Leor Sapir
Manhattan Institute fellow and policy analyst
A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Leor Sapir is one of the most forensic critics of gender-affirming care policy in the United States. His ability to name the structural forces behind institutional evasion makes his work directly relevant to Ireland, where the same patterns of manufactured consensus have shaped healthcare, schools, and public debate.
Leor Sapir is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where his research spans K–12 education policy and the political and institutional dynamics driving youth gender medicine. With a background in political science, he brings a level of analytical precision to the gender debate that goes beyond clinical arguments — examining how policy is made, how dissent is suppressed, and how professional and media institutions close ranks around contested claims.
In the Beyond Gender episode Leor Sapir: The Questions the New York Times Refused to Ask (#27, August 2025), he joined Stella O'Malley to dissect the New York Times' Protocol podcast, a two-year investigation into youth transition that nonetheless stopped short of asking what gender identity actually means. Sapir's analysis is methodical: not just what the journalists got wrong, but what they chose not to ask, whose expertise they declined to seek, and which assumptions they left entirely intact. For Irish listeners, the parallel is hard to miss. The same manufactured consensus, the same reluctance to platform sceptical clinicians, and the same circular logic Sapir traces through American journalism have been consistent features of how gender medicine has been handled — and avoided — in Irish media and public life.
Sapir is a regular contributor to City Journal, the Manhattan Institute's policy magazine, where he has written extensively on gender-affirming care, the implications of the Cass Review, and the capture of medical and educational bodies by gender-identity advocacy. His work consistently highlights the gap between the actual evidence base and the confident public-facing claims of advocacy-aligned clinicians.
For an Irish audience — particularly those watching the HSE reshape its services, or trying to make sense of what is taught in Irish schools — Sapir offers something rare: a clear account of how ideological capture works as a system, and why individual clinicians or journalists find it so difficult to break from it. Stella O'Malley's conversation with him in episode #27 brings that account into direct contact with the Irish experience.
