Elizabeth Warren and the Limits of Wonkery

She built her reputation on rigorous research and analysis. Then she met trans activists.

Senator Elizabeth Warren knows that the testosterone injected in trans-identified girls is anabolic steroids. She acknowledged as much in a 2022 letter to the Drug Enforcement Agency, signed by only one other lawmaker, which demanded that the drug be re-classified to make it easier to access. In the letter, Warren – who is renowned for her cynicism toward powerful business interests – and her colleague, Sen. Ed Markey, parroted unfounded healthcare lobbyist talking points:

“gender-affirming hormone therapy is safe, effective, medically necessary, and critical to the health and well-being of transgender people.”

Warren’s advocacy of steroids extends to underage girls. In 2024 she joined an amicus brief filed by members of congress that called on the Supreme Court to rule minors have a constitutional right to receive puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

Warren’s role in transitioning kids intrigues me because when she was my age, she was an obscure law and policy wonk – just like me and many of my friends. And broadly speaking we are not trans activists. Opposition to the trans agenda is widespread in my professional circles. Yet we haven’t stopped it; we haven’t stood up to our own trans activist colleagues who are leading the charge for child gender medicine and boys in girls’ sports. (OK, I've had some arguments.)

What’s wrong with the wonks?

This is Elizabeth Warren’s story.

“As We Forgive Our Debtors” (1989)

As a young professor of commercial law in the 1970s, Warren hung with the conservative “law and economics” crowd. It was a pro-business movement that could afford to woo rising academics. Warren met her husband, Bruce Mann, at one of its conferences.

Law and econ articles tended to be abstract. The field trafficked in numbers, formulas, and models. But real-world data, not so much. Instead these scholars often ginned up hypothetical scenarios that followed made-up rules: “Assume everyone involved in the transaction knows everything about it and is acting in a way to optimize their financial position, and there are no barriers to new businesses trying to undercut the old ones …”

Within that milieu, Warren and two colleagues (a law professor and sociologist) contrived a quirky and quixotic project: to figure out who was filing for personal bankruptcy. Not who should file for bankruptcy under existing law, assuming they had no motives beyond financial optimization; not who might file in various hypothetical scenarios. Who was actually doing it.

At the time, lenders had been telling everyone – particularly impressionable young scholars at conferences – that consumers exploited the bankruptcy courts’ misaligned incentives. Warren eagerly set out to strengthen the lobbyists’ case. Years later she recalled she’d been “on the lookout for cheaters and deadbeats as a way to explain who was filing for bankruptcy.”

Warren and her colleagues trawled for quantitative data at bankruptcy courts – travelling there and Xeroxing files. They gathered qualitative data by surveying debtors and systematically interviewing them (and judges). Warren explained in 2008:

“When we interviewed the families who had filed for bankruptcy, quite frankly, I was shameless about this, we paid them $50 if they would take extensive telephone surveys for us about bankruptcy, and so we got very high response rates.”

Warren and her colleagues found that the industry’s narrative was all wrong. By and large, debtors filed for bankruptcy following real hardship like job loss and illness, not luxury spending sprees. They published the book As We Forgive Our Debtors in 1989, then various follow-up studies. A key insight: families were falling into debt in their quest for houses in good school districts. The groundbreaking project spurred Warren to fight against financial lobbyists, and to change her voter registration in 1996 from Republican to Democrat.

Warren also ditched law and econ. In 1987 she criticized the theory-based approach of a fellow bankruptcy expert, Douglas Baird, in the context of a friendly debate:

“I have offered a dirty, complex, elastic, interconnected view of bankruptcy from which I can neither predict outcomes nor even necessarily fully articulate all the factors relevant to a policy decision. Baird has offered a rational, clean approach in which he claims few factors are relevant and solitary conclusions are always compelled. Baird's view of bankruptcy is more chic than mine, but I believe my view is more realistic and more likely to yield useful analysis.”

I represented debtors and alleged debtors as a legal aid lawyer, first in suburban Massachusetts and then in Brooklyn. My on-the-ground perceptions matched Warren’s scholarly findings. By and large, Americans have sad reasons for getting into debt, feel ashamed by it, and act irrationally – against their own financial interest – as a result. The scant criticism of Warren’s early work on debtors is opaque and unconvincing.

So I think Warren’s scholarship during this era was legit. Her racial identity, not so much. She was calling herself an Indian.

White Lie

Warren, who is blonde, identified as a Cherokee Indian for decades, including in her 1970s bar registration. Her opponents charge that she was trying to benefit from affirmative action; her allies claim she did not benefit, and that in the 1970s-80s a Native American identity would not have conferred any benefit.

I actually believe Warren adopted the ruse (which she claims was informed by family lore) out of a weird but common pathos. We all know people who falsify their class background or sexual orientation absent any financial incentive. Race fakers provoke more ire than semi-celibate bisexuals but it might all be the same thing.

Planet of the Wonks

The 1989 book proved Warren to be the consummate wonk. What do I mean by that? And which lawyers are not wonks?

The only time in my life when I didn’t want to be a lawyer was during law school. At first I was thrilled to be attending NYU, which was known as being more progressive and supportive of “public interest” careers than its peers like Columbia and Chicago. But I soon found myself alienated by the loudest public interest students’ grandiosity. These people fully intended to save the world by filing novel Equal Protection challenges. Some of them were so utopian that I wondered if they hoped to render the legal system obsolete. They deliberated for months over whether gay white students should be allowed in the Edgar Allen Poe lounge, which they planned to convert to a safe space (ultimately NYU denied them the right to control entry to the lounge).

I graduated into the recession with no job and volunteered at Rhode Island Legal Services. That changed everything. The lawyers at RILS were self-deprecating, gritty, and fiendishly preoccupied with legal and practical minutiae. They represented one downtrodden client at a time and got no glory. This felt like home.

And so by the age of 25 I’d gotten to know both types of lefty public interest lawyers: revolutionaries and wonks. Revolutionaries (less politely known as social justice warriors) tend to cluster in anti-discrimination and constitutional law jobs. Wonks show up more often in economic fields like consumer protection and antitrust. Housing law trends revolutionary, at least in NYC. But representing hundreds of tenants can turn a revolutionary into a wonk. I believe my micro-generation of elder millennials (late 30s to mid 40s) is the workforce’s wonkiest, while revolutionaries predominate among Gen Z and the old hippies who still sit on boards and lead some offices.

To outsiders, wonks might seem to have the same worldview as their revolutionary peers. They get along. They congratulate each other on favorable settlements. Both breeds recite from the same catechism in job interviews. But there are those who write the catechism and those who just cram it the night before the test.

Wonks cheerfully outsourced lingo and slogan production to revolutionaries their whole lives and now they’re saying – wait, nonbinary people have rights?

In 2023 I saw that a conference in my field would feature a “womxn’s lounge” for all who identified as female or not male. One of the conference organizers was an old friend of mine who is a wonk par excellence, very reserved and realistic. I emailed her to explain the through-line from lawyers misspelling “women” to surgeons carving healthy breasts off teen lesbians. My friend didn’t respond. When I caught her eye at the conference, she nodded, held up her index finger, and ran away from me. Literally ran, swerving around startled consumer advocates in the crowded hallway.

Wonks pick their battles. They want to find a test case for their theory about the warranty of habitability or testify to the state legislature about why post-judgment interest should be no higher than the federal funds rate. They don’t want to argue about oppression and identities. Generally they only want to argue about one thing and it is something that cannot be explained at a 9th grade reading level.

“What Is a Woman’s Issue?” (2002)

So young Warren, with her dogged determination to protect the dusty old bankruptcy code from lobbyists, was a wonk. And she was not a revolutionary.

According to the Boston Globe,

“while Warren aligned herself with economic underdogs in her research, she was not viewed as a champion of women or minorities at the law schools where she taught. Silent on the race and gender wars that divided campuses in the 1980s and 1990s, she was never a liberal crusader.”

Politico in 2019:

“For much of her career, she has not been a vocal champion of women’s rights[.]”

But in 2002, now a professor at Harvard Law School, Warren plunged into the Harvard Women’s Law Journal to call out the feminist org NOW Legal Defense for hyping then-Sen. Joe Biden. He’d recently sponsored the Violence Against Women Act, sure, but he was also fighting to make it harder for consumers to file for bankruptcy. And this, Warren claimed, would hurt women. They made up 39% of filers vs. men’s 29% (the rest of the petitions were married man-woman couples).

Warren argued that women’s organizations should make fighting the bankruptcy bill a top priority. I don’t buy it. Women’s higher rates of bankruptcy at the time seemed to reflect challenges for single mothers that had nothing to do with the bankruptcy code itself – women’s orgs should tackle those upstream problems. My sense is that Warren whipped up the feminist argument because it was her ticket to a fresh venue to trash Biden in.

Anyway, the article is interesting because it proves that Warren understands very well how industry manipulates legislators to the detriment of ordinary people, particularly women.

On the financial industry’s power over lawmakers:

“Flush with money, the credit industry can hire the lobbyists to pay calls on every Senate and House staff member, prepare ‘information’ packages for Congress and the media, make calls to reporters, organize news conferences, buy advertisements in national newspapers, hire expensive law firms to draft legislative proposals, and pay for celebrity endorsements. Women's groups, even if they had no other issues to occupy their time and resources, cannot match this outlay.”

On how industry controls the narrative using “studies”:

“There is, of course, one well-funded source of data about the bankruptcy system: the credit industry. The industry has paid for its own studies, which it vigorously promotes, purporting to show that many of those who file for bankruptcy could pay their debts but are taking the easy way out with bankruptcy. Those studies, not surprisingly, do not focus on women.”

The gender industry also pays for and promotes its own studies. The studies don’t focus on women who are married to trans-identified men, competing against them in sports, or locked up in prison with them. When the studies concern gender medicine, the women are called “men.”

“The Two-Income Trap” (2004)

In 2004 Warren co-authored The Two-Income Trap with her daughter. Their argument: the American middle class had stagnated. Families were only keeping their head above water by having both parents work, but this led to higher costs (childcare, etc.) and greater vulnerability (if one parent lost a job, the other couldn’t compensate because they were already working). By knocking the sentimental glow off of stats about rising female wages, Warren showed once again that she didn’t care about the feminist party line.

The book landed Warren on Dr. Phil. People liked her. I think she succeeded because she was passionate about the topic. In a January 2008 talk on the book’s themes, she sounds obsessed with the fate of the middle class to the point almost of paranoia:

“I feel we’re moving from a three class society to a two class society. … Americans identify with the middle class, it affects our democracy, it’s part of what gives us our political stability … it affects who we are in this world, but I fear what’s happening and what these data are about is that we actually are gonna see a larger upper class. We’re seeing, not just the rich-rich, but the sort of rich, the ones who have the same jobs, bringing in two incomes, who don’t get sick, who don’t lose a job … they stay with the upper group. … and then the rest is just one long trail of underclass that stays on a constant debt treadmill.”

Months later the Great Recession hit. The middle class floundered. Warren looked like a seer.

I don’t think she was wrong to worry. But the focus on sudden shocks, rather than the difficulty of gaining security in the first place (a defining story of my generation), suggests she was myopically focused on one particular kind of struggling American: the kind that files for bankruptcy.

“Illness and Injury as Contributors to Bankruptcy” (2005)

Warren’s most contested paper claimed that “about half of debtors cited medical causes” for filing bankruptcy. Co-authored with two medical doctors and a sociologist, the study relied on generous metrics to determine what counted as causing a bankruptcy – a medical debt of over $1,000, for example, or the debtor stating that was the reason and later providing detailed information about the medical issue.

The paper was valuable to the project of establishing that many debtors are sympathetic characters – Warren’s metier. It also suggested, by unearthing worst-case-scenarios, that the healthcare system could play a role in causing “financial ruin.” But the analysis couldn’t support definitive conclusions about the healthcare system.

The authors were candid in the paper about their project’s limitations. But they could hardly have been surprised by what happened next – politicians cited the paper misleadingly to support arguments for health insurance reform.

Warren built alliances with those politicians, including then-Senator Barack Obama. She became a US senator herself by winning election in Massachusetts in 2012.

“Dream Big”: Campaign for President (2019-20)

An early bird, Warren announced her candidacy for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president in January 2019. The field would soon grow crowded. She bid for the role of “nerd” and the press granted it. In a New York Times column published days into her run, Paul Krugman appraised her: “she is what a serious policy intellectual looks and sounds like in 2019.”

Warren also beefed up her revolutionary bona fides by taking stands like refusing to participate in town halls hosted by Fox News.

The top reaction on Twitter to Warren’s Fox boycott

In July 2019 it was reported that Warren had added pronouns to her social media bios. In September, she was the only presidential contender to appear at DragCon. NBC News dubiously suggested that any “strategy to maximize the LGBTQ vote could pay dividends in early primary and caucus states[.]” I suspect she was aiming for the endorsement of Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. The sprightly New Yorker ultimately backed her fellow socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders.

By then, Warren was on notice about trans. Kara Dansky knew Warren’s husband – she’d taken his class at Penn Law. She emailed him the TERF starter pack in May 2019 and asked him to forward it to Warren. He thanked her for the email, according to her book The Reckoning.

The Transgender Child

In January 2020, Warren appeared at a CNN Town Hall on LGBT issues. She opened by reading the names of “transgender women of color” who had been killed that year.

Then a 9-year old girl going by Jacob asked her how she would make “kids like me feel safer at school.” Jacob’s mother, Mimi Lemay, had just published a memoir of raising a “transgender child.” The family lived outside Boston, the site of America’s first child gender clinic.

Warren answered:

"I want to make sure that the person I think is the right Secretary of Education meets you and hears your story. And then I want you to tell me if you think that's the right person, and then we'll make the deal. Does that sound good?"

Note CNN’s casting choice here. Jacob was old enough to recite a line on stage but young enough to pass as a boy. She wasn’t a teenager sweating and wheezing in a breast binder or a lanky boy in a dress asking about sports. Warren had signaled throughout her campaign that she was down to embrace fringe identity stuff. At this forum, CNN served her a golden opportunity to endorse the concept of transgender minors. She accepted with gusto.

That was five years ago. Jacob’s mother is still writing about her journey as the mother of a transgender child, so presumably Jacob has used puberty blockers and perhaps steroids.

The Transgender Feminist

Warren’s energetic campaign was punctuated by frequent drops of new “plans” – webpages detailing various policy problems and proposing legal changes and government programs to address them. At the time they looked impressive. Today they look like she entered a prompt into ChatGPT:

“Summarize the demands of Ford-funded advocacy groups related to solving feline obesity in a tone that is progressive yet patriotic. Put the most arcane ideas in bold. Talk about black cats in a separate section.”

But ChatGPT wasn’t around in 2019. Instead Warren seems to have relied on staffers to synthesize activist demands.

A Guardian story published in February 2020 reported that she had secured the coveted Chase Strangio endorsement. Five MTFs and one FTM gushed about her solicitude:

“We talked candidly about the murders of black and brown trans women, and domestic violence,” said Raquel Willis, a trans rights organizer and former Out magazine executive editor, who met Warren last year at a roundtable with black women. They discussed solutions and ideas critical to black radical leftists that Democrats rarely touch, including prison abolition and decriminalizing sex work, Willis said: “No candidate is perfect. But there is a willingness to evolve. There is an openness. There is empathy.”

Daniel Lander, Warren’s precocious LGBTQ Outreach Director, was tasked with whispering donors’ gender identities into the candidate’s ear at fundraisers.

The Guardian also interviewed Charlotte Clymer, a spokesperson for the LGBT org Human Rights Campaign. Five years earlier, when Clymer was going by Charles, he identified as a “male feminist” and ran a “tyrannically controlled Facebook group” about feminism that led to him winning a “Good Guy Award” from the National Women’s Political Caucus. He verbally attacked women who disagreed with him.¹ For example:

“You have to earn respect for your opinion. I’m not going to hand it to you because you’re a woman talking women’s rights.”

Clymer claimed to the Guardian (which didn’t mention he worked for HRC) that he discussed Warren’s stance on trans issues on a 90-minute call with the campaign.

Clymer raised $171,000 for Warren on Twitter in February 2020. She thanked him with a personal call. He reported that he asked her to demand testosterone be de-scheduled. “Her knowledge was amazing.”

Warren knew that as a major presidential candidate, she legitimized anyone she publicly associated with. That was her rationale for snubbing Fox:

“A Democratic town hall gives the Fox News sales team a way to tell potential sponsors it's safe to buy ads on Fox—no harm to their brand or reputation”

Yet her campaign showered attention on men like Clymer, greasing their future career path.

The next year Clymer joined the board of LPAC, which supports all of America’s powerful lesbian politicians. They all fight for “trans rights.”

Warren invested lots of time talking to “LGBTQ” people. This strategy followed the template she set in the 1980s interviewing debtors. But the debtors were a very large, random cross-section of the bankruptcy-filing population. The LGBTQs were a handful of professional activists. So much for methodology.

Running for president under the banner of wonkiness was always a contradictory idea. Wonks develop expertise by drilling down into one narrow area for years. Their methods don’t scale to generalist jobs.

Release the Steroids (2022)

The Strangio endorsement was a bust. Warren never won a single state in the 2020 Democratic primary.

Still a senator, she followed up on Clymer’s ask. In 2022, she was the only other lawmaker to sign on to Sen. Ed Markey’s demand that the DEA make it cheaper and easier for doctors to prescribe steroids. She knew very well it was the same drug that bodybuilders use. The letter reads:

“Congressional efforts to address the non-medical use of testosterone by athletes thirty years ago has inadvertently created barriers to medically necessary gender-affirming care today.”

Prescriptions for Schedule III drugs like steroids are monitored through state-level databases. The letter argues this tracking “outs” trans-identified people “to their health care providers, pharmacists, [and] family members[.]” But don’t family members already know the patient’s sex and observe the changes caused by testosterone? Shouldn’t healthcare providers know their patients’ sex and current drug usage?

It’s a goofy letter. I don’t know if it reflects Clymer’s influence. It’s worth noting Markey is Warren’s fellow Masshole. The state is home to the Harvard-approved gender pill mill Fenway Health.

So Much for Sounding Intellectual

In Warren’s 2002 article for the Harvard Women’s Law Journal, she anxiously conjured:

“a troubling specter of women exercising powerful political influence within a limited scope, such as rape laws or equal educational opportunity statutes, but wielding little influence in business or other supposedly gender-neutral areas that profoundly affect many women.”

Warren has always viewed social justice as distracting bullshit that keeps women down. I bet she’s never taken trans stuff seriously, but rather simply followed consultants’ advice and told trans activists what they wanted to hear. And so by refusing to lift her gaze from the financial industry, Warren overlooked the healthcare industry waltzing by in a pink bonnet. Or who knows – maybe she saw the monster and didn’t care.

The wonks I know are not going to risk anything for trans because it’s not their number one issue. Some get lucky and trans stuff doesn’t fall in their lap. Others compromise: they sign off on amicus briefs they think are dodgy, host a womxn’s lounge, help a colleague brainstorm evasive answers to questions about the sex binary, or reprimand paralegals for violating the office pronoun policy. They tell themselves they're doing too much good on other issues to throw it all away on something symbolic.

The stakes are about to rise for many wonks.

The Biden administration led the fight for trans rights alongside activists. Now that the federal government is changing hands, activists will ask liberal state governments to dance. Attorneys general could sue to block Trump's executive orders, for example, or intervene in lawsuits on healthcare regs that Trump refuses to defend. Will the wonks tell their politician bosses and revolutionary coworkers that gender identity lawsuits have no merit?

It’s OK to commit your entire career to one issue to the exclusion of all other righteous causes. But then don’t run for president. In fact, don’t apply to be a supervisor.

1. The Cut’s take on the controversy is exquisitely 2014: “one of the most exciting aspects of online feminism is that it calls out even the best devotees when they mess up. … That said, I can imagine how it might be uniquely difficult for straight, white men to stomach feminist criticism. Whenever I’m criticized by someone whose experience I’ve failed to address in my writing (because of my own manifold privileges), I get prickly and sad.”