A Blight on the Presidency and the Nation

A scholar on the administrative state's embrace of gender radicalism

“I do want to emphasize one thing in regards to the topic–because I think it's really important and worth emphasizing–and that is the central importance of institutions, and the role that they have played in the transgender revolution. There's an understandable tendency to focus on culture, cultural arguments, philosophical ideas, and those are extremely important–I've written on them a lot, don't get me wrong, very important–but the idea that politics is always downstream of culture strikes me as misguided. And I think the transgender revolution really demonstrates why that's the case."

“Talk to them. I have, when I used to have office hours when I taught in college, and I have spoken to students, I've spoken to colleagues, to friends, family members on the left–you talk to them, you spend five minutes investigating their ideas about, you know, we all have this internal sense of gender, all these bizarre, kooky metaphysics, and within a nanosecond that gives way to therapeutic cliches. They have no philosophical defense of these ideas, it just immediately gives way to this full relativism of – everybody should do what they feel makes sense, and makes them feel good about themselves, and who am I to judge? And if we don't agree with them, that they're going to experience subjective distress, and they're gonna want to kill themselves.

So, you know, again, it's not that gender ideology doesn't play an important role here, it really does. But when you scratch below the surface, when you push back a little bit, it's incredible how quickly all of this gives way to this unhinged compassion, and empathy, and concern for feelings of suffering. And so I think that's important because it also gives us a plan of action for how to push back against it…recognizing what's driving this thing, that it really is compassion, empathy, unhinged from any form of rational introspection and assessment of the evidence, is really key to unlocking how we can move in the direction of other countries here.”

Leor Sapir is a scholar of the administrative state, specifically of the Title IX enforcement apparatus whose mandates have been a primary engine of ideological succession in American education, which in turn has been a key pipeline through which the moral innovations of the professional activist class have been unleashed onto the wider world. We spoke for three hours on my Callin show about many aspects of the gender revolution, including the remarkable extent to which it is both a top-down phenomenon and the product of improvisation by bureaucrats responding to pressure from activists that wound up becoming entrenched into law and retroactively treated as moral imperatives. Sapir is peerlessly well-informed about the inner workings of the agencies and courts that are tirelessly working to conjure up new protected classes, and new forms of marginalization to confer recognition upon by the American civil rights bureaucracy and discusses in depth many aspects of the ongoing cascade explored nowhere else in American media or academe.

The original interview aired on June 22, 2022. You can listen to the full discussion and other Conversations in Year Zero on Callin, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple  |  Spotify  | Google

Become a paid subscriber to my Substack to receive transcripts of all audio content across platforms.