#william thomas

By: Douglas Murray

Published: Sep 4, 2025

Could you be persuaded to say something you knew not to be true?

Most of us would probably say “Absolutely not. Never.” But the evidence is that even a small amount of social pressure can make grown adults say things they know to be untrue.

Take the case of Malcolm Gladwell. The Canadian-born author has had most of the good fortune that life can bring. His received opinions have gained him lucrative positions at liberal publications. His books have become international bestsellers. In fact, many authors might look in envy at the fact that some airport bookshops seem to have a whole Malcolm Gladwell section.

His schtick might be to say banal things in ways that appear spicy and new. But he has made a very good career of it and been lauded by his peers.

Yet this week, he admitted that he is a coward.

Appearing on a podcast called “The Real Science of Sport,” Gladwell referred to the vexing question of born males competing in women’s sports.

For most of us, this was always a no-brainer. It was obvious that someone who has been born a male, gone through male puberty and has all the physical advantages of being a man should be kept well clear of women’s sports. Otherwise women’s sports cease to be women’s sports, thousands of young female athletes would train hard for no reason and women’s sports would simply become a division of men’s sports for men who can’t succeed against their male peers.

Gladwell says he finds the arguments for men competing in women’s sports to be unconvincing.

But at a panel in 2022, he said that men should indeed be allowed to compete in women’s sports.

To his credit, he admits why he said what he said just three years ago. He says that he felt “cowed” at the time. Now he is “ashamed of my performance” on the panel in question. He also admitted that he approached the discussion “in a dishonest way.”

Having debated Gladwell in the past, about the same time as his now-recanted panel, I can say that I’m pleased to hear his admission. I’m also not remotely surprised that Gladwell would approach a debate with dishonesty. His performances are generally filled with group-think and laced with condescension toward anyone he finds disagreeing with him.

In fact, in all the decades I have debated my own views in public, I don’t think I’ve often come across someone so willing and indeed eager to debate in bad faith.

But his admission helps us to understand something about the incentive structures in our own society.

Parents across America who said what Gladwell now says were slandered for years for saying it. High school and college athletes a third of Gladwell’s age who dared to say what was true were hounded by mobs. They had their reputations and sometimes their careers wrecked.

And for what? For saying something that should have required no courage to say and which should never have been controversial.

Consider the price that other people paid for similar heresies.

This week, the comedy writer Graham Linehan returned to the UK after a visit to America. On arrival at Heathrow airport, the 57-year-old was met by five armed police officers. They promptly detained Linehan and took him in for questioning. He has been arrested and faces trial.

In recent years, Linehan has been one of the very few people in the entertainment industry to speak out against the gender ideology madness that flowed through Western societies. He refused to accept that a man can become a woman and stood up to the online and offline bullies who said otherwise.

For this he was dropped by all the mainstream figures who had once worked with him.

Despite producing masterpieces like the sitcom “Father Ted,” Linehan was treated like a pariah. He has struggled to find work. What writing he has done — including a book — has been carefully ignored by most of the media. You would be hard-pressed to find a “Graham Linehan section” in any airport bookshop.

And now on top of all this, Linehan has been arrested. By armed British police who don’t normally carry guns and rarely if ever bother to investigate actual crimes. Most people in the orbit of London will never have any follow-up from the police if their phone or bicycle is stolen. Many will struggle to get the police to visit their house if they have suffered a home burglary.

But those same police show up with guns to detain a comedy writer who has been guilty of “wrong-think” on a social issue?

When put together, the cases of Gladwell and Linehan should remind us of a deep and important truth about our culture.

If there is a punishment for telling the truth, then many people will tell lies. If telling lies is incentivized, then many people will tell lies. And if you allow mobs of people online or off to intimidate people and don’t stand up to them, then many people will be intimidated. And they will change what they say accordingly.

There has been a price for Graham Linehan for telling the truth. Whereas there were only ever rewards for Malcolm Gladwell for saying things that even he now admits to have known at the time to be untrue.

The debate on men in women’s sports is gradually reaching some kind of sensible place. But that isn’t because of the simple weight of truth. It is because a small number of famous people and a much larger number of people with no public profile refused to take part in a culture of lies.

A healthy society needs brave people. And a healthy society should celebrate those people. It should also express mockery and contempt for all those people in positions of power who now admit to putting their own personal comfort before any concern for truth.

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Trudy Ring at The Advocate:

A peace vigil that has been held near the White House since 1981 has ended after the Trump administration ordered its removal. Park Police took everything at the vigil site down Sunday morning, the Associated Press reports. The removal was part of the clearing of homeless encampments in Washington, D.C., but a volunteer staffing the site said it is not an encampment. "The difference between an encampment and a vigil is that an encampment is where homeless people live," Philipos Melaku-Bello told the AP. "As you can see, I don't have a bed. I have signs, and it is covered by the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression." He is in touch with attorneys about possible legal action. The site had a small tent and a banner reading “Live by the bomb, die by the bomb,” the AP reports. Activist William Thomas started the vigil in 1981, and it is likely the longest continuous antiwar protest in the U.S. Thomas died in 2009, and then Melaku-Bello and others took over the site, staffing it 24 hours a day to avoid actions like Sunday’s.

Donald Trump was unaware of the site until Brian Glenn, a reporter with the conservative network Real America’s Voice, pointed it out to him Friday. “Just out front of the White House is a blue tent that originally was put there to be an anti-nuclear tent for nuclear arms,” Glenn said, according to the AP. “It's kind of morphed into more of an anti-American, sometimes anti-Trump at many times.” Trump then told his staff to have it taken down.

On Sunday, acting on a suggestion from Real America’s Voice employee Brian Glenn, Donald Trump’s regime removed the White House Peace Vigil tent that has remained in front of The White House since 1981 under Ronald Reagan’s Presidency and maintained under several Presidents of both parties.

The tent was staffed 24/7/365(6) at all times to avoid situations like this.

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William Thomas, known to the world as Lia Thomas, made headline news when he was permitted to swim on University of Pennsylvania's women's team, break records, and win competitions. After some investigation of his social media accounts, it's highly suspected that he suffers from an abnormal sexual desire called autogynephilia.

William Thomas was ranked 462nd on the men's swim team before he decided to identify as a woman and call himself Lia Thomas. Soon enough, he was the fastest swimmer on the women's swim team at University of Pennsylvania and was even allowed to compete at women's meets, where he broke records and stole medals from hard-working female athletes. At the Ivy League championships, Thomas won the 500 free final by over 7 seconds. At University of Akron's Zippy International, he beat his teammate by more than 12 seconds in the 500 race. Later, in the 1650 freestyle, he beat a female opponent by 38 seconds.

The more medals he won, the more attention he gained from the media and the more he was praised by trans activists everywhere. Thomas was even nominated for the 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year Award (he was denied the award in the end). But the more that people dive deep into Thomas' social media use, the more it becomes clear to them that he suffers from an abnormal sexual desire called autogynephilia. 

What Is Autogynephilia? 

The simplest way to explain autogynephilia is when a man gets sexually aroused when he himself embodies a woman's characteristics, appearance, outfits, etc. YouTuber Red Moon RADio: Redfem Radio interviewed Masha Jagasdottir, an expert in childhood development and social services. Masha helped explain what an autogynephilic male is. 

"First of all, it's a paraphilia. So that category of mental illness, mental distress—it's basically like a mapping error of internally experienced desire," she says. "To cut all the nuance away, it's basically a male-bodied individual who's mapped his entire sexual desire onto himself as a female. And the draw in that comes from the fact that it's the only woman that he'll ever be able to control completely, is his own body. So he wants the embodied feeling of suppressing and humiliating a woman."

"It's really important for them to go out in public, in female spaces, because part of the thrill is watching other women have to swallow their disgust. It's a paraphilia that is absolutely in the same category as zoophilia and pedophilia," Masha continues. "These are actually deeply distressing antisocial paraphilias. It's dangerous for the self and dangerous for society."

This fetish has resulted in many men coming forward as trans, presenting themselves as women to the world, and insisting that they be accepted as normal members of society. It's impossible to know just how many men who call themselves trans women are actually struggling with autogynephilia. It's safe to say that many of these men are not actually trans but rather autogynephilic, and they find sick sexual pleasure in pretending to be women. Walt Heyer, a man who detransitioned after living as a woman for several years, suspects that the umbrella term "transgender" has inadvertently included many individuals who wrestle with autogynephilia, which he describes as "a condition where a man will dress up, look at himself in the mirror as a female, and the female he sees in the mirror becomes the object of his sexual affection." 

Lia Thomas Is Suspected to Have Autogynephilia

Nicole Wawro, also known as @feministrecovery_ on Instagram, shared a wide range of information from Thomas' private Instagram account @liathimas, revealing that he has some very disturbing interests that all point to his autogynephilia (also referred to as AGP). She posted a 4-minute reel on Instagram sharing that Thomas announced on his private Instagram that he opted in for a surgery to castrate himself. Naturally, he waited until after the swim season at UPenn and after the FINA ruling said he wasn't able to compete on the women's team to get this procedure done. Thomas made the announcement using 2 cherry emojis next to a pair of scissors, clearly joking about (and even celebrating) the fact that he chopped his testicles off. However, while Nicole was working on the veracity of this story, she also found a lot of other information about Thomas that was greatly disturbing.

"Lia is smart. All the photos he posts of himself are squeaky clean," Nicole says. "However, the photos he likes, the photos he is tagged in by friends, and the accounts he associates with tell a very different story about a very different Lia."

His online activity strongly suggests that he gets sexually aroused by dressing up as a woman, which is a very common characteristic of autogynephilia. Nicole points out that he often likes photos about sexual fetishes of cross dressing, people getting together for trans orgies, and women getting beat up by men who identify as trans females. For example, Fallon Fox, the male MMA fighter who called himself a trans woman and broke open a female fighter's skull in the ring, bragged about it on Instagram, "Me on crushing women skulls." Thomas liked the post, along with another Fallon Fox post where he is doubling down on the fact that he beat another women to a pulp.

Thomas also is seen liking posts about AGP, including a cartoon of an "AGP trans" person who is dressed up as a girl in a pink dress, and has an erection as he looks at himself in the mirror. This furthers the suspicion that he gets some kind of sexual arousal from cross-dressing. Thomas has also liked many other photos of men cross-dressing as women, as well as posts about "sexploration."

Nicole even found that Thomas liked posts of his friends practicing paganism and Satanism, as well as pictures of crass pornographic cartoons. Apparently, Thomas has even shared photos of his own sex dungeon that he built with his boyfriend, complete with a wall of BDSM toys and kinks. 

"If this was just about his personal life and his preference as a gay man and his fetishes, we would have just left it there," Nicole says. "But it's not. Lia represents what it means to be all-American. He has lobbied to be in the women's locker room on the basis that he feels like a woman, not because he has any sexual arousal. He presents himself as a squeaky clean athlete with no ulterior motive. But parents deserve to know there is a darkness about allowing any man into the locker room that claims that they just feel like they should be there." 

Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that less than 4 years ago, Thomas seemed to be living a normal life as a young man. He proclaimed he was in love with his girlfriend and he dressed and acted like a male.