Liberal darling Malcolm Gladwell finally said the quiet part out loud. Trans extremists and their gutless enablers ravaged America: MAUREEN CALLAHAN

A star leftist just went right.

Or at least, finally, made the right call.

Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author and darling of the liberal elite, admitted this week that he’d been cowed into silence on the trans issue.

Good for him, truly. Better late than never.

That said, listen to him describe his inner monologue as he moderated a panel discussion at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2022.

After a trans athlete on that panel went beyond insisting that biological males should play in female sports but that ‘you’ — everyone, but women especially — ‘have to let us win,’ Gladwell says he thought to himself: ‘This is nuts.’

But he didn’t have the guts to say it then.

Are we surprised? This is what woke progressivism has wrought — a culture in which a 62-year-old, who has cumulatively sold 25 million books, is afraid to say what he knows to be true.

What all sane people know to be common sense.

This is the real pandemic. This is the actual virus, and it’s in the collective bloodstream, and it’s killing off rational, logical thought and debate — the one and only threat to our democracy.

‘I’m ashamed of my performance at that panel,’ Gladwell told The Real Science of Sport podcaster Ross Tucker, who was also on that panel and had the courage to argue against trans athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.

‘I share your position 100 percent and I was cowed,’ Gladwell continued. ‘My suspicion is that 90 percent of the people in that audience were on your side, but five percent of the audience was willing to admit it.’

Of course.

Even today, those of us who refuse to countenance biological men in women’s sport and spaces, to use groupthink Orwellian nonsense words such as ‘chestfeeding’ and ‘pregnant people’ — terms that the Democratic party is now encouraging its adherents to abandon, in the hopes of reclaiming the White House in 2028 — risk being tarred as transphobes, bigots, or being cancelled.

Gladwell’s admission doesn’t so much signal a shift — his is too passive and late for that — as it reflects one.

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who presented as masculine but insisted he was female and was then allowed to fight biological females at the 2024 Olympics — and ‘won’ — has been banned from the World Boxing Championships.

Why? Because Imane Khelif is a man.

The Italian Olympic boxer Angela Carini, 25, ended her match against Khelif after 46 seconds, fearful that she would be maimed or worse.

Not that she said so explicitly or even felt as if she could say how utterly insane, unjust and potentially fatal it is to put biological females — who have trained their entire lives to reach Olympic gold — up against a man.

‘I am in pieces because I am a fighter,’ Carini said after withdrawing.

Even so, she had another burden: Not upsetting Khelif, who smirked at Carini as she tearfully exited the ring, or trans activists or the mainstream media, who still carry this water.

On Wednesday, Sky Sports reported the latest on Khelif’s rejected appeal to compete against women at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, calling Khelif ‘she’.

Even Big Tech is in on it.

Google ‘Iman Khelif, male,’ and AI replies with this: ‘No, Imane Khelif is a woman, and claims that she is male are false’.

Well, according to reports published last fall in France, Khelif has XY chromosomes.

In other words, he is a man.

Not that we needed chromosomal testing, because our eyes tell us as much: The height, the musculature, the broad facial features, the sheer physical force of the two punches Carini suffered at his hands.

‘I have never felt a punch like this,’ Carini said, adding that she feared he had broken her nose.

If Khelif had any decency, he would never have fought women. If Khelif had anything approaching scruples, he would never have accepted that gold medal in women’s boxing.

But as with so many of these trans athletes, they’d never make it against fellow biological males — like Lia Thomas, the undistinguished UPenn male swimmer who declared himself trans, began allegedly swinging his appendage around the girls’ locker room, and was suddenly breaking records all over the place.

Thomas actually came up during that MIT panel, with Gladwell saying ‘she’s an elite swimmer’ and musing whether Thomas could compete in the Olympics — as a female, of course, before minimizing any debate by saying that was the province of Fox News.

This is exactly why Democrats lost.

And it’s why the trans athlete on Gladwell’s panel felt emboldened enough to say that it wasn’t enough for men to compete in women’s sports.

Again: ‘You have to let us win.’

Gladwell — who still won’t name that athlete, which is part of the problem — claims that was his a-ha moment.

‘They’re not asking for a place at the table. They’re not asking to be treated with respect and dignity,’ Gladwell said. ‘What they’re asking for is for no one to question their considerable physiological advantage they bring to the sport. I heard that and I thought, This is nuts, and yet I didn’t say anything.’

Well, now he’s saying it — as is California’s ultra-progressive governor Gavin Newsom (doing so out of political expediency, not because he has a shred of integrity or true core beliefs), Dem congressman Seth Moulton and Dem senator Ruben Gallego.

‘Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,’ Moulton told The New York Times after the 2024 presidential election. ‘I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that’.

Who will be brave enough to follow, not that Moulton and Gladwell are dragging the NPR/MS-NOW crowd into the light?