Supply-Side Progressives

We give the mainstream media in general, and the New York Times in particular, a pretty hard time for being biased toward the left. Then again, they just hired David French, which I consider to be one of their best decisions ever, and they have shown an increasing willingness to entertain ideas that are not quite politically correct.

For example, please read a terrific recent overview by Jesse Singal on how diversity training—which expanded rapidly during the “Black Lives Matter” movement a few years back—is basically a scam.

DEI training is designed to help organizations become more welcoming to members of traditionally marginalized groups. Advocates make bold promises: Diversity workshops can foster better intergroup relations, improve the retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps, and so on. The only problem? There’s little evidence that many of these initiatives work. And the specific type of diversity training that is currently in vogue—mandatory training that blames dominant groups for DEI problems—may well have a net negative effect on the outcomes managers claim to care about.

Over the years, social scientists who have conducted careful reviews of the evidence base for diversity training have frequently come to discouraging conclusions. Though diversity training workshops have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. The lack of evidence is “disappointing,” wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article, “considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.”

Or check out a long and carefully balanced report on the growing medical pushback against the use of puberty blockers and hormones for supposed transgender youth, featuring shockingly reasonable opinions like this one.

“The most difficult question is whether puberty blockers do indeed provide valuable time for children and young people to consider their options, or whether they effectively ‘lock in’ children and young people to a treatment pathway,” wrote Dr. Hilary Cass, a pediatrician leading an independent review in England of medical treatments of adolescents presenting as transgender.

On her recommendation, England’s National Health Service last month proposed restricting use of the drugs for trans youths to research settings. Sweden and Finland have also placed limits on the treatment, concerned not just with the risk of blockers, but the steep rise in young patients, the psychiatric issues that many exhibit, and the extent to which their mental health should be assessed before treatment.

This has been part of a wider transgender reality tour in which more people have been willing to openly question the orthodoxy of the dogmatic trans activists. Naturally, the New York Times was targeted for intense criticism from activists, who signed two different open letters to the newspaper, to which it responded by politely telling them to get lost.