Leor Sapir
Manhattan Institute Fellow and gender policy analyst
Leor Sapir is a Manhattan Institute Fellow whose forensic analysis of American gender medicine carries direct lessons for Britain. When the New York Times spent two years investigating youth gender clinics yet never asked what gender identity actually is, Sapir noticed — and said so. His scrutiny of journalism, evidence, and institutional failure mirrors the questions the Cass Review forced onto British medicine.
Leor Sapir is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where his research focuses on the evidence base and politics of gender medicine for children and adolescents. Trained in political philosophy, he brings analytical rigour to questions that much of the medical and media establishment has treated as closed — chiefly, whether the clinical frameworks underpinning youth transition rest on solid science or on ideological assumption.
In episode 27, Leor Sapir: The Questions the New York Times Refused to Ask, he joined hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman to dissect the NYT's two-year "Protocol" series on youth gender medicine. His central charge: despite its enormous scope, the series never asked what gender identity actually is. Journalism that accepts that premise as given, he argues, cannot hold clinicians or policymakers to genuine account, however many column inches it devotes to the subject.
The contrast with Britain's Cass Review is the sharpest lesson for UK listeners. Where American media largely deferred to activist-aligned clinicians, Hilary Cass was commissioned to ask precisely the foundational questions Sapir identifies as missing. The NHS subsequently closed the Tavistock's Gender Identity Development Service and restricted puberty blockers outside research settings — a reckoning Sapir argues the United States has yet to begin. His work is a reminder that the institutional failure Britain named, and is now painstakingly trying to correct, is not uniquely British: it is a feature of wherever those questions went unasked for too long.
