It's not clear what Hesse wrote that caused this shift, but it's a very safe bet that she wasn't writing anything that would come as a surprise to her far-left readers. Hesse has made a name for herself as a reliable leftist.

In 2023, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her columns "convey[ing] the anger and dread that many Americans felt about losing their right to abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade." 

Her gender-based commentary has also raised eyebrows among conservative critics over the years. In 2022, Hesse accused Florida's parental rights legislation removing progressive gender ideology from the classroom of being "homophobic and transphobic bills cloaked in neutral language." 

In another piece, she defended drag queens reading books to children, insisting "Drag queens are not the ones sexualizing drag story hour."

I wrote about one of Hesse's columns back in 2023 in which she analyzed J.K. Rowling's tweets to conclude she was transphobic. Lacking any actual evidence, Hesse was reduced to criticizing the "fuzzy auras" around her tweets.

Journalism is a business for sticklers. Reporters are discouraged from calling anyone transphobic, or homophobic, or racist, because doing so requires knowing what’s in their hearts when the only thing we can know with certainty is what comes out of their mouths.

So what I can say is that what comes out of her mouth, or goes onto her Twitter account, has a fuzzy aura of harmful rhetoric. Rowling might indeed believe she has transgender friends. But taken as a whole, her body of communication on the issue, such as the things she chooses to retweet and the provocative language she uses while doing so — cumulatively, it sucks…

I do not know what is in Rowling’s heart. But reading her Twitter feed, this is the overall effect: Her Twitter feed does not ask its readers to think. It asks them to fear. It creates phobias. Of trans people. It creates trans phobias.

Hesse was especially upset that Rowling had highlighted a case about a convicted male rapist who announced they were trans and was being moved into a women's prison.

Rowling’s Twitter account in the past few months has returned multiple times to one particular British case: a transgender woman who was convicted of rape before she transitioned, and who was now set to be transferred to a women’s prison. Rowling’s attention to this story appeared to be in service to a broader argument that it is grievously dangerous for cisgender women to have to share spaces with transgender women.

Having followed this myself I can tell you that Rowling was actually making a simpler point, one Hesse is struggling to avoid: Some really deranged men might take advantage of a system of self-identified gender to further abuse women. The case Rowling wrote about was one example of this clearly being true, but not the only one. 

The lesson a normal person would take from this is that repeating "trans women are women" doesn't work in all cases. Indeed, there was a story published last week suggesting Rowling was on to something when it came to trans-women prisoners.

Almost two thirds of transgender prisoners who identify as female are convicted sex offenders, it has been revealed.

Out of the 245 trans women inmates, who are legally recognised as male, a total of 151, or 62 per cent, had committed at least one sexual offence.

Part of me wonders if that wasn't the story Hesse was responding to which got pulled prior to publication. I can only imagine her response would have been an epic disaster of double-speak.

In any case, having a column on a hot topic like this written by a leftist ideologues is a terrible idea. The whole reason this is a hot topic is that people disagree and have strong feelings about it. A newspaper ought to recognize those differences and try to reflect them honestly in its coverage instead of handing the entire field over to one narrow point of view. The Post will be better off without Monica Hesse as a gender columnist.