The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference was founded in 2006—three years after Michael Lewis published Moneyball, whose screen adaptation would turn Jonah Hill into the world’s first sports-data-nerd hero. The annual event “provides a forum for professionals and students to discuss cutting-edge trends in analytics and business to foster innovation in the global sports industry.” Its organisers include members of the MIT business school’s Entertainment Media & Sports Club, many of whom are no doubt looking to carve out careers in the booming sports-betting field.

Being a university-hosted event, however, the conference proceedings naturally contain a few high-concept nods to DEI. “The Conference is passionately dedicated to driving diversity and inclusion across the industry to advance accessibility and representation,” the organisers assure us. In 2022, the agenda included presentations on Equity Analytics and The NFL’s Rooney Rule, Importance of Inclusion, Empowerment, Ownership: The Future of Women’s Professional Hockey, and, infamously, Transgender Athletes: A Conversation Led by Malcolm Gladwell.

I say “infamously” because last week, three years after the fact, Gladwell’s participation in that panel became a culture-war flashpoint. On 2 September, the long-time New Yorker writer and best-selling author appeared on The Real Science of Sport podcast, hosted by South African scientist Ross Tucker (more on him below), and confessed that he now felt “ashamed” of his 2022 conference appearance. Even back then, Gladwell told Tucker, he realised it was wrong for trans-identified biologically male athletes to take medals and roster spots away from actual women. But back then, he gave lip service to the idea of trans “inclusion” anyway, Gladwell admitted, because he’d been “cowed” by activist talking points.

“If we did a [2022] replay of that exact panel,” Gladwell said, “I suspect [there’d be] near unanimity in the room that trans athletes have no place in the female category. I don’t think there’s any question.”

I didn’t find Gladwell’s admission particularly surprising. During the late 2010s and early 2020s, legions of journalists, academics, artists, politicians, and assorted public intellectuals pretended to believe that “trans women are women.” It was nonsense, and they knew it. But it was nonsense that was having its moment. In progressive circles, it was something you were supposed to say, and so people said it. Gladwell wasn’t special. He was just one of the herd.

What does make him special is that he’s come out and admitted his intellectual dishonesty, despite having no material incentive to do so. While it’s pathetic that he prioritised political fashion over truth in 2022, I think it’s admirable he’s coming clean about it in 2025.

My relatively generous take on Gladwell is a minority opinion, however. Outside of National Post columnist Colby Cosh, in fact, I’m having trouble finding anyone else who shares it. More representative of the common response is Tablet writer Liel Leibovitz, who writes that “Gladwell’s self-serving excuse for an apology taught us… Gladwell does not see journalism as a tool for telling the truth; he, like so many of his colleagues, understands it as a pursuit of social clout, career advancement, and other earthly rewards.” Douglas Murray called Gladwell a liar and a “coward.” My Quillette boss, Claire Lehmann, chalked up more than 4,000 likes on X with: “Very little sympathy from me. If your job is journalism, and/or non-fiction writing, people expect you to tell the truth, even when, or especially when it is difficult. To not do so is to betray one’s professional duty.”

Claire’s last line is correct, of course. But I find it hard to register fresh anger or disgust in regard to a species of intellectual dishonesty that we’ve all been mocking and denouncing for many years now. Being so plainly in violation of biological reality, the precepts of gender ideology were always destined to collapse—as we are now witnessing. It was just a question of when that would happen, and which progressive luminaries would be early adopters in collapsing it. Gladwell, who’s always had a keen eye for trends, has now placed himself in this category.  

There’s another thing that should be said in Gladwell’s defence (if that’s the right word)—which is that his performance at that 2022 MIT conference wasn’t nearly as awful as his own mea culpa to Tucker suggested.

I went back and watched the whole thing, and kept waiting for the moment when Gladwell began speechifying cynically about the need to allow trans-identified male athletes into women’s sports. But that moment never came. He was the moderator. And almost all of the talking was done by his three panelists: the aforementioned Ross Tucker, who delivered a solid, data-driven explanation about the enormous athletic differences between men and women; they/them sports journalist Katie Barnes, who spoke about “gender-expansive” individuals and chastised Tucker for using the term “biologically male”; and Joanna Harper, a transgender scholar who seemed well-versed in the science of male–female athletic differences, but also fretted (bizarrely) that non-trans women were stealing medals from self-identified “trans women,” not the other way around.

Based on what Gladwell said on Tucker’s podcast last week, I got the impression that the panel had somehow turned into a pro-trans-rights jamboree, and that Gladwell had joined in with Barnes and Harper to denounce Tucker as a transphobe. But that’s not what happened at all. While Barnes and Harper both occasionally said very silly things, the bulk of the conversation was civil and largely data-driven.

Yes, Gladwell made a gratuitously snide remark about FOX News at one point, and also suggested (falsely) that culture warriors were fixating too much on Lia Thomas (whom Gladwell described, pretentiously, as a “non-modal” athletic specimen). But otherwise, he let the trio of panelists hold forth, and left his own opinions (both the real ones and the fake ones) in the background.

If I’d been a conference participant, in fact, my main complaint about Gladwell’s performance wouldn’t have been that he used the occasion to cynically showcase his trans-positive bona fides (which he didn’t really do); but that he seemed so intellectually listless. Notwithstanding his claim to have consulted with “many” people beforehand about how to approach the panel, his questions were vague and unimaginative. He invoked Gladwellian gimmicks like “the Martian question” and “magic-wand experiments.” When the discussion turned to testosterone measurement, he seemed confused by the technical descriptions (somewhat hilariously repeating the word “nanomole” as “nana-mule”), and then admitted he “knows nothing about the issue.” He spent a lot of time fidgeting and looking bored.

Had Gladwell really intended to prioritise virtue-signalling at this event, he’d have put a lot more effort into it. But the whole thing just looked lazy. Assuming that the Sloan organizers paid Gladwell even a substantial fraction of his usual $200,000–$300,000 speaking fee, they seem to have received poor value for their money.

I’m being somewhat catty here, you’ll notice—something that’s always a temptation when one is writing about someone who’s rich and successful and arouses jealousy among his peers. Not all ink-stained wretches have the opportunity to earn a massive payday by delivering phoned-in remarks about a subject we haven’t bothered to research. (In my experience, a more typical speaking fee for a journalist brought in to do this kind of gig is in the low four figures.)

Gladwell’s stature clearly has something to do with the bitter condemnation he’s received in regard to his gender hypocrisy—and not just because it’s fun to take down an aging alpha who’s lost his edge. Gladwell was one of the few writers who (like J.K. Rowling in the UK) was so rich and so well-respected that he could have spoken up against gender radicals without risking his livelihood. Instead he waited till 2025, when the cultural tide had already turned, and even prominent Democrats are acknowledging how loony the whole genderwang cult got.

It’s important to keep one’s eye on the prize, though. Malcolm Gladwell is just one person. There are legions of others like him who will soon be navigating their own exit from the genderwang cult—deleting old Facebook posts and tweets, taking down “Letter to My Brave Trans Niece” Substack posts, removing pronouns from their LinkedIn profiles, and apologising to ex-friends whom they once shunned for gender wrongthink. This welcome process of deprogramming is something that will be discouraged—and therefore delayed—if we heap shame on these people as they come to us confessing their abandoned hypocrisies. And I fear that many of these prospective confessants are looking at Gladwell’s rough treatment as a cautionary tale.