Seven years ago, National Geographic announced a “gender revolution.” In a special 2017 edition of the famous magazine and a corresponding TV special hosted by Katie Couric, Nat Geo declared that the black and white “binary world” was crumbling, replaced by the exciting new world of transgenderism and gender fluidity. The magazine cover featured a 9-year-old “transgender girl.” The “experts” Couric interviewed were mostly leftist political activists.
It was an embarrassment.
The revolution may have been televised, but it also declared victory prematurely. A recent report on the effects of transgender medicine published in England has, as one critic put it, “stunned people into reality about the dangers and inefficiency of transgender medicine.”
The Cass report, authored by pediatrician Hilary Cass, found gender medicine is operating on “shaky foundations” when it pushes medical treatments such as hormones to pause puberty or to “transition” to the opposite sex. “The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” the report said.
Many European countries are pausing their treatments for gender dysphoria, as well as many states in America. USA Today summed it up: “Cass’ report raises many red flags about how little is known about the long-term consequences of gender-affirming medical treatment in children. She urges ‘extreme caution’ multiple times throughout her review.”
That’s not what National Geographic was doing seven years ago. I focus on Nat Geo’s role in the gender revolution not just because it’s a good example of media malpractice, but because it strikes a personal chord. My father was a writer and editor at National Geographic for 30 years, from roughly 1960 to 1990. He was a kind and compassionate journalist but also had no tolerance for attacks on basic scientific facts.
Dad would have been shocked at the issue on “the gender revolution.” The section titled “Helping Families Talk about Gender” offers this: “Understand that gender identity and sexual orientation cannot be changed, but the way people identify their gender identity and sexual orientation may change over time as they discover more about themselves.”
As Andrew T. Walker and Denny Burke wrote in Public Discourse, “The first half of this sentence asserts the immutability of gender identity, but the second half of the sentence claims that people’s self-awareness of such things can change over time. But is there not a contradiction here once we define our terms? Gender identity is not an objective category but a subjective one. It is how one perceives his or her own sense of maleness or femaleness. … If that perception is fixed and immutable (as the first half of the sentence asserts), then it is incoherent to say that one’s self-perception can change over time (as the second half of the sentence asserts).”
Another article in the Nat Geo special offers a full-page picture of a shirtless 17-year-old girl who recently underwent a double mastectomy in order to “transition” to being a boy. Walker and Burke wrote in response: “Why do transgender ideologues consider it harmful to attempt to change such a child’s mind but consider it progress to display her bare, mutilated chest for a cover story?”
Dad would have had no problem covering gender dysphoria in the pages of National Geographic. It’s a serious medical issue. In the 1980s, my father was pushing for Nat Geo to take on more difficult subjects, including the AIDS epidemic. He wanted to cover it in a way that was scientifically rigorous and also compassionate. USA Today notes that “Cass’ report is written in a clear and compassionate manner, and her findings deserve careful consideration in the United States.” The Cass report would have been front and center in any story my father greenlit for the magazine.
But today, National Geographic, like so much of the rest of the culture, seems gripped in a mania focused on race and gender. As part of the magazine’s April 2018 “The Race Issue,” editor Susan Goldberg offered this headline: “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.”
Goldberg hired a scholar, John Edwin Mason of the University of Virginia, to dig through the Nat Geo archives and find white supremacy. Interviewed by Vox, Mason announced that “the magazine was born at the height of so-called ‘scientific’ racism and imperialism — including American imperialism. This culture of white supremacy shaped the outlook of the magazine’s editors, writers, and photographers, who were always white and almost always men.”
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Responding to a 2018 cover featuring a cowboy on horseback, Mason argues that “the image of the white cowboy reproduces and romanticizes the mythic iconography of settler colonialism and white supremacy.”
National Geographic has a proud legacy and is a cherished part of my own family history. It needs to stick to science.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.