{"id":21120,"date":"2025-09-09T19:48:48","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T23:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21120"},"modified":"2025-09-09T19:48:48","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T23:48:48","slug":"with-malice-toward-some","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21120","title":{"rendered":"With malice toward some"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
“The Surrender at Appomattox” – Mosaic Mural by Allyn Cox, 1965 at the General Grant National Memorial<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Recently, the popular intellectual <\/strong>Malcolm Gladwell came out with an apology<\/a> for supporting the idea of men playing in women\u2019s sports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first blush, this filled me with Glad(well)ness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I had another, delayed response. One I\u2019m now reconsidering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That has to do with being a gracious winner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I saw conservative commenters castigating Gladwell, because he should have had the courage to tell the truth from the start, I thought at first they were being unnecessarily vindictive. My tendency is to say, \u201cLet\u2019s just let bygones be bygones. We need to live with one another, after all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It looks as if (God willing), we may be winning this gender battle. Both the unisex sports thing, and the transexual thing. This is a splendid development. Much of the transgender madness was fueled by a conviction (a delusion, but often sincere) that catering to sexual dysphoria would prevent suicide. (It increasingly appears that it not only does not do that, but rather contributes to suicide and murder.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not to mention ruined lives and reproductive sterility, just at the moment when we\u2019re facing a demographic cliff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My hero has always been Abraham Lincoln, who, as the end of the Civil War approached, proposed a gracious reconciliation \u2013 \u201cto bind up the nation\u2019s wounds.\u201d His plan was not fully realized, but we did, in time, work out an accommodation \u2013 the north allowed southerners to believe (not entirely without reason) that the war had been about more than slavery. That there was an important constitutional issue involved. They called it the \u201cLost Cause.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It allowed them to keep their pride.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So my inclination is to say, \u201cLet\u2019s let the people who were wrong about transgenderism keep some dignity. Let\u2019s let them construct some kind of myth to justify their cruel (often cowardly) error.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then I thought about it some more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact is, the world has changed since 1865. If (as I hope), we\u2019ve won this battle in the gender wars, we\u2019re not in the position of the north at the end of the Civil War. Our enemy\u2019s cities do not lie in ruins (except as a consequence of their own policing policies). Our opponents still occupy the highest, most prestigious positions in many of our most honored institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t have to create a new myth of a \u201clost cause\u201d for the transgender advocates. They will, you can be sure, construct it for themselves. The media will (first) drop the whole business down the memory hole, as much as they can; and (second), to whatever extent the memory lingers, find a way to blame it on conservatives and Christians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I think the leaders of the transgender movement need to be made to pay in some way. They must suffer some kind of public disgrace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know what to suggest, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think President Trump should put somebody to work on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, the popular intellectual Malcolm Gladwell came out with an apology for supporting the idea of men playing in women\u2019s sports. At first blush, this filled me with Glad(well)ness. But I had another, delayed response. One I\u2019m now reconsidering. That has to do with being a gracious winner. When I saw conservative commenters castigating Gladwell, … Continue reading With malice toward some<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[94,5701,5699,5700,5698],"class_list":["post-21120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abraham-lincoln","tag-malcolm-gladwell","tag-men-in-womens-sports","tag-reconstruction","tag-transgenderism"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21120"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21123,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21120\/revisions\/21123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}