Opinion | How to Make Sense of the New L.B.G.T. Culture War – The New York Times

This — call it discretion, if you want — is partly voluntary, based on a desire to be a good ally, to show maximal kindness, and not give any aid and comfort to conservatives, Republicans, Ron DeSantis.

But it’s also enforced: A version of the Rowling vortex quickly surrounds anyone who argues skeptically about the rise in transgender identification or suggests that hormonal and surgical treatments are being overused, whether that person is a journalist, an author, an academic researcher, even a gender-dysphoria clinician.

That enforcement has not prevented these skeptics from presenting their arguments, from having books that sell or well-subscribed Substacks. But it effectively limits debate within crucial liberal institutions, so that the skeptical position feels almost untouchable in the academy.

This increasingly means that American liberalism all the way up to the Biden administration is drifting away, on these questions, even from the most liberal and secular parts of Europe. From Britain to Sweden there is an increasingly vigorous debate around adolescent medical interventions, widespread doubts that they are actually supported by the data and a partial reconsideration of their general application to transgender-identifying youth. In liberal America there is mostly just an orthodoxy, even if the cracks show here and there.

This uniquely American climate also raises uncomfortable questions for the few conservatives, like myself, who enjoy a substantial liberal readership. You will notice that I have written this essay in a studiously cautious style, on the theory that as I am in fact a known social conservative, my too-vigorous prosecution of the skeptics’ case would serve only to reinforce the current progressive orthodoxy — enabling the response that, see, to doubt the wisdom of puberty blockers or the authenticity of teenage self-identification is the province of Catholics, religious conservatives, the out-group.

But of course this is also a theory of conflict-avoidance, shading into cowardice. So to end more straightforwardly, I will make a prediction: Within not too short a span of time, not only conservatives but most liberals will recognize that we have been running an experiment on trans-identifying youth without good or certain evidence, inspired by ideological motives rather than scientific rigor, in a way that future generations will regard as a grave medical-political scandal.