterone suppression—especially once serious, high-volume training is layered onto that physiology.

Studies limited to mildly trained populations are therefore asking the wrong question if the goal is to inform competitive sport. They tell us how hormone therapy affects everyday fitness, not how performance ceilings change under elite training conditions.

The Other Problem Sports Science Rarely Admits

There’s one more wrinkle that almost no one outside elite sport fully appreciates.

At the highest level, tiny differences decide everything.

A one-percent performance change sounds trivial in everyday life.

In sprinting or distance running, it’s the difference between winning and not even making the podium.

Ten seconds versus 9.85 in the 100 meters is the difference between gold and watching from the stands.

Consider the photo finish at the 2025 World Athletics Championship marathon (unable to show image due to copyright). After 26.2 miles, the top two runners crossed the line separated by just 0.03 seconds.

Now imagine that one of them had a 0.5 percent advantage. Over a marathon, that translates to roughly 40 seconds.

That’s the reality of elite sport. Small advantages don’t stay small. They turn into medals, records, and margins of victory.

But here’s the paradox: effects that matter enormously in elite sport are often scientifically hard to prove.

Elite samples are tiny. Day-to-day performance can vary by one or two percent. And the advantages that decide outcomes are often fractions of a percent.

So when a study reports “no statistically significant difference,” what that often means is “we didn’t have enough power to detect it,” not that “there is no advantage.”

A lack of statistical significance is not evidence of real-world equivalence in sports performance. That distinction matters enormously in elite competition, where medals are decided by margins too small for most studies to reliably detect.

Putting It All Together

So what does the BJSM study actually tell us?

It shows that manipulating adult hormone levels changes recreational fitness. That’s interesting. It’s useful. It’s real physiology. But it does not answer what happens when years of elite training collide with biological ceilings set by development. Those are different questions—and confusing them is where much of the public debate goes wrong.

Suppressing testosterone in adulthood can meaningfully shift recreational performance because recreational outcomes are strongly influenced by current physiology: hemoglobin levels, muscle mass, recovery, and short-term training response. Elite sport, by contrast, is decided less by day-to-day hormone levels and more by structural capacities established during development.

Traits shaped during puberty—heart size, skeletal geometry, limb proportions, muscle architecture—largely determine how much performance can ultimately be extracted through years of intense training.

Hormone therapy may change where someone falls in the middle of the distribution, but it does not erase the developmental ceiling. And elite competition is decided at that ceiling, not in the middle.

That is the distinction this literature—and much of the media coverage citing it—continues to miss:

• Recreational overlap between sexes does not predict overlap at the elite level.

• Adult hormone levels matter, but training is an even stronger determinant of performance.

• Extreme training reveals performance ceilings, and those ceilings differ by sex. With equal training, the best biological female athletes have not surpassed the best biological male athletes in the same sport.

That isn’t ideology. It’s how distributions work. It’s how physiology works.

None of this is a statement about human worth. Biology isn’t a value judgment; it’s simply biology. Women aren’t “lesser” athletes because they don’t match male records. They compete within a different physiological category.

As I’ve written before, Faith Kipyegon doesn’t need to run a sub-4:00 mile to be extraordinary. She already is. Her performances are remarkable precisely because they represent the limits of female physiology. Different does not mean inferior. It just means different—which is exactly why female athletes have a distinct competitive category.

The issue surrounding transgender athletes is not whether they have a right to participate in sports, it’s how competition is classified. Sport already relies on classification everywhere else—age groups, weight classes, Paralympic categories—because without them, competition stops being fair or meaningful. Sex categories exist for the same reason.

The point here isn’t to single anyone out or to attack any group. It’s simply to keep the science honest. Studying how testosterone suppression and cross-sex hormones affect basic fitness in recreational or military populations has value. But it does not tell us what happens under elite training conditions, and it should not be used to shape policy for high-level sport. Those are different physiological worlds, and pretending otherwise only muddies the debate.

If we want evidence that genuinely informs elite sport policy, we need studies that actually examine elite performance—not just everyday fitness.

As always, this isn’t about one paper or one controversial topic. I critique questionable claims, misleading headlines, and overstated conclusions wherever they appear. If you enjoy this kind of deep dive into how science gets interpreted—and misinterpreted—you can find more at Beyond the Abstract.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

After more than a year of obfuscation, denial, and misdirection by left-wing media, Algerian Olympic “women’s” boxer Imane Khelif has finally confirmed what was already obvious to anyone willing to look at the evidence: he has male chromosomes.

In a recent interview with the French sports outlet L’Équipe, Khelif acknowledged that he possesses the SRY gene, a gene found on the Y chromosome that initiates male sexual development in humans and other mammals.

Here is the key exchange during that interview (translated from French):

INTERVIEWER: So that we understand correctly, you have a female phenotype but have the SRY gene, an indicator of masculinity.

KHELF: Yes, and it’s natural.

That admission settles the matter.

The SRY gene—short for “sex-determining region of the Y”—is what causes a mammalian embryo to develop along the male pathway. Therefore, Khelif admitting to having the SRY gene is a direct admission of having a Y (male) chromosome.

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About SEGM

SEGM's mission is to promote evidence-based principles in the field of youth gender medicine. Our objectives include critically appraising primary studies, translating, analyzing, and disseminating international practice guidelines and society position statements, and, importantly, developing new quality systematic reviews of evidence in partnership with major research universities. In addition to evaluating the endocrine and surgical intervention pathways (known as “gender-affirming care”), we support the development of non-invasive approaches for the care of young people with gender dysphoria.

In a watershed moment, on February 3, 2026, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) issued an official position statement recommending that a key step of “gender-affirming” care—surgical intervention—be delayed until the patient is “at least 19 years old.” The recommendation against performing gender-affirming procedures in minors extends to all types of gender-related surgeries, including breast/chest, genital, and facial surgeries. However, the ASPS statement goes much farther than merely advising surgeons to delay surgery. It raises serious evidentiary and ethical concerns about the entire gender-affirming treatment pathway for youth, including social transition, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones.

Currently, an estimated 1,000 or more mastectomies for minors reporting gender dysphoria are performed annually in the United States. The announcement by ASPS is likely to upend this practice. ASPS is a major medical organization, representing over 90 percent of all plastic surgeons in the U.S., and is the primary specialty performing mastectomies. However, ASPS’s broader conclusion that all gender-transition interventions in minors share similarly problematic risk-benefit profiles is likely to be even more consequential in its ability to influence clinical practice and policy across the field in the months and years ahead.

The 2026 ASPS position statement warrants careful reading by clinicians, researchers, policymakers, and others concerned with pediatric care and evidence-based medicine. Below, we distill its central conclusions.

1. The evidence base for youth gender transition is highly questionable

• Health benefits of gender-affirming interventions in youth are highly uncertain. ASPS points out that not only the magnitude of possible health benefits of medical and surgical “gender-affirming” interventions is in question—but the very existence of any such benefits is uncertain. It notes consistent findings of uncertain benefits from several recent systematic reviews of evidence—including the mastectomy review published in the ASPS official journal. It also references the U.K. Cass Review, and the HHS Evidence Review, in addition to several other international evidence appraisal initiatives.

• There is emerging evidence of harms of pediatric transition. ASPS goes beyond acknowledging the very low certainty of benefits of youth transitions and explicitly highlights emerging evidence of harm. Notably, its discussion of potentially harmful practices is not limited to surgical interventions, but also includes endocrine treatments (puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones). ASPS explicitly acknowledges detransition and regret in its statement and draws attention to the lack of long-term outcome data as a key evidentiary gap.

• The risk-benefit ratio for all endocrine and surgical interventions is problematic. ASPS concludes that “there is insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio for the pathway of gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions in children and adolescents.”

• None of the current U.S. treatment guidelines are trustworthy. ASPS notes that it has not endorsed any treatment guidelines for the care of gender dysphoric adolescents in the United States, and that none of the current guidelines and guidance documents are considered trustworthy for implementation. These include clinical guidance from WPATH, the Endocrine Society, or the American Academy of Pediatrics—all of which are poorly rated.

2. All transition steps form a connected clinical pathway with cumulative risk

• Treatment effects cannot be disaggregated. ASPS points out that as the continuum of care progresses from social transition and puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones and surgery, the risks and uncertainties inherent at each stage become interdependent and cumulative.

• Surgery is the final phase of a single “gender-affirming” clinical pathway with the greatest compounded risk. ASPS warns, “outcomes observed after surgery cannot be confidently attributed to surgery itself rather than to prior medical treatment, psychosocial factors, or the natural trajectory of the condition. As a result, surgical interventions inherit the foundational uncertainties present earlier in the continuum of care.”

• Each treating physician bears independent responsibility for the overall treatment outcome. ASPS advises its members not to rely on mental health referral letters and not to treat prior endocrine interventions as a proxy for determining that surgery is indicated. Instead, each provider of gender-transition interventions must conduct their own independent assessment of medical appropriateness and adolescent capacity to consent.

3. Youth gender transitions currently operate outside medico-ethical norms

• Youth gender transitions are currently an outlier medical treatment. ASPS notes that gender dysphoria/gender incongruence is the only diagnosis where treatment indications for irreversible procedures are entirely “dependent on predicting future identity development or evolving embodiment goals.” It notes that the stability of the diagnosis at the population level is unknown, and that clinicians cannot predict the future for any individual child or adolescent. Further, ASPS points out that the interventions themselves may alter the course of adolescent identity development, including identity formation and psychosocial development, which compound the uncertainties, risks, and ethical challenges.

• Focusing on appearance satisfaction rather than health outcomes is inconsistent with the goals of medicine. ASPS rejects claims by some proponents of gender transitions that the goal of treatments is to merely help patients meet their embodiment goals. ASPS’s position statement reinforces the standard medical premise that treatments should improve health outcomes—not simply improve satisfaction. It notes, for example, that adolescent breast reductions are only performed when there is an expectation of health benefit, which is required for the procedures to be reimbursable by insurance.

• The “suicide narrative” and other crisis-based justifications for gender transitions are unacceptable. ASPS decries attempts to position gender-affirming interventions as “lifesaving” or to claim that delaying or withholding them leads to suicide—claims that are contradicted by the evidence. It notes that the only appropriate stance when it comes to demand for pediatric transitions, especially when they are justified by crisis claims, is even greater caution and more stringent safeguards.

4. Drawing false equivalences with established medical practices is misguided

• Gender-related surgeries are not comparable to other plastic procedures. ASPS draws a clear distinction between gender-related surgeries in minors and other plastic procedures sometimes done in adolescence, such as breast reduction or gynecomastia surgery. In ASPS’s view, breast reduction and gynecomastia surgery usually address clear physical problems (pain, functional limitation, or distress tied to a physical condition), and the reason for surgery does not depend on predicting how a young person’s identity or long-term goals will develop. By contrast, ASPS argues that gender-related surgeries in minors are typically justified mainly by expected psychological or social benefits, even though the long-term evidence is uncertain and the procedures can have permanent effects on fertility, sexual function, and future medical needs—so the ethical threshold for proceeding should be higher.

• Providing youth gender transitions based on “very low” certainty of benefits is inconsistent with medical ethics. ASPS notes that although reliance on very low/low certainty evidence is not uncommon in medicine, ethical permissibility turns on “the relationship between evidence uncertainty, anticipated benefit, potential harms, and patient vulnerability.” ASPS calls out misguided evidentiary ethical analyses by the advocates for youth gender transitions (including the Yale-based “Integrity Project referenced by ASPS) and stresses that when interventions are irreversible, the existence of the benefits is uncertain, harms may be lifelong, and minors’ identities are still developing, the precautionary principle must apply.

5. Standard bioethical principles cannot be ignored

• Standard bioethical principles apply. ASPS invokes “established principles of biomedical ethics” that “dictate that physicians should offer interventions only when there is a reasonable expectation that anticipated benefits outweigh potential harms.” Irreversible procedures such surgery should not be provided to minors.

• Patient autonomy and preferences alone do not justify treatment. ASPS observes that patient autonomy is best understood as the right to accept or refuse a clinically appropriate intervention, and this “does not create an obligation for a physician to provide interventions in the absence of a favorable risk-benefit profile particularly in adolescent populations where decision-making capabilities are still developing.” It also notes that patient “values and preferences” (an important concept in evidence-based medicine) have not been studied in this area of medicine. Therefore, it is unclear whether fully informed patients and families would agree with the Endocrine Society‘s ethical framing for gender-related treatments that explicitly puts a higher value on achieving enhanced cosmetic outcomes, and a lower value on avoiding medical harm. ASPS asserts that informed consent by patients resides within an evidence framework—not outside it.

• Respect for patient dignity does not equate with provision of a specific treatment. ASPS affirms respect for the human dignity of individuals who identify as transgender and/or suffer from gender dysphoria. It clarifies, however, that “recognition of patient dignity is not contingent upon pursuit of a specific clinical pathway.”

ASPS Position

• On the basis of all these points, ASPS “recommends that surgeons delay gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.”

Potential implications

There are several key implications of the ASPS 2026 statement, which we briefly outline below:

• The HHS Evidence Review has been accepted as valid and foundational by a major US medical association. ASPS endorses the HHS Evidence Review, directing its members to Appendix 4 “which details the types of interventions (medical, surgical, psychological), reported outcomes, magnitude and direction of effects, and overall certainty of evidence available in the published literature.” It also endorses the HHS Review’s ethics analysis, emphasizing that for adolescents, the precautionary principle should apply. The ASPS notes, “when the likelihood of spontaneous resolution is unknown and when irreversible interventions carry known and plausible risks, adhering to the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence (i.e. promoting health and well-being while avoiding harm) requires a precautionary approach.”

• Physicians might begin to distance themselves from “gender-affirming” interventions. Until recently, the refrain that “every major medical association supports” pediatric gender transition may have discouraged individual clinicians from reexamining the evidence. A high-profile dissent from the specialty society tied to a key part of the clinical pathway is likely to signal to busy physicians—who may not have time to read lengthy evidence reviews—that pediatric gender transition is a contested area of practice. At the same time, clinicians who wish to continue to practice pediatric gender-affirming surgery may distance themselves from ASPS or other mainstream medical organizations.

• Medical malpractice litigation may face fewer barriers. ASPS bluntly warns that surgery in minors carries elevated ethical, clinical, and legal risk, and that surgeons remain personally responsible for indication and informed consent—not protected by letters or protocols. Because specialty-society guidance shapes standards of care for hospitals, insurers, and courts, ASPS’s recommendation to defer surgery under 19 will likely intensify scrutiny of clinicians who continue operating on minors—especially given its view that WPATH, Endocrine Society, and AAP guidance is not sufficiently reliable. A recent New York jury award of $2 million in a malpractice case over a mastectomy at 16 underscores the growing legal focus on consent and documentation.

• Insurers will likely reassess policies in light of rising risk. Given ASPS’s strong stance against surgery in minors—and its emphasis on interdependent, cumulative risks—both liability and health insurers may respond. Malpractice carriers could raise premiums as legal exposure increases, while health insurers may revisit medical-necessity criteria for surgeries and tighten oversight of endocrine interventions.

• Other major medical associations may have to revisit their positions. By emphasizing that “gender-affirming” interventions are interconnected and cumulative, ASPS forces organizations to either align with its evidentiary and ethical reasoning—or reject it and articulate an alternative framework. The American Medical Association has already signaled movement, stating it agrees with ASPS in that surgery in minors should generally be deferred to adulthood. Next, the American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association will face scrutiny, since their members routinely provide transition referral letters—sometimes with minimal or no assessment. It remains unclear to what extent organizations like the Endocrine Society and the American Academy of Pediatrics, which have strongly endorsed these treatments, will be able to adjust.

• Researchers may reconsider study designs. Several initiatives (including the UK PATHWAYS trial) treat each step of medical transition as a separate intervention. ASPS’s emphasis that the treatment should be viewed as an interconnected pathway—with benefits and risks that compound across steps—may push researchers to redesign studies to better assess the cumulative effects of the overall “gender-affirming” approach.

• Vulnerable young adults may be better protected. Although ASPS limited its guidance to minors, its wording of “at least 19 years old,” along with its decisional framework—linking ethical permissibility of poorly-evidenced interventions to anticipated harm-benefit ratio and patient vulnerability—may prompt greater caution with patients in their 20s as well. Because the evidence base for adolescents and young adults is similarly weak, and their vulnerabilities often overlap due to ongoing brain development and a similarly high burden of mental health comorbidities (as the Cass Review notes), young adults could face a higher threshold for irreversible interventions and closer scrutiny of medical necessity.

SEGM Take-Away

It is no accident that plastic surgeons are the first professional association to take a strong stance against a key intervention in the “gender-affirming” care pathway for youth.

First, unlike endocrine interventions, where changes unfold gradually and the extent of irreversibility may only become clear over time, surgery is universally understood as irreversible from the outset. When the risk–benefit ratio is unfavorable, surgeons have no gray area to retreat into—they must decide whether to operate.

Second, because surgery is typically the final step in the transition pathway, surgeons inherit the cumulative risks and uncertainties of the upstream interventions. That vantage point likely contributed to why the professional association representing plastic surgeons was among the first to recognize the full scope of the problem.

Third, and importantly, plastic surgery is unusual among medical specialties in routinely providing both elective cosmetic procedures and medically necessary care. This positions plastic surgeons to distinguish between interventions that are medically indicated and those that may primarily offer patient satisfaction without improving health outcomes.

The ASPS statement on pediatric gender transition adopts an evidence-based stance in its evaluation of pediatric surgery, as such procedures have been historically asserted to be “medically necessary.” ASPS points out key foundational gaps in knowledge about adolescent gender-related distress, analyzing them through the lens of evidence-based medicine. It points out the unknown natural course of the condition absent medical and surgical interventions (i.e., “natural history”); the unclear stability of the diagnosis of gender dysphoria/gender incongruence; and the very low/low certainty of evidence for the treatment outcomes, especially in the long term. While the evidence base is highly uncertain, ASPS warns that it is “increasingly suggestive of potential harm and long-term complications” of gender-affirming interventions for minors.

The medical establishment’s gradual self-correction—reflected in ASPS’s change in position—is precisely what SEGM has advocated for since our inception. SEGM is proud to have supported this shift through focused work since 2019. We were the first organization to report that Finland broke with WPATH and issued far more cautious recommendations, and we were the organization that translated the full Finland’s PALKO/COHERE recommendations, cited by ASPS, for the English-speaking world. Finland’s full-length guidelines were the first document in the world to recognize pediatric gender transition as an “experimental practice.” We are also proud to have commissioned key independent North American systematic reviews of the evidence, including the mastectomy systematic review and meta-analysis from McMaster University, published in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery—ASPS’s official journal—which ASPS also references as part of the basis for its decision.

Some will likely frame ASPS’s shift as a defensive reaction to recent litigation or political pressures. However, ASPS began signaling a more cautious approach in the wake of the Cass Review and has progressively indicated an intent to align practice with the best available evidence. It is our sincere hope that other medical organizations follow suit, and demonstrate to the public their willingness to move forward in a way that aligned practice with medical evidence and ethics in order to protect vulnerable youth from harm.

This article was originally published on the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine’s website on February 5, 2026.

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Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

When we talk about political violence, we almost always assume that its perpetrators are young men. That makes sense: men are statistically more likely to engage in physical aggression and get arrested for violent crimes at higher rates. At the same time, many are dealing with rising unemployment, declining educational achievement, and growing social disengagement. Given all that, researchers may reasonably assume that young men are driving greater tolerance for political violence.

New data complicate that assumption. A recent survey by the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers found that under certain conditions, women were more likely than men to express support for political violence. The findings were so counter to the prevailing narrative that they surprised even the researchers.

It makes sense, though, when you start to recognize where these women’s impulses come from. The rise of what I call “punitive femininity” is downstream of the toxic political culture online, a culture that is transforming the sex long viewed as more restrained and less prone to violence.

To investigate toleration of political violence, NCRI use data from a survey of 1,055 respondents, weighted to be representative across sex, age, race/ethnicity, and education. The survey asked participants whether they saw any justification for the targeted murder of President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It recorded responses on a seven-point scale ranging from zero (“completely unjustified”) to six (“highly justified”).

Among left-of-center respondents, 67 percent expressed at least some justification for the murder of Trump, an 11-point increase over NCRI’s earlier 2025 study. Fifty-four percent of right-of-center respondents expressed some degree of justification for murdering Mamdani.

Strikingly, justification for killing Trump and justification for killing Mamdani were strongly correlated. This implies that support for political murder is not merely partisan but reflects a generalized tolerance for political violence.

The most unexpected result: women were significantly more likely than men to endorse such violence. Female respondents were approximately 21 percent more likely than males to express some justification for murdering Mamdani and nearly 15 percent more likely to justify murdering Trump.

Both differences were statistically significant. These effects persisted even after controlling for age and other variables.

This disparity isn’t obviously the result of biological sex differences or even political polarization. Rather, it reflects the rise of a distinct and disturbing mindset.

The strongest predictors of tolerance for violence in NCRI’s data were heavy social media use and a sense that America is in a state of terminal decline. The supporters of violence in the survey aren’t traditional extremists. Rather, they seem motivated by the despair, nihilism, and moral confusion online.

For whatever reason, women seem uniquely at risk for infection by this mindset. Over the past decade, women—especially younger women—have become more politically and affectively polarized in their political judgments. Political disagreement is increasingly treated as a serious moral offense rather than a simple difference of opinion. When you see the world that way, punishing someone for holding different views becomes a moral good.

I think of this mindset as “punitive femininity.” By punitive femininity, I do not mean to invoke notions of hostility, cruelty, or aggression in the conventional sense. I mean the transformation of moral concern into a license to act punitively. Adoption of this attitude is fueled by a combination of raw anger, emotional manipulation, and an exaggerated sense of moral certainty.

Social media plays a central role in this transformation. Modern platforms reward outrage, absolutism, and performative aggression. They flatten moral complexity, elevating and even glorifying condemnation.

This lens helps make sense of some of the strangest corners of the internet. Consider the online reaction to Luigi Mangione. After his arrest for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, some treated Mangione not as a killer, but as a celebrity. They even explicitly sexualized him, describing him as attractive, charismatic, and even romantic.

When violence is paired with attraction, it stops being judged on moral terms. Instead of asking whether an action is wrong, people start asking whether it feels meaningful, expressive, or somehow justified.

Women aren’t uniquely prone to this dynamic. But they do disproportionately occupy and get their news from the digital spaces where this kind of aestheticization spreads fastest.

Historically, women have played a stabilizing role in moral and civic life. Across cultures, they score higher on measures of empathy, care, and harm avoidance.

When women become less likely to demonstrate these virtues, it doesn’t mean they’ve suddenly transformed. It means the moral climate itself has deteriorated. Social media is breaking down basic norms of restraint, and that breakdown is showing up in groups once closely associated with moral caution and care.

If we care about social stability and the well-being of the next generation, we need to change course. We must stop rewarding moral outrage—especially when it means support for violence.

This essay was originally published in City Journal.

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About the Author

Joe Figliolia is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute where he writes about ethics, society and culture with a particular focus on pediatric gender medicine. His writing has appeared in City Journal, The Dispatch, and the New York Post, among others. Figliolia earned an MA from NYU's Center for Experimental Humanities.

From the collapse of a shared American monoculture and the rise of hyper-personalized information streams to the flood of AI-generated content, it has never been harder to separate digital wheat from digital chaff. The promise of shared cultural literacy feels increasingly remote as our information environment grows more complex, while our capacity for comprehension and critical thinking fails to keep pace. Even with access to more knowledge that makes the Library of Alexandria seem almost quaint in comparison, many of us remain lost in an informational hall of mirrors.

This problem is especially acute when it comes to subjects with a genuinely high barrier to entry. Pediatric gender medicine is one such topic. To understand it in any serious, holistic way requires at least a working familiarity with several disciplines that are typically siloed from one another: evidence-based medicine, endocrinology, clinical psychology, bioethics, and sociology, among others. Given that reality, it’s easy to understand the impulse to defer to supposed experts when time, background knowledge, or both are in short supply.

But a recent essay in Newsweek, titled “Bad Medicine—How Secretary Kennedy Is Jeopardizing LGBTQ Lives,” inadvertently illustrates the costs of uncritically outsourcing judgment to ostensibly authoritative voices who, in this case, fail to serve their function or the public interest. The piece is written by Adrian Shanker and Sam Ames, both of whom served in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Biden-Harris administration. They characterize HHS’s recent peer-reviewed report on pediatric gender dysphoria as the product of conspiracy thinking and “transphobia,” while framing it as an extension of Health Secretary Kennedy’s more eccentric views on controversial topics like autism and vaccines. In doing so, the authors present themselves as clear-eyed defenders of truth cutting through pseudoscience.

This is unfortunate, because whether driven by bad faith or genuine scientific illiteracy, the essay amounts to a sweeping misinformation campaign against the HHS report—one that corrodes public trust in both experts and institutions. What’s at stake is nothing less than our ability to inhabit a shared, intelligible world governed by scientific norms rather than surrendering to the buzzing confusion of relativism.

What makes the Newsweek piece especially damaging to civil discourse is the gap between its sanctimonious confidence and its evident lack of engagement with the underlying material. Despite repeatedly asserting that the HHS report lacks scientific merit, the authors give every indication that they either did not read the report in full or, if they did, failed to understand it. This impression is hard to avoid given their reliance on claims that the report itself directly contradicts, as well as their apparent confusion about how evidence hierarchies function in evidence-based medicine.

Shanker and Ames declare the report “methodologically muddled,” but fail to expand on this critique. What they fail to acknowledge is that the report’s peer-reviewers—including evidence-based medicine experts from Belgium—praised its methodology as clear and reproducible. Nor did any reviewer dispute the central finding of the report’s umbrella review—a review of systematic reviews—that the evidence supporting medical transition is of only “low certainty.”

Although critics like Shanker and Ames portray the HHS report as a political hit job with predetermined conclusions, its findings are anything but surprising. Systematic reviews—the highest tier of evidence in evidence-based medicine—conducted in Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom have reached the same conclusion. Just weeks ago, New Zealand announced a pause on all new puberty-blocker prescriptions over ethical concerns. Yet Shanker and Ames appear either unaware of, or uninterested in, this international context, instead telling readers that the HHS report exists merely “to create the appearance of a genuine scientific debate.”

The authors also assert, irresponsibly, that so-called “affirming care” is a “common sense” intervention, claiming that decades of research demonstrate a 60 percent reduction in depression and a 73 percent reduction in suicidality and self-harm. But the characterization of these interventions as “common sense” falls apart under even minimal scrutiny. They remain unapproved by the FDA for the treatment of gender dysphoria, and their adoption was shaped in part by earlier efforts to address poor outcomes among adult transitioners, not by robust evidence of benefit in pediatric populations.

More troubling still, Shanker and Ames fundamentally misrepresent the evidence base itself, undercutting the HHS report’s central aim of helping the public understand what the science actually shows. The dramatic figures they cite trace back to a single 2022 observational cohort study by Diana M. Tordoff and colleagues, a study that has persisted in public discourse like an invincible zombie, despite having been carefully and repeatedly fact-checked since its publication. Its methodological flaws have been documented by Leor Sapir, Jesse Singal, and, several months ago, by me, after the study was cited in a Continuing Medical Education course by a member of the Texas Medical Association.

Readers should understand that within evidence-based medicine, studies like Tordoff et al. (2022) sit near the bottom of the evidence hierarchy for straightforward methodological reasons. As an observational study without a control group, it cannot establish causality. Any reported benefits are further confounded by the fact that participants simultaneously received psychotherapy and psychiatric medications. In short, the study design makes it impossible to isolate the effects of medical intervention itself. This is precisely why systematic reviews exist: to weigh the totality of evidence and assess whether an intervention actually works.

Either Shanker and Ames do not grasp this basic framework, or—perhaps even more troubling—they do and choose to ignore it. When writing confidently and publicly about one of the most conceptually and ethically complex issues of our time, there is a responsibility to get the underlying facts right, even when reasonable people may disagree about what those facts imply for public policy.

This abdication of responsibility extends to their defense of medical societies that endorse pediatric gender medicine, which they treat as conclusive evidence that the practices must therefore be evidence-based. As they write, “What the report fails to adequately address, is the longstanding consensus of every major medical organization that gender-affirming care is linked to improvements in the health of transgender youth” (and the consensus has recently shown signs of cracking with the groundbreaking position statement by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons opposing surgical interventions for minors). They go on to claim that “what was formerly a generally-accepted medical consensus has been thrown into a flashy culture war whose proponents rely on bluster and noise to appear on equal footing with empirical evidence.”

Contrary to their assertion, the HHS report devotes an entire chapter—Chapter 12—to explaining how U.S. medical associations arrived at an artificial consensus around pediatric gender medicine despite contrary findings in systematic reviews. As the report details, American medical organizations rarely evaluate the underlying evidence base for “affirming care” themselves. Instead, they tend to endorse guidelines issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the U.S. Endocrine Society—guidelines that have been deemed unsuitable for use in clinical practice because of serious deficiencies in developmental rigor. These guidelines have nonetheless done much of the heavy lifting in persuading the public that pediatric gender medicine is both safe and effective.

In WPATH’s case, the organization commissioned evidence reviews and then declined to publish them after the findings conflicted with its goal of expanding access to pediatric medical transition. The Endocrine Society’s recommendations, meanwhile, are classified as “discordant” in the parlance of evidence-based medicine, meaning their clinical guidance is not supported by the conclusions of their own systematic reviews, which focused largely on adult, rather than pediatric, transitioners.

The authors’ appeal to medical consensus also ignores a basic point that consensus-based medicine is not the same as evidence-based medicine. The very purpose of federal evidence standards was to move beyond professional agreement as an authority in itself. History offers no shortage of cautionary examples. Frontal lobotomies, insulin coma therapy for schizophrenia, and routine bloodletting were once considered standard care. There is good reason to suspect that many pediatric transition interventions will one day be viewed in much the same light.

Ironically, the authors’ uncritical deference to the U.S. medical establishment makes it more difficult to reestablish treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria on empirical grounds. What Shanker and Ames appear not to recognize is that the current position of many American medical associations is fundamentally at odds with the principles of evidence-based medicine. That tension helps explain why several European countries, which adhere more closely to EBM standards, have reversed course on pediatric medical transition. In the United States, by contrast, defenders of “affirming care” tend to rely on institutional consensus—an appeal to authority—rather than on the strongest available evidence.

There are also clear incentives discouraging U.S. medical associations from breaking with the consensus they helped construct. As I documented in a recent report on institutional capture within the Texas Medical Association, policymaking on “LGBTQ” issues is often delegated to ideologically homogeneous subcommittees, some of which carry intellectual or financial conflicts of interest. These bodies frequently treat “affirming care” as a civil rights imperative rather than as a medical intervention that should rise or fall on evidentiary grounds.

Finally, acknowledging error on pediatric gender medicine would carry significant reputational and legal consequences. Organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, which continue to endorse pediatric medical transition, appear to be pursuing a short-term survival strategy of reputational preservation. But the longer these organizations hold out, the greater the damage is likely to be in the long term. Given the rapid leadership turnover in many professional societies—where presidents often serve only year-long terms—there is little personal incentive for those at the helm to correct course, even when doing so would better serve best interest of their organizations and the public they claim to care for.

At the individual level, many clinicians who have invested deeply in this intellectual project are likely grappling with a profound degree of cognitive dissonance. Confronted with the possibility that well-intentioned interventions may have harmed vulnerable patients, there are two paths available: revise one’s understanding in light of new evidence, or rationalize away that evidence to avoid damaging your positive self-concept. One of these paths is plainly easier than the other.

The issues raised by the Newsweek essay are complex, and I do not pretend to have all the answers. A good-faith exchange of ideas about gender medicine is not only desirable but necessary. Yet, as the article itself illustrates, too many participants in this debate—whether driven by tribal loyalty, ideology, or moral certainty—avoid substantive engagement with criticism, opting instead for ad hominem attacks or speculation about the sinister motives of “the other side.”

Some readers may recoil at the messenger. A Trump-era HHS Department is, for many, an uncomfortable source of authority. But dismissing the report on that basis alone would be a serious mistake. However imperfect the messenger, the message deserves to be confronted on its merits.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.

A note before I begin...

For most of my adult life, I was certain I would never want children. Not uncertain or conflicted. Certain. I built my relationships, my ambitions, and my future around that conviction, assuming that fatherhood was a life I would never live. Then, without warning, that certainty shattered. It didn’t happen through argument or persuasion, but through a single moment that changed how I understood love, meaning, and time. This is a personal story about how I went from seeing children as a kind of ending to seeing them as the deepest beginning imaginable, and why becoming a father is now my life’s greatest aspiration.

This essay was originally published on X as a submission to its $1 million contest for the best X Article. Unfortunately, it did not win.

I have the best parents I could ever imagine.

They are emotionally stable, smart, pragmatic, hard working, and loving. I have never witnessed either of them behaving dishonorably toward each other, or toward anyone else. I have never heard them yell at one another, never observed cruelty, and never sensed an ounce of contempt. They have been married for more than forty years, and they still love each other deeply.

Growing up, I always knew my parents were different from my friends’ parents, though for a long time I could not articulate why. It wasn’t that my friends’ homes lacked affection (they didn’t), but what I felt in my own house was warmer, steadier, and secure. There was a playfulness to the way my parents spoke to one another, reflecting the deepest comfort in their presence together. Even now, when I visit home, I’ll often catch them passing each other in the kitchen only to stop for a hug or kiss, or sometimes even dance.

A family friend once told me a story that captures a glimpse of who they are. Many years ago, my parents organized a trip to Mexico with a group of friends. The husbands arrived a week early to fish, and the wives were to join them later so everyone could vacation together and eat what the men had caught. When my mom finally stepped off the plane with the other wives and saw my dad waiting there, she began to cry soft, happy tears. She had missed him. Her husband and best friend. Even after just one week apart.

The love I feel when I visit home is unlike anything else I’ve ever known.

When I was very young, I remember assuming I would have children someday, but it wasn’t something I reflected on much. It just seemed like part of life. But sometime in high school, that assumption fell away. This didn’t occur because of any particular event, and it was not a result of deep introspection. I simply stopped being able to imagine myself as a father. Children seemed like a hassle and an immense burden. Why would I want that? What was the point?

As I got older, my “child-free” stance became more entrenched. It was reinforced by Reddit forums like r/childfree, where users celebrated the freedom of a life without kids. People posted about their amazing vacations, extra money, their ability to sleep in, or the nice things they cluttered their lives with. That life looked appealing to me. Although I always believed I would be a good father if I chose that path, it wasn’t a path I felt drawn toward. And even if I had been, it seemed almost impossibly distant. I didn’t have the money, the house, or the loving wife. It felt too abstract and hypothetical, like it was something for another version of me.

My first long-term relationship was with someone who was also firmly against having children. That seemed perfect. At one point, I even had a consultation for a vasectomy. I never followed through. I’m still not entirely sure why. It just felt like something I could always do later.

When that relationship ended in 2016, my search for a new someone came with a non-negotiable requirement: she also had to be child-free. Being an academic didn’t help either. The postdoc years, the geographic instability that made establishing roots nearly impossible, and the uncertainty of tenure all felt incompatible with building a family. I was convinced that children simply weren’t in my future. I was certain of that until I was thirty-six years old.

Then one moment changed everything.

In 2020, during COVID lockdowns, our family decided that we’d all quarantine together. So I moved back into my parents’ home near Sacramento, along with my brother. I always notice how much parents have aged since I last saw them, even after a short separation. They were definitely getting older, but they were healthy.

During lockdown, my dad needed to have a colonoscopy. As part of the prep, he was forbidden to eat solid food for twenty-four hours and could only drink clear liquids. He chose sugar-free Crystal Light lemonade. A terrible idea, as it turned out. After the procedure, he came home, sat outside for a bit, then stood up to go inside and lie down. Having consumed no carbohydrates for over a day, he suddenly became lightheaded. As he opened the door, he fainted and fell face-first onto the tile floor, hitting his head hard and knocking himself unconscious.

I wasn’t there when it happened. I was in my bedroom, working at my desk. My brother suddenly burst through my door in a panic telling me that Dad had fallen. From the way he said it, I knew immediately that this wasn’t a mere stumble.

The image I saw as I rushed into the living room is forever burned into my memory. My dad was on the ground, convulsing. Shaking violently. I thought I was watching him die, and that he would suddenly stop moving forever. The fear was overwhelming. But through that terror a single thought erupted inside me with startling force: you must have children.

The thought wasn’t in the form of words, like an inner monologue. It was more like being shouted at by an emotion.

Eventually, my dad stopped shaking and regained consciousness, but he wasn’t himself. He didn’t know where he was or what happened. He kept trying to stand up, but we wouldn’t let him. We called 911. The paramedics arrived quickly and asked him questions. He was oddly cheerful but completely disoriented. Devastatingly, because of the COVID pandemic, we couldn’t go with him when they loaded him onto the gurney and took him away in the ambulance.

As the doors to the ambulance closed, I felt shaken in a way I’d never experienced before. And suddenly, the meaning of that earlier internal command became clear. I understood that the reason I had never felt the need to start my own family was because I already had one. A perfect one. I had a mother and father who loved each other, a brother who was my best friend, a home filled with warmth and support. My parents were so good at being parents that they left me wanting nothing. They made me feel whole and complete, and it kept me blissfully ignorant of how the cycle of life is supposed to work.

But shaking on the floor, my father—who had always been my symbol of strength and stability—was suddenly fragile. Mortal. For the first time, I viscerally understood that the family I had always relied on was not eternal. It was fleeting. My dad was getting older. He will die someday. For all I knew, he might have been dying right there and then.

With that realization, the foundation of my sense of meaning cracked. I saw clearly that my deepest sense of purpose came from my family, and that without them I would feel hopelessly lost. If I wanted that sense of meaning to persist for the rest of my life, I would need to create my own family. And that meant relinquishing my role as the son and stepping into the role of the father.

The meaning wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t come from making my parents proud. It would come from something much deeper: giving myself up, setting aside my ego, and building a secure, loving world for my children. It would come from seeing myself reflected in their eyes and feeling pride not in my achievements, but in who they become with my guidance.

For most of my life, I had thought of having children as the end of my life. Now I understand it as the beginning of a new one. In truth, until I have children of my own, I still view myself as a child in some sense. Unfinished. Parenthood feels to me like the necessary final chapter of a life well lived, one filled with a meaning much deeper than exotic vacations or luxury goods could ever provide.

I don’t care about traveling anymore. I’ve seen enough. I don’t care about my intellectual legacy. How many more essays do I really need to write? All I care about now is being a good father.

I wish I had come to this realization earlier. As it stands, I will be an old dad. Given my parents’ age—especially my father’s—I don’t know how well my future children will ever know them. That thought weighs heavily on me. And knowing that every passing year without children means one fewer year I get to be their father feels like something precious constantly slipping away. On my deathbed, how much would I value a few more years with my loving family? Waiting hurts, because every delay feels like a loss.

I know people who want children but have postponed having them because of politics. Because of the current administration. It’s painful to think that someone would allow their political opponents to steal four years of life with their children. Four Christmases. Four birthdays. Four totally irreplaceable years.

Days like Father’s Day are hard reminders of what I don’t yet have. But nothing hits quite like Christmas Eve, when there are no little ears to hear me read The Night Before Christmas, or Christmas morning, when no children come rushing in, eyes full of wonder, to open presents from Santa.

I think many people will eventually have this same realization. I know several around my age who already have, triggered by the death of a beloved parent. They delayed starting families because they felt fulfilled by the one they already had, not realizing that the warmth and wholeness they felt was never meant to last forever.

I used to say I couldn’t imagine being a father. Now it’s nearly all I imagine.

I’ve always been wary of labels. I don’t believe in God, but I avoid calling myself an atheist. I didn’t like being labeled a Democrat when I was on the left, and I don’t like being labeled a Republican now that I lean right. I was deeply influenced by Paul Graham’s essay “Keep Your Identity Small,” which argued that the more labels you adopt, the harder it becomes to think clearly because disagreement starts to feel like a personal attack. Indeed, so many of our current social ills are caused by an excessive fixation on identity.

But I’ve found one exception, one identity I can’t wait to claim without hesitation or caveat.

Dad.

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About the Author

Pamela Paresky is a Senior Fellow at the Network Contagion Research Institute, a Senior Advisor the Open Therapy Institute, and the founder of the Free Mind Foundation. She has taught at Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and the US Air Force Academy, and is currently an Associate at Harvard University in the Department of Psychology. Subscribe to her Habits of a Free Mind Substack, and follow her on X @PamelaParesky.

When psychological jargon replaces descriptions of reality, it erodes our ability to draw legal distinctions, and the loss of legal rights soon follows. The recent Supreme Court cases Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. offer a clear illustration.

Stated in ordinary language, the question before the Court is simple: Should the law recognize biological sex when allocating sex-based protections? Stripped of psychological jargon, the question itself is nonsensical. Sex-based protections that do not recognize sex as a biological category are incoherent. But once the issue is reframed in “gender” jargon, the cases appear to the uninformed as matters of discrimination and exclusion.

Under longstanding constitutional doctrine, sex is a real, observable, and legally relevant distinction. Excluding male athletes from female-only sports is constitutionally permissible when the classification serves a remedial purpose. Women’s sports exist precisely to remedy categorical disparities that would otherwise bar females from meaningful participation.

Yet psychological language is increasingly used to bypass that reasoning altogether. If a male child is linguistically transformed into a “girl,” then excluding “her” no longer appears to be the lawful exclusion of a male from a female-only category. Instead, it now looks like the denial of participation to a different category of “girl,” rather than the enforcement of a sex-based rule.

During oral argument, advocates—and at times the Court itself—repeatedly referred to the male athletes in these cases as “transgender girls,” a term drawn not from biology but from psychology and identity discourse. The phrase does not describe sex. It obscures it.

A “transgender girl” is a male child whose psychological sense of identity conflicts with biological sex. The purpose of the term is not descriptive precision but perceptual transformation. It invites listeners—and judges—to look past maleness altogether. That is the point.

This substitution is often defended as compassionate and inclusive. But in law, its power depends on a reversal of linguistic direction of fit. Instead of aiming to describe the world as it is, the language demands that the world be reorganized to match the words. Once that reversal is accepted, the law becomes vulnerable to a subtle but highly consequential sleight of hand.

The philosopher John Searle distinguished between two directions of fit in language. In the first, “word-to-world,” language describes reality. In the second, “world-to-word,” reality is made to conform to language. The Declaration of Independence is a classic example of the latter: the United States was created by linguistic declaration.

Psychological jargon with respect to sex categories has quietly shifted from the first mode to the second. What was once a clinical description of psychological distress—an internal sense of self at odds with biological sex, formerly termed Gender Identity Disorder—has been transformed into a vocabulary whose purpose is no longer diagnosis or clarity, but affirmation. The result is a legal fiction that treats subjective identity as if it could override biological reality.

Whatever one thinks about the therapeutic value of such affirmation, treating a subjective sense of femaleness as sufficient to reclassify a male as female under the law is destabilizing to jurisprudence.

Even the routine use of pronouns that contradict biological sex reflects the same world-to-word reversal. Such language may ease psychological distress in individuals diagnosed with gender dysphoria. But when identity terms that conflict with reality replace descriptive categories, the law loses its capacity to draw objective distinctions and instead becomes a vehicle for subjective self-identification. If “girl” comes to mean anyone who claims the label, sex disappears as a legal category. And so do sex-based rights.

The phrase “sex assigned at birth” illustrates the same linguistic maneuver. In its original clinical context, it referred to rare cases in which an infant’s sex was mistakenly recorded—most often in disorders of sex development where a male newborn’s genitalia appeared female. The phrase was later absorbed into a psychological framework that treats sex itself as provisional and subjective.

In reality, sex is almost always correctly observed and recorded at birth. It is not a matter of physician discretion or social assignment. Yet the widespread use of this language subtly recasts sex-based classifications as arbitrary administrative choices rather than the legal recognition of a biological reality.

Once the broader framing of sex as something merely “assigned” at birth is accepted, and a male child with gender dysphoria is reclassified as a “transgender girl,” protecting females begins to look arbitrary—or worse, discriminatory. The psychological language has already done the argumentative work before legal reasoning even begins.

This pattern is not confined to women’s sports. It reflects a broader trend in public discourse, in which linguistic constructs harden into what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called “thought-terminating clichés”—phrases that signal moral virtue while shutting down debate. To question the language is to appear callous. To insist on distinctions is to invite moral condemnation.

Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated this danger long before the rise of modern psychology. He warned that democratic societies tend to cultivate habits of the heart—sympathy, identification, emotional responsiveness—more quickly than habits of the mind—judgment, restraint, and moral courage. When compassion outruns discernment, Tocqueville feared, citizens come to confuse kindness with justice.

That confusion is now embedded in our legal vocabulary. The law is increasingly pressured to affirm identities rather than uphold categorical boundaries. The result is not an expansion of justice, but a dissolution of rights—and a collapse of critical thinking.

George Orwell warned that when language ceases to describe reality, it becomes an instrument of power rather than truth. In law, that corruption has concrete consequences. Sex-based rights depend on the law’s ability to identify sex. Once psychological semantics makes that taboo, women lose hard-won protections in both law and society.

Semantics are not a distraction from justice. They are its foundation. And a free society fails when it loses the courage to tell the truth.

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