Michael Shellenberger was the keynote speaker at a recent conference by Genspect, an Ireland-based organization that aims to “counter the pervasive influence of gender ideology in Western culture.”
Michael Shellenberger is, without exaggeration, one of the most influential political writers in San Francisco.
During his two-decade career as an author and independent journalist, Shellenberger’s often contrarian writing on climate change, tech and human nature has caught the ears of scholars, business leaders and policymakers — Elon Musk, Garry Tan, effective altruist Steven Pinker and Joe Rogan count among his fans. In 2018, he ran for governor and garnered 0.5% of the vote. He ran again in 2022 after the attempted recall of Gavin Newsom, and his vote share crept up to an impressive 4%.
Even if you’ve never read his 2021 book, “San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities,” you’ve likely heard echoes of it in our local political discourse.
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“What kind of civilization leaves its most vulnerable people to use deadly substances and die on the streets?” he writes in the book. It’s a question that anyone with a heart can and should ask.
Shellenberger navigates the answer to this question by arguing that homelessness is a lifestyle choice; progressive “compassion” for perceived victims of the system has allowed a solvable problem to become seemingly intractable. Being too soft on homelessness only hurts people, he writes.
Drawing from this central thesis, city leaders like San Francisco Mayor London Breed often lean on anecdotes of homeless drug addicts who turn down good faith offers of housing to justify more aggressive measures to deal with the issue, such as conservatorship and encampment sweeps. Shellenberger has also popularized the term “homeless industrial complex” to refer to the service providers he alleges profit from the persistence of human misery on San Francisco’s streets.
Given our city’s longstanding failure to resolve these street conditions, it’s perhaps unsurprising that many think of Shellenberger as a moderate pragmatist — a sensible corrective to the excesses of California liberalism. In this context, then, it might seem out of nowhere to discover the extremity of his views on transgender issues.
Shellenberger was a keynote speaker at a recent conference by Genspect, an Ireland-based organization that aims to “counter the pervasive influence of gender ideology in Western culture.”
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According to Human Rights Watch, “gender ideology” is a catch-all term “consistently used to attack feminism, transgender equality, the existence of intersex bodies, the elimination of sex stereotyping, family law reform, same-sex marriage, access to abortion, contraception and comprehensive sexuality education.”
That’s a fairly apt description of the conference, which took place on Nov. 4-5 in Denver. Shellenberger joined his fellow speakers to rail against gender-affirming care for youth and to denounce the entire concept of trans identity as a “woke religion” borne from the secularization of society.
“We are creating, through ideological means and social media, gender dysphoria. … These are ideologically driven failures of civilization,” he said.
Among “woke” concepts, “trans is the craziest one of these ideologies,” Shellenberger said. In his view, trans activists are afflicted with cluster B personality disorders, typified by what he called “attention-seeking, grandiosity … the excess of empathy for people designated victims” and violent tendencies directed toward women.
Shutting down the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, a widely respected source of vetted, evidence-based guidance for trans health care, is his stated goal.
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“We used to perform lobotomies on people, with an ice pick through the eye,” he said, likening the cruelty of that practice to gender-affirming surgery. “These surgeries do not need to keep going on.”
Beyond his Genspect conference remarks, Shellenberger’s Substack newsletter, Public, has increasingly focused on the supposed threats that trans people pose to society, including to women’s sports, women in general, the family and Western civilization. He has written in support of pseudoscientific ideas like the social contagion theory of gender, which argues that youth who identify as trans are simply bowing to peer pressure. In tweets first reported by the news site 48 Hills, he likened gender-affirming care to chopping off limbs.
Shellenberger did not respond to my multiple requests for comment.
It might be tempting to compartmentalize — to dismiss the conspiratorial trans ideology stuff because maybe he has a point about the homelessness thing.
But you simply can’t ignore the sheer amount of evidence contortion involved in maintaining his conspiratorial views of trans people. His stances on homelessness and trans issues both stem from his foundational concept of “victimology,” his oft-evoked theory that casts marginalized people as the ones manipulating society. Progressives love a victim too much, he says, that’s why they practically deify trans people, homeless people and racial minorities.
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Social psychologists would call this “system justification” — the method by which many people alleviate their fears of uncertainty and perceived threats by bolstering their belief in the justness of the status quo. A system isn’t wrong or bad if the ones who are harmed by it aren’t good or sane people.
Shellenberger’s perspective is very much rooted in this one idea, though he seems to have diverse interests and has written extensively about environmentalism, UFOs and Black Lives Matter.
This should spark reflection among those influenced by his politics. And it should cast doubt on the endgame of the rhetoric that Shellenberger and his allies espouse.
At the very least, it should prompt you to look for better books to read.
Reach Soleil Ho (they/them): soleil@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @hooleil
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