Ross Douthat vs. transgender people

Ross Douthat is a conservative American writer and anti-transgender activist. Douthat has written for anti-trans publications, including the National Review, First Things, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Douthat was a figure in the New York Times anti-trans coverage crisis in the early 2020s.

Background

Ross Gregory Douthat was born on November 28, 1979 in San Francisco to writer Patricia Snow and lawyer Charles Douthat. Douthat has a younger sibling, Jeanne. Douthat grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. In adolescence, Douthat converted to Pentecostal faith healing, then later to Catholicism. Douthat graduated from elite private prep school Hamden Hall in 1998. Douthat and fellow New York Times contributor Michael Barbaro edited the student newspaper, and Douthat wrote anonymously for an unofficial student publication called Verité,

Douthat earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 2002. At Harvard, Douthat interned at National Review and wrote for student newspaper The Harvard Crimson and for hard-right student publication Salient.

In February 2003, Douthat co-founded the standalone group blog The American Scene with Reihan Salam and Steven Menashi. It was associated with The American Conservative and had a less formal style. After Douthat and Salam left, the blog was rebranded in 2007 and was slowly absorbed back into The American Conservative.

Since 2007, Douthat has been the film critic for National Review. Douhat was an editor at The Atlantic from 2003 until 2009. Douthat is a nonresident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Douthat married writer Abigail Tucker in 2007. They have five children. Douthat has written about living with Lyme disease.

Anti-trans activism

Douthat is a prominent opponent of marriage equality. Douthat has been described as “one of America’s few remaining ‘respectable’ opponents.” As the cultural and legal tide shifted on the issue in 2013 and 2014, Douthat took a more conciliatory tone, expressing hope that those with religious obejections would not be forced to recognize or provide services to LGBTQ couples.

Starting in college, Douthat has made a number of anti-LGBTQ and anti-porn statements:

“Tolerance for gays means intolerance for others, namely those who cling to what the Administration regards as outdated nonsense — the idea that not all sexual behavior is morally equivalent.” (“The Cross and the Triangle,” 1999)
“Today, everything is available, to everyone, at any time. Every deviant desire, dark fantasy and sordid dream can be realized, at a reasonable price. Forget “normalizing homosexuality”–something the Right has been worrying over since the advent of gay liberation. Today, the Internet and DirecTV are normalizing everything, from group sex to bestiality to darker things that decency forbids mentioning.” (“The Pornographic Revolution,” 2000)
In a piece pegged to professor Antonio Lasaga’s 2002 conviction for child sex crimes, Douthat wrote a contrarian provocation titled “Reviving Pedophilia.” Douthat sarcastically ponders if age of consent is the next taboo that “the civil libertarians and the postmodernists” will take up now that “sex-change” operations and “homosexuality” are no longer taboo:
- “If only, Mr. Lasaga must have thought in the more recent months, if he were muted or transformed somehow, if he had obtained a sex-change operation, or presented a taste for S&M, or argued desire for stiffing the aged. Any of those he might have gotten away with. But instead — the tragedy of tragedies — he found himself attracted to male children.”
- “For there are few modern taboos more entrenched than the one that prohibits adult-minor sexuality. […] It is difficult to pinpoint how this taboo came about — was it a lobbying group, say, NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, with its name and its strange “civil rights” rhetoric, or was it an outgrowth of the same forces that have created the ‘children’s rights’ movements in the past?”
- “The question — one that the law has effectively settled, but that remains open to academic inquiry — is the practicality of minor consent. Is it possible that the law treats children differently than adults, not because of some innate vulnerability, but because of a cultural construction that has arisen over time? Could it be that the modern taboo on minor-adult sex is as arbitrary as the taboos that once governed homosexuality?”
- “Perhaps Britain is ready for people like this — a nation with interest groups, with Socrates and Plato as their philosophers, and with the classics in every schoolroom. The late twentieth century saw the emergence of the children’s rights lobby, and the House of Commons recently approved a bill to lower the age of consent for homosexual acts. Why not, then, lower the age of consent across the board? Where will the line be drawn? Isn’t the expanding sexual revolution likely to continue? Aren’t we all, in the end, progressed to our fullest freedom?”

In 2014, Douthat acknowledged that marriage equality was a lost cause and urged religious conservatives to become a “dissenting subculture emphasizing gender differences and procreation,” a phrase Douthat had used previously. Douthat also cites anti-trans activist Andrew Sullivan’s call to allow those dissenters to continue refusing services to LGBTQ couples, writing:

“In this scenario, religious conservatives would essentially be left to promote their view of wedlock within their own institutions, as a kind of dissenting subculture emphasizing gender differences and procreation, while the wider culture declares that love and commitment are enough to make a marriage. And where conflicts arise — in a case where, say, a Mormon caterer or a Catholic photographer objected to working at a same-sex wedding — gay rights supporters would heed the advice of gay marriage’s intellectual progenitor, Andrew Sullivan, and let the dissenters opt out ‘in the name of their freedom — and ours.'”

In a 2021 piece about the Dr. Seuss estate pulling some titles with racist content, Douthat criticized Amazon’s decision to stop selling anti-trans book When Harry Became Sally by Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation:

Just a few weeks ago the Amazonian giant decided to simply delete, without real explanation, a 2018 book by Ryan Anderson, a Catholic scholar and the head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, called “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.”

As with Seuss, the Anderson deletion has mostly been a conservative cause célèbre. I’ve seen little liberal concern over the dominant player in the book business playing censor in culture-war debates.

But that case is particularly interesting because it’s not exactly that liberals are failing the hard test of defending a book they find bigoted or transphobic. For some that’s true, but I live and work among highly educated liberals, and I know that more than a few of them actually agree with the critiques of current transgender theory Anderson presents. They’re skeptical about the widespread use of puberty blockers for gender dysphoria. They’re wary about the implications for women’s spaces, women’s sports. They don’t share Anderson’s Catholic presuppositions, but they are, at least, J.K. Rowling liberals.

In the last stages of the same-sex marriage debate, I never encountered a flicker of private doubt from liberal friends. But in the gender-identity debate, there are pervasive liberal doubts about the current activist position. Yet without liberal objection, that position appears to set rules for what Amazon will sell.

In a 2022 piece that characterizes transgender rights as a “culture war,” Douthat repeats two anti-trans theories about the increase in out transgender people:

It’s a characteristic like left-handedness that was socially suppressed
It’s a kind of temporary adolescent exploration
It’s a social contagion

Douthat presents it as morally desirable to limit or eliminate transgender future generations, writing, “We have been running an experiment on trans-identifying youth without good or certain evidence, inspired by ideological motives rather than scientific rigor, in a way that future generations will regard as a grave medical-political scandal.”

Podcast

In April 2025, Douthat began hosting the podcast Interesting Times. Guests have a wide range of viewpoints. Anti-trans guests have included:

In December 2025, Douthat interviewed Chase Strangio about the trans rights movement.

References

Burns, Nick (March 2025). [interview] Ross Douthat: Condition of America. New Left Review https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/ross-douthat-condition-of-america

GLAAD (April 19, 2023). The New York Times’ Inaccurate Coverage of Transgender People is Being Weaponized Against the Transgender Community. https://glaad.org/new-york-times-inaccurate-coverage-transgender-people-being-weaponized-against-transgender/

Owen, Laura Hazard (February 15, 2023). New York Times contributors, GLAAD, and many others criticize Times’ coverage of trans people. Nieman Lab https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/new-york-times-contributors-glaad-and-many-others-criticize-times-coverage-of-trans-people/

Gibson, Lydialyle (October 8, 2020). Ross Douthat’s conservative conservatism, a profile by Lydialyle Gibson. Harvard Magazine https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/10/features-the-conservative

Sitman, Matthew; Adler-Bell, Sam (Spring 2020). Morbid Symptoms: An Interview with Ross Douthat. Dissent https://dissentmagazine.org/article/morbid-symptoms-an-interview-with-ross-douthat/

Villarreal, Daniel (December 16, 2018). A Twitter sleuth dug up homophobic screeds written by NYT columnist Ross Douthat. LGBTQ Nation https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2018/12/twitter-sleuth-dug-homophobic-screeds-written-nyt-columnist-ross-douthat/

Longman, Martin (March 2, 2014). Douthat’s Strange View of Marriage. Washington Monthly https://washingtonmonthly.com/2014/03/02/douthats-strange-view-of-marriage/

Parenne, Alex (April 1, 2013). Anti-gay marriage: Indefensible. Ross Douthat and others try their best, but the arguments for “traditional” marriage aren’t getting any better. Salon https://www.salon.com/2013/04/01/the_new_nicer_anti_gay_marriage_debate/

Beyerstein, Lindsay (August 10, 2010). Ross Douthat’s Aesthetic Case Against Gay Marriage. Big Think https://bigthink.com/guest-thinkers/ross-douthats-aesthetic-case-against-gay-marriage/

Hayden, Erik (August 9, 2010). Debating Ross Douthat on Gay Marriage: Are we “giving up on one of the great ideas of Western civilization”? The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/national/2010/08/debating-ross-douthat-on-gay-marriage/344567/

Oppenheimer, Mark (January 2010). Ross Douthat’s Fantasy World: The New York Times’ wunderkind columnist is on a quest to save intellectual conservatism. Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/ross-douthat-new-york-times-conservatism/

Suarez, Maria A. [editor] (2010). Douthat, Ross. Current Biography Yearbook 2009. H. W. Wilson Company. pp. 130–133. ISBN 978-0824211042 https://archive.org/details/currentbiography0000unse_g6w0/page/130/mode/2up

Atwan, Greg (March 24, 2009). A Portrait of Ross Douthat as a Young Republican. Big Think https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/a-portrait-of-ross-douthat-as-a-young-republican/

Staff report (September 30, 2007). Abigail Tucker, Ross Douthat. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/fashion/weddings/30tucker.html

Coverage in anti-trans press

Sexton, John (April 13, 2022). Ross Douthat: The culture war over gender and how different people view it. Hot Air https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2022/04/13/ross-douthat-the-culture-war-over-gender-and-how-people-view-it-n462241?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Selected writing by Douthat

Douthat, Ross (December 4, 2025). The Shifting Politics of Transgender Rights: The lawyer and activist Chase Strangio on cultural divisions and common ground. Interesting Times / New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/opinion/transgender-rights-strangio-douthat.html

Douthat, Ross (April 13, 2022). How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/opinion/transgender-culture-war.html

Douthat, Ross (July 24, 2021). Can the Left Regulate Sex? New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/opinion/sunday/cultural-progressivism-sex-regulate.html

Douthat, Ross (May 2, 2018). The Redistribution of Sex. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/opinion/incels-sex-robots-redistribution.html

Douthat, Ross (March 1, 2014). The Terms of Our Surrender. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/opinion/sunday/the-terms-of-our-surrender.html

Douthat, Ross (March 30, 2013). Marriage Looks Different Now. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/douthat-marriage-looks-different-now.html

Douthat, Ross (August 8, 2010). The Marriage Ideal. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/opinion/09douthat.html

Douthat, Ross (April 6, 2006). Theocon Moment. Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB114429313704818550

Douthat, Ross (2002). Reviving Pedophilia: A Yale professor runs afoul of modernity’s last sexual hang-up. Salient

Douthat, Ross (October 30, 2000). The Pornographic Revolution. Harvard Crimson https://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=102066 [archive]

Douthat, Ross (October 13, 1999). The Cross and the Triangle. Salient http://www.digitas.harvard.edu/%7Esalient/issues/991013/basement.html [archive]

Books

Douthat, Ross (2025). Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Zondervan, ISBN 978-0310367581

Douthat, Ross (2021). The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. Convergent Books, ISBN 978-0593237366

Douthat, Ross (2020). The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-1476785240. Issued in paperback as The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic.

Douthat, Ross (2018). To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism. Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-150114694-7

Douthat, Ross (2012). Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Free Press, ISBN 978-1439178300

Douthat, Ross; Salam, Reihan (2008). Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. Doubleday, ISBN 978-0385519434

Douthat, Ross (2005). Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. Hyperion, ISBN 978-1401301125