Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Lear

Sapir. He's an adjunct fellow, a new one at the Manhattan Institute. He received a PhD in political

science from Boston College and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard. He's written several

articles for City Journal, both in print and online, about the new gender politics in the United States.

Today, we'll be discussing his background, his recent work for City Journal, and his thoughts on the future direction of the debate over transgenderism and schools and other public issues in the West.

So,

Leo, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Brian.

So this is your first time on the Ten Blocks podcast, and you've recently become an Institute, Manhattan Institute fellow, as I mentioned. But your writer, rewriting, and

you know, I urge our listeners to check it out, is bringing a kind of sobriety and incisiveness to a conversation that's often lacking in both qualities in the country.

So why don't you talk a bit about your academic background and how you became interested

in all of these controversies over transgenderism? Sure, sure. So first of all, thanks for the

warm words and the compliment. I finished my comprehensive exams in May of 2016, and I was trying at the time to think of a good dissertation

topic that would combine my interests in political philosophy and American government.

Now, it just so happened that the same week I completed my exams, the Office for Civil Rights

and the Obama Administration's Department of Education handed down a dear colleague letter on transgender students.

In that letter, it explained that, you know, schools must stop classifying students by their natal sex

and defer instead to what OCR was calling their inner sense of gender. And if they didn't do this,

they would risk losing federal funding. Now, like most Americans who had heard about the dear

colleague letter, it caught me completely by surprise. Here you had the federal government

declaring that a definition of human nature that has been with us since time

immemorial that can be found across pretty much all cultures is not just wrong, but that its

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