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Aryeh Cohen-Wade vs. transgender people

Aryeh Cohen-Wade is an American editor and podcaster. Cohen-Wade is host of the podcast Culturally Determined.

Background

Aryeh Cohen-Wade was born in January 1983 and grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey. Cohen-Wade earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 2005. Cohen-Wade worked for artist and author Richard Kostelanetz from 2006 to 2008.

From 2007 to 2015, Cohen-Wade was managing editor for Bloggingheads.tv, an early podcast platform. Cohen-Wade returned as executive editor from 2017 to 2020.

In 2015, Cohen-Wade began the podcast Culturally Determined.

From 2023 to 2025 Cohen-Wade was associate opinion editor at The Hill. Since January 2025, Cohen-Wade has worked as a freelance podcast host and producer.

Relationship with Jesse Singal

Cohen-Wade and anti-trans activist Jesse Singal met on a trip to Israel in the late 1990s when they were both around 14 years old.

In an interview shortly after Singal tried to exonerate Kenneth Zucker, Singal described one version of the controversy about the practices at Zucker’s CAMH clinic:

It basically has a view of gender identity development that’s very externally oriented. In this few, they call it a biopsychosocial development model. Basically we all learn how to be boys and girls. And however we act is sort of reinforced by parents and society and stuff like that. So they did not… when I say “they,” I sort of refer to Zucker, because a lot of clinicians there would tend to adopt his views. He had a lot of students, a lot of researchers would pass through there, because despite the controversy it was seen as a world-class research clinic.

In their view, we’re not really born with a gender. I was born with male anatomy. I was, for lack of a better word, biologically male. But I learned to be male, and that reinforced itself and it eventually solidified. They thought that at a young age, this stuff is really malleable. And that effectively kids can get confused at a young age. And it’s important to acknowledge that even the folks who vehemently disagree with him, at least the other researchers who did, everyone thinks that sometimes if a little boy comes in and says “I’m a girl” or “I” want to be a girl,” it’s because they don’t like playing football, they don’t like rough and tumble play, stuff like that. So they think, “Well because I don’t like football, I must be a girl.”

So, in cases like that where the dysphoria isn’t that serious, a good clinician will help them develop a less rigid view of gender. Because ideally, if really all that’s going on is that sort of level of confusion, you know you want to teach them that boys don’t have to like football. boys can play with dolls, boys can do all kinds of stuff. So to make a very long story short, what made this clinic controversial is that in some cases, they would do what they called limit setting. They would, if a kid would– let say a little boy was four years old comes in. and he’s really fixated on playing with dolls, and on dressing up like a girl. Sometimes the clinic would work with parents to impose limits on those behaviors, because the clinic saw it as self-reinforcing. Like if you let him dress up like a girl every day and only wear wigs and only play with dolls, because kids have a less sophisticated view of gender, that will reinforce the notion that he’s a girl.

And the clinic was open with the fact that they the best case outcome in a situation like that is to help the kid be comfortable in their own gender. Not their own gender, but their assigned gender, or anatomic gender.

The problem was, to a lot of people, this idea of effectively taking away a kid’s doll. And – I’ll go into the details but the point is that idea, not letting a little boy play with a doll, sounds like conversion therapy. Because there have been these infamous therapies, back when conversion therapy for homosexuality was a big thing, you would try to get someone to “act like a man.” So a lot of people saw in this treatment regime or regimen something similar to conversion therapy. And eventually this led to a lot of really bad rumors about how the clinic was traumatizing kids, and destroying lives, and effectively killing trans people.

Among the gay and lesbian communities, one of the sort of victories is that that sort of stuff, respectable clinicians who get published in mainstream publications for the most part don’t do that. And we see it more as, I think I put in the article, a sort of a backward shack in the Bible belt. it’s not something real clinicians do.

Eventually there was enough pressure from some of the trans community and from activists that the hospital CAMH announced that they would do an external review.

Singal’s article focuses on serious errors in the reporting of some incidents by former clients of the clinic. Those errors led to a lawsuit in which Zucker prevailed. Singal presents these as the “most serious” allegations against Zucker, when the most serious allegations were that Zucker’s clinic was engaging in unethical and possibly illegal practices in their attempt to addresss “gender dysphoria.”

Culturally Determined

On Culturally Determined, Cohen-Wade was an early promoter of self-identified “lefty” contrarians aligned with views associated with the “intellectual dark web”:

Re-enter Phoebe Maltz-Bovy, Kat Rosenfield, Katie Herzog, and Jesse Singal. Like Daum, I made my discovery watching Bloggingheads (which is not necessarily a contrarian space as much as one that brings in many different viewpoints). Executive editor Aryeh Cohen-Wade played in the adjacent-to-the-movement Joe Rogan role by providing a platform along with some sympathy for their insights. 

Guests include:

References

Ahmed, Mariam (May 19, 2023). The Hill appoints Cohen-Wade associate opinion editor. TBN https://talkingbiznews.com/media-moves/the-hill-appoints-cohen-wade-associate-opinion-editor/

Jeffers, Jay (January 25, 2019). What Was the Intellectual Dark Web? Medium https://medium.com/@jayljeff/what-was-the-intellectual-dark-web-b926374685e7

Media

NonzeroClips / Culturally Determined with Aryeh Cohen-Wade and Katie Herzog (July 29, 2018). Jordan Peterson and Detransitioning | Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Katie Herzog [Culturally Determined]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IRAKuB1JI8

Nonzero / Culturally Determined with Aryeh Cohen-Wade and Contrapoints (September 15, 2017). On punching Nazis | Aryeh Cohen-Wade & ContraPoints [Culturally Determined].

NonzeroClips / Culturally Determined with Aryeh Cohen-Wade and Jesse Singal (March 15, 2016). Life lessons from being shamed on Twitter | Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Jesse Singal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoMsF9ALruw

Resources

YouTube (youtube.com)

The Nonzero Foundation / Bloggingheads.tv (bloggingheads.tv)

Substack (substack.com)

LinkedIn (linkedin.com)

X/Twitter (x.com)

Muck Rack (muckrack.com)

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (mcsweeneys.net)