Leor Sapir
Manhattan Institute fellow and policy researcher
Leor Sapir is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute whose work scrutinises the evidence base and media coverage surrounding youth gender medicine. When he turned his attention to the New York Times' ambitious Protocol series, the questions he found missing were the same ones troubling European regulators, clinicians and parents trying to make sense of a literature that has been shifting beneath their feet.
Leor Sapir is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he researches education and identity politics with a particular focus on gender medicine policy. His academic background is in political theory, and he has become one of the more rigorous voices examining how institutions — clinical, journalistic and governmental — have handled the contested evidence base around youth gender transition.
In episode 27, The Questions the New York Times Refused to Ask, Sapir joins hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman to dissect the NYT's six-part Protocol series — a production the paper spent two years developing. His central charge is methodological: that across six episodes and extensive reporting, the Times never paused to ask what gender identity actually is, what evidence underpins it, or whether the clinical model built around it meets basic standards of scientific scrutiny. For a newspaper that positioned Protocol as a definitive account of a live controversy, the omission is, he argues, not incidental but structural.
For European audiences, the critique arrives at a critical moment. Sweden, Finland and England have moved to restrict puberty blockers and hormones for minors on grounds of insufficient evidence; the Netherlands — long regarded as the originating country of the affirmative model — is conducting its own reassessment; and France's national academy of medicine has urged caution. Yet many clinicians across the continent still anchor practice to WPATH Standards of Care. Sapir's analysis of how journalism can expend enormous resource on a subject while sidestepping its core conceptual question has direct implications for how European media and institutions are handling the same debate.
Sapir writes regularly for City Journal and other outlets on gender policy, education and institutional credibility. His work is notable for focusing less on individual cases than on the systemic reasoning — and reasoning failures — that shape clinical and regulatory practice at scale, making it particularly relevant to European policymakers now navigating their own formal reviews.
