Long before gender ideology dominated the political zeitgeist, Brandon Showalter was covering it at the Christian Post.
His interest in the issue naturally stemmed from his Christian faith, which taught him not only that men and women are intrinsically different but that children’s innocence must be protected. Showalter saw early on how transgenderism was taking root in culture. He dove into the subject, not knowing the depravity he would find on the other side.
“I saw the cover of Time magazine with Laverne Cox,” he told IW Features, referring to a 2014 piece featuring Cox, who is trans-identified. “I previously thought this was just a few drag queens and cross-dressers at Mardi Gras. I had no idea how much the ideology had infected culture and institutions. That really awakened me to the depth of the evil that this movement represents, and how disproportionately it impacts women.”
He went to his editors and urged them to make investigating gender ideology a priority. He started researching, interviewing doctors, and writing.
Showalter never intended for the issue to become his sole focus. But he couldn’t look away. He talked to the victims of the ideology, including families who’d been torn apart by it. And Showalter observed how gender ideology disproportionately preys upon girls.
In 2022, Showalter started a documentary podcast and developed it into five seasons. Gender ideology was so engrossing for him personally because he felt it exposed everything else rotten in America, he said.
He repeated the keen observation of one therapist he knew: “Transgenderism is the clearest lens through which we can see the disintegration of every institution in Western society.”
Gender ideology posed a critical question to society: would it countenance consequential lies or not? It wasn’t just about whether a man could become a woman or vice versa—it was a deeper civilizational battle for language and truth, Showalter said. If political leaders could deceive the public into affirming an obvious falsehood that sex can be changed, they could get them to adopt anything.
Gender ideology has since become a massive political issue, with the Trump Administration stepping up to curtail its influence and rid it of government institutions after the Biden Administration had embedded it deep within the federal government. Showalter said he is grateful for the current moral leadership.
“I won’t be sniffing at any positive development, and I’m grateful to see federal government action of any kind over the Supreme Court rulings,” he said. “I mean, I know what it has cost to get here.”
But he noted that in certain states and cities, gender ideology is still entrenched. Activists are standing by for the next progressive administration, which they expect will revive their gender ambitions.
But while they are working to preserve gender ideology in stealth, Showalter believes the American people have already cast their cultural veto. Pride Month has lost its luster, he’s noticed. WNBA player Sophie Cunningham’s star exploded since she plainly stated that transgender-identifying men shouldn’t disenfranchise young female athletes in their sporting category, he noted.
“Lies do kind of collapse under the weight of their own falseness after a while,” Showalter said.
What made Showalter’s coverage distinct was that, while many of his conservative peers reported on women’s sports and child gender transitions, he focused on the suffering of the families. He gave a voice to affected parents, siblings, and grandparents and highlighted how the ideology roiled their families.
Perhaps his most seminal work is his 10-year reflection on the issue. Devastatingly comprehensive, the piece lays bare the degeneracy endemic in gender ideology—from sexual exploitation to pedophilia to medical scandals. He goes into graphic detail and doesn’t hold back. One jaw-dropping nugget involves a man attempting to chest-feed his infant daughter as a fetish.
There was one finding that Showalter said he still struggles to get over. A FOIA document exposed that an NIH-funded grant was awarded to a gender clinic, at which the pediatrician lowered the age for administering cross-sex hormones from 13 years old to 8 years old. Medical experiments were being performed on minors with the help of taxpayer dollars.
“I never would have thought, had you told me 10 or 15 years ago that, yeah, your federal health agencies are going to greenlight a study in which an 8-year-old girl can get testosterone,” he said.
Showalter continued to report on the shock and awe despite a seemingly impenetrable blockade by the mainstream media. The so-called journalists of the legacy press seemed determined to either deny the issue or, worse, carry water for the gender activists.
“This is not only a sordid chapter in medical history and a scourge against women, especially their women’s rights,” he said. “This horror would not have been allowed to happen were it not for the protective phalanx given to the audio logs by our mainstream press.”
Those outlets helped advance gender ideology because they were under the delusion that it was the next frontier of civil rights. As a result, they enabled the abominable and morally bankrupt: children having irreversible damage done to their healthy bodies and young female athletes losing trophies and scholarships to gender-confused men.
Showalter has a lot of miles behind him on the issue. After a harrowing decade covering it, he and other advocates, such as nurse whistleblower Vanessa Sivadge, felt vindicated when the first Detransition Clinic opened at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, Texas, where a gender clinic had once stood.
“[There are] 3 Supreme Court rulings on our side,” Showalter also pointed out, adding he has some confidence that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court will continue to inoculate the country to a degree against future gender activism.
There have been other wins, too. Dozens of gender clinics have closed around the country, in fact.
If there’s any point that Showalter wants the uninitiated to take away from his career story, it’s that the suffering wrought by gender ideology is more layered and multifaceted than anyone truly knows. Far from a small, insignificant issue—as the media claimed for years—it swallows and corrupts everything it touches.
He recalled speaking to one mother who had two children fall down the gender rabbit hole.
“It’s an exquisite form of torture,” he recalled her telling him.
“I never could have imagined this would be my life,” Showalter said. “This is not what I signed up for on career day. It’s been horrible. But it’s definitely God’s work to bring it to the mainstream for people who are almost in denial that it could be real.”
