Sarah Barker is not impressed by Malcolm Gladwell’s mea culpa.

Hard-boiled editors, presidents of sports organizations, communications directors who were used to being screamed at, who were used to getting their way, they all smiled and nodded along meekly to the most nonsensical garbage, adopting absurd ideological language that they knew to be absurd ideological language…

Malcolm Gladwell, well known author, journalist, columnist, and all-around influential person, both in the sports world and beyond, came clean on that front, and my goodness, hasn’t it created a stir…

Gladwell quickly moved past that bombshell—that he knew back in 2022 that what these trans activists were saying was “nuts” but that he was “cowed” into not challenging it; that he agreed with what Tucker was saying but did not say so or ask the trans panelists to respond to the science; and that he’s “ashamed” of his actions—without ever reflecting on how a person whose job it is to tell the public the truth could be “cowed” by a couple of activists talking nonsense, or how his failure to speak up until now, three years and a cultural epoque later, affected women. He did not utter the word “women” at all. While he wanted to appear contrite to Ross Tucker for letting him twist in the wind on that panel, he never apologized to women for his complicity in allowing the fundamental violation of women’s human rights to continue.

It’s interesting how easy it is for men to forget to mention women. I keep noticing it, and that includes noticing that it never changes. All these decades of active feminism but still, men forget to mention women.

Gladwell fancies himself a thought leader, and he is accorded status and speaking fees as an influential person in our society. If he is those things and was those things in 2022, imagine the power he could have exerted by simply pushing back on trans activist ideas he knew to be “nuts.” Imagine how much good he could have done for women, women’s rights, and women’s sports. But he made a decision in the moment (what was that book he wrote on intuitive thinking? Blink?) to cover his ass instead. Fine. But after that conference, he had three years to speak up for women’s sex-based rights. But he didn’t. Again. Even now, during the podcast, he had trouble identifying who was really harmed by his failure to speak up. He seemed to think it was Ross Tucker, or maybe his own self-regard. No. It was women. The group he pointedly did not mention (Suck it up? You should have to live with that? Those were not general statements. Women have to suck it up. Women should have to live with that).

…

A few minutes later, he noted how the whole world went crazy during Covid for two or three years—was he blaming Covid for his crazy cowardice?—and that now the world has returned to “normal.” So, that’s apparently why it’s okay for him to say he always believed what his good buddy Ross was saying, and the whole trans thing is more or less over. For him. Now that he’s got this off his chest. No acknowledgement that women have been trying to claw back rights that were taken from them for more than two decades, well before Covid, that they did not take the two-to-three years of Covid off to go crazy, and that, possibly due to his vacation from duty, there are more men than ever in women’s sports. And their fight continues.

Well it certainly wasn’t entirely due to his vacation from duty, but his vacation was one of thousands of such vacations which did add up to more men than ever in women’s sports.