POLITICAL CORRECTNESS  claims another victim and shoots the progressive messenger at the same time.

Earlier this month, New York magazine science columnist Jesse Singal wrote an extensively researched piece on the destruction of the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic in Toronto and the “show trial” of its leader, 65-year-old psychologist Kenneth Zucker, who was fired from his job at one of Canada’s largest mental hospitals last December…

What Singal documents in his column is a witch-hunt: a hasty review by people with little scholarly expertise who credited uncorroborated — and in some cases, later disproved — claims of misconduct against Zucker and his staff.

The closure of the Toronto clinic was roundly celebrated in left-of-center media. One might think Singal’s devastating report — coming from a journalist squarely on the progressive side in the culture wars — would be cause for second thoughts. Instead, it led, predictably, to nasty attacks on Singal…

How to best help kids with gender identity issues is an important, complex question. It calls for respectful debate, not dogma and witch-hunts.