On trans issues I reject two things: the moral panic on the right and the censorious absolutism on the left.
The panic is out of scale. In December 2024, NCAA president Charlie Baker told senators he knew of fewer than 10 transgender athletes among more than half a million. In 2022 Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, counted 4 among 75,000 high school athletes, one of them in girls’ sports. “Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few,” he wrote. Bans and demonization answer a threat the numbers do not show. They are illiberal backlash, not serious policy.
The absolutism is real too. Open scientific talk about sex differences, and good-faith disagreement over language or policy, are not violence. Treating them as violence corrodes liberal norms. In youth medicine, prudence matters: England’s Cass Review found the evidence for puberty blockers and hormones in young people weak. Rigor is not prohibition, and questioning evidence is not bigotry.
Culture wars like this one are what free societies go through as people claim equal rights. What I support is equal civil rights, protection from harassment, and basic dignity, with no metaphysical dogma in either direction. When politics becomes exaggerated threats, zero-sum thinking, and silenced dissent, it signals a moral panic. The antidote is free inquiry, evidence, and durable institutions, not strongmen, purges, or enforced consensus.