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David Remnick, in your video chat with John Lithgow, you two agree to conflate J. K. Rowling and Roald Dahl as “problematic” cultural figures.
Dahl’s case rests on documented antisemitism—an expression of group-based prejudice.
Rowling defends sex-based categories and the material realities of women’s lives. To place these two writers within the same frame risks collapsing their obvious distinctions—a serious fallacy.
More troubling to me (than your fallacious reasoning) is the vantage point from which this frame emerges. I call it the Petruchio dynamic.
In The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio insists on defining reality for Katherine—declaring the sun to be the moon, and requiring her to agree. The male–female power imbalance, the good old male default, gives men cultural entitlement to declare what is real—and worse, to expect the female to comply no matter what nonsense Petruchio utters.
When contemporary cultural conversations about sex are shaped primarily by male voices—however thoughtful or well-intentioned—there lurks an echo of the Petruchio dynamic. What do you two know about female maturation, endometriosis, menstrual cramps, or giving birth? Yet, with masculine superiority, you presume to give us a sermon on the morality of it all.
Your conversation creates a subtle irony. Women speak to the constraints and vulnerabilities shaped by our biological sex; men, occupying positions of moral superiority, interpret and sometimes pooh-pooh those claims. The result can feel less like dialogue and more like adjudication—an insistence, however politely expressed, on what women’s reality is or ought to be. You gaslight us. I use the term “gaslighting” cautiously, but advisedly.
If women articulate concerns grounded in material experience—about bodies, reproduction, or physical competition—and those concerns are inadvertently recast as confusion, prejudice, or bias, something more than a conversation is taking place. A scolding, indeed.
Because public debate on this topic is often polarized, I think it is important to be clear about my own sensibilities. I do not approach these questions from a position of religious conservatism. I admired the aesthetic boldness of the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics; I have long appreciated the wit and humanity in La Cage aux Folles; and I recognize the dear old bard, William Shakespeare himself, teases us—playing with identity and androgyny. Art is not a threat to anyone’s life but an expression of life’s richness. In short, I am centre-left politically and open-minded culturally, —as long as the female sex is not threatened with cultural erasure (eg., pregnant people).
My concerns range from practical questions—such as, how sex categories are counted and represented in institutional data (eg., are trans women recorded as female in hiring statistics?)—to more complex questions of systemic fairness. The fastest woman in the world will not outrun the fastest man. That is a biological reality. In particular, in sports, male skeletal strength and the implications for physical competition sit uneasily alongside efforts to integrate sex categories. Female biology, shaped by the demands of gestation, is not simply a matter of “gender choice,” but of embodied gametes.
None of this suggests hostility toward trans women.
I support PRIDE. I support private unisex bathrooms. I support freedom of expression—while expecting the inevitable consequences. Confidently, Messers Remnick and Lithgow travel the pc high road, so-called, whereas I choose to add my voice to the critical mass of brave, outspoken, and astounded people, championed by J. K. Rowling, who call out you high-minded guys for your eye-watering arrogance. To reiterate: Aristotle was wrong. Women are not failed men. We can speak for ourselves. Just invite us to join the conversation.
