Jesse Singal, Cattle Rustler?
Jesse Singal
Years ago I heard a historical story about a land dispute in the old West. A rancher family was occupying some prime real estate and had just branded their cattle. A rival wanted the land and invented a story that they were cattle rustlers, a major crime, and said the ranchers has just stolen some cattle and were searing their own brand over the old ones.
A vigilante mob rode to the ranch, saw the fresh brands on the cattle, and lynched the innocent family. The genius of the plot was incorporating true details into the lie. The mob saw what they were expecting and concluded the accusations were true.
From time to time, we all witness disagreements where there are two or more plausible explanations. A worker is fired and claims they were targeted by a bigoted manager, but the employer claims they were disruptive and rude to customers.
Are colleges refusing to hire conservative academics because they are actively discriminating against them? Or are there just not enough competent conservatives interested in academia? Does the same explanation hold true when we look at racial and sexual diversity in academia?
Two opposing sides can concoct plausible explanations for a problem, and we’ll often see what looks like confirming evidence that makes sense for the explanation.
When we encounter one of these ambiguous situations, it’s a common mistake to embrace the first explanation we heard, like the lynch mob did who were convinced they had captured a group of rustlers. They even had a token piece of evidence – the fresh cattle brands – but they actually saw something ambiguous and let it confirm what they expected to find instead of investigating it further.
This all brings us to Internet whipping boy Jesse Singal, former science editor of New York Magazine, a freelance journalist and co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast. For years transgender rights activists have painted Singal as a bigoted peddler of misinformation.
Yet, Jesse Singal’s supporters see him as a careful, nuanced champion of uncomfortable truths. He’s reported about the major gaps in research for transgender medicine for children and the dangers it brings but still maintains that some children should take puberty blockers after careful assessment. How do we know which version of Jesse Singal — if either — is true?
Ultimately, the best solution involves careful study and analysis. For example, activists frequently make bold claims about evil behavior by Singal but when pressed for examples, they clam up like a mobster being questioned by a homicide detective. Activist Brianna Wu made claims in March 2021 about having “receipts” of Singal’s crimes, but has never followed up and publicly revealed any evidence.
A popular solution is to look for institutional support, but this has problems as institutions are run by human beings. You can see a positive example of institutional support when someone presents themself as a lone genius up against the close-minded scientific establishment. That almost always turns out to be a crazy lunatic peddling pseudoscience. In that case, the institutional support is fairly reliable.
However, there are numerous cases when elements of the criminal justice system have been caught lying about evidence, from beat cops who lie in court to the 2012 Massachusetts crime lab scandal where a chemist was caught faking positive results for suspected drug samples. In these cases, the institutional support is flawed.
Unfortunately, numerous institutions and their members have smeared Jesse Singal, from journalists with large followings like Jude Sade Doyle and the gay rights advocacy group GLAAD. But, look closer and you’ll see more misinformation from people who should know better. This is simply a sign of institutional capture and decay, as the claims made by GLAAD were easily disproven yet the organization has failed to remove him from its “accountability project” list.
It’s important to keep in mind the trustworthiness and reputations of those we read. Unfortunately, doing this makes us vulnerable to lies and smears made about people who say controversial things. That doesn’t oblige us to listen to every crank and conspiracy theorist, but it does mean that we have to use our judgment and decide when to drill down deep into the evidence of the claims themselves, as well as carefully parse any accusations against those making them.
Is there a reason there is no stance taken in this article? Is Jesse good or bad?Report
My intention was to focus on how mobs reach bad conclusions and show that the claims about Singal are as flawed as the criticism against the ranchers hanged as rustlers, while the thinking by critics is similar.Report
Except, and this is critical — I have literally NO IDEA who Singal is, what the claims against him are, or how they were shown to be wrong or right or whatever.
No idea. Nebulous accusations from “transgender activists”, one person who apparently claimed they had proof but didn’t, and the conclusion he’s just a brave truth teller.
From that I can surmise it probably had something to do with transgender issues and that’s IT.
I can’t determine whether this dude is unfairly smeared or not, because literally all I know is YOU CLAIM he was unfairly smeared about SOMETHING.
I mean I could take you at your word, just agree with your conclusions without an ounce of data or reason, but what’s the point of the post then?
“This guy is unfairly maligned, just like that cattle owner was” — cool dude, but I literally had more information about the cattle situation.
I’m gonna be honest — the incredible lack of detail is kind of suspicious. That’s sort of hand-waving let’s not get into the weeds stuff is, in my experience, generally what someone does when the details don’t look so great.
Again — I have NO IDEA who this guy is. Not a clue. And reading this, I still don’t have a clue.Report
The incredible lack of detail is by design. That’s how it works at Ordinary Times now. Just weird opinion pieces about how bad the libs are with literally no facts whatsoever, just vague handwaving how the libs are being supermean to someone for reasons that mysteriously are not documented.
Fun fact: The actual story with Brianna Wu is she was responding to Jesse Singal bringing up what _he_ claims happened Julia Serano, at odds with what she has recounted and documented. (I.e., it wasn’t even Serano bringing it up, it was Singal diving into it again.)
veronica d linked to that below.
But I’m mentioning it here because people should understand, within the discussion Brianna Wu was having, half a dozen people had already stepped forwards recounting Singal’s weird lies and misrepresentation of them. This was a ‘How Jesse Singal has actively tried to hurt people, specifically including writers who he disagrees with, trying to contact people to get them fired’ discussion.
The fact Brianna Wu said ‘Yeah, this happened to me too, but I don’t really feel like going into it at the moment’ is only a big deal in the universe of people who think Brianna Wu is a vastly important figure. (And one guess of what sort of people those are? Starts with G, ended with amergate.)Report
“That’s how it works at Ordinary Times now. Just weird opinion pieces about how bad the libs are with literally no facts whatsoever, just vague handwaving how the libs are being supermean to someone for reasons that mysteriously are not documented.”
Yeah, I’ve sort of noticed. They also seem to be catnip for people with rapidly shifting names to opine on, and the few I’ve previously known about the missing details are pretty critical.
And the ones included are often heavily skewed, when they’re not just disputed facts presented as unquestioned truths.
It’d be like writing an article on Bill Cosby, noting his conviction was recently overturned, and then lambasting MeToo movement for railroading an innocent man. Like that’s so glossing over facts and reality to constitute knowing deception. They’re not confused, they’re not coming to a different conclusion — they’re just lying and hoping nobody notices.
Those posts DO seem to pull some people with rapidly shifting user names to make comments, which I guess makes it look like a post that drives conversation.Report
The rapidly shifting user name person is a former commenter who has been banned.
We try to catch the comments quickly. We regret any errors that result in them being left up.Report
Okay, to be fair, the way it works at Ordinary Times is a tiny handful of people do a lot of free work putting the site together and keeping it running. As someone who has always watched from the sidelines and posted about old books and old movies, I am not terribly informed about how decisions are made, and usually averse to jump in with criticisms.
However, I would like to propose that, with these editorial posts, the writers really should be including the relevant context towards the beginning of their piece, linking to examples of what they’re talking about, and doing the bare minimum that would be required for a college composition course. “Showing” rather than just asserting in other words. This post was clearer than some I’ve read, but I too am not sufficiently online to know anything about this guy and really learned more from the comments than the post.Report
While I am inclined to agree with the conclusion of this piece based on prior knowledge, you don’t really do any work to support it. A deep dive into the specifics of the dispute over his Atlantic piece (or some similarly controversial piece) would have been interesting, but this is just a straight-up assertion of opinion that doesn’t really show anything.Report
I’ve been listening to Blocked and Reported, and it’s really good. Aside from being fun, Singal and Herzog are both unusually thoughtful people, relics of a time before almost all journalists went pants-on-head crazy at the same time and never recovered. In dozens of hours, I have yet to hear either of them say anything disparaging about trans people; both are well left of center on trans issues.
The main reason they’re so reviled, as far as I can tell, is that their regressive insistence on things like “facts,” “data,” and “due diligence” prevents then from joining in the circlejerk into which journalism has degenerated.Report
Don’t think I’ve ever heard Singal but Katie Herzog was on Andrew Sullivan’s podcast a few weeks ago and was legit hilarious.Report
“The main reason they’re so reviled, as far as I can tell, is that their regressive insistence on things like “facts,” “data,” and “due diligence” prevents then from joining in the circlejerk into which journalism has degenerated.”
Though you won’t find it in this article, GLAAD is happy to tell you what they dislike about Singal, and I’d challenge the author of the piece, and you, to detail what is unreasonable about it.
I agree that “canceling” him is unwarranted, and it’s probably true that Singal is not transphobic, but there is a reason he’s heavily criticized within the LGBT community and among their allies, and it’s not because he insists on “‘things like ‘facts,’ ‘data,’ or ‘due diligence.'” In a sense, it’s quite the opposite. Like, 2 minutes of research would make that clear.Report
If you’re genuinely interested, the target defends himself pretty well here: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/glaad-took-false-previously-disprovenReport
I’ve read that; I don’t think it addresses the main contentions of his critics, including GLAAD.
Let’s take a step back. There is a ton of research being done right now on transgender issues at all ages, and trans advocates are overwhelmingly in support of that research. To pretend, as so many do, including here, that there are the people on the side of facts, like Singal, and the trans activists against the facts, is ridiculous, and we shouldn’t take seriously anyone who holds that view.
It’s very easy to see why Singal is the target of criticism, even putting aside his behavior (see Veronica’s link below). The science here has real life implications, for individuals and society, and in a time when the health and very lives of transgender people are under attack from virtually every direction, all trans advocates and allies are asking is that the science be reported on accurately and in a way that doesn’t provide unnecessary ammunition to the people who seek to attack transgender people at every turn. Singal, particularly with his focus on rare reversals, has provided just such fuel with at times careless and inaccurate reporting.Report
A good chunk of that is nonsense, mostly because Jesse Singal doesn’t really know things about trans people, he just sorta collects evidence of ‘kids getting transed who don’t need to be’.
For the nonsense example that sprung immediately to my eyes, he claims that the correct claim that ‘Studies have shown that children have been known to insist on a change in gender or become gender-confused after a trauma or major disruption in their attachments.’ backs up his incorrect claim that ‘Trauma, particularly sexual trauma, can contribute to or exacerbate dysphoria in some patients, but again, no one yet knows exactly why.’
There are…uh…not the same claims. Mostly because he has no idea what the hell gender dysphoria is. (Along with, I suspect, most people reading this post.)
Gender dysphoria is ‘I feel my body is incorrect for the sort of person that I am.’ It’s is a very specific feeling that your body is incorrect. It’s not even something that all trans people have, and it’s certainly not a similie for ‘deciding to being trans’. You can be trans and be _completely fine_ with your body.
There are kids who, after trauma, say ‘I wish my body was different due to the fact people assault people with bodies like mine’ or ‘I wish I was a boy so I wouldn’t get assaulted’, but that’s _not_ gender dysphoria. That’s not what it’s called.
It’s worth pointing out that Diane Ehrensaft does _sorta_ call it gender dysphoria…except not really. She calls it ‘reactive gender dysphoria’, but, well, she’s being quoted from 2011, and as she points out, that’s not really the term for what she’s describing anyway, just what she’s decided to call it in that quote. By 2016 she isn’t using that term, because that’s not how things are understood now, and it’s kinda a bad term.
There is no scientific evidence that gender dysphoria, (Feeling your body is wrong for you as a person, as opposed to just wishing it was different due to the circumstances) can be caused by, or exacerbated by, trauma. Literally no evidence of this.
He’s even presented with people explaining this confusion to him, and he literally fails to follow their point while quoting them! CLINICIAN: Right. You’re gonna get too many false positives if you say, “This distress is only related to trauma, not gender dysphoria, and any patient with trauma doesn’t have gender dysphoria — they just have trauma.” You’re going to really hurt a lot of people — you’re going to ignore their gender dysphoria and you’re going to attribute [it to] something that’s not relevant.
Teasing out the two things, can be a difficult mess, and require parents and clinicians to not assume, ‘Trauma, particularly sexual trauma, can contribute to or exacerbate [gender] dysphoria in some patients.’, to quote Singal’s comment.
That clinician’s quote calls him out to his face, pointing out that trauma and gender dysphoria are two different things that can result in children ending up in gender clinics (And many children have both!), and Singal doesn’t understand the quote is doing that!
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I, as a non-binary and thus technically trans person, spotted Singal’s confusion or ‘gender dysphoria’ with ‘wanting to be opposite gender’ in literally seconds. Because I actually understand the discussion. Unlike Jesse Singal who, again, knows nothing about trans people, and completely refuses to listen to anything they say.
On top of that, I feel I must point out that Singal’s claim, in his original Atlantic article, was used in that article to justify the idea of not believing children when they say they are trans, whereas all his quotes to justify that claim are about how vanishingly rare that sort of thing is. Which means it is incredibly odd to base an article around.
He also, weirdly, thinks that it shows kids were not trans and shouldn’t have transitioned if they end up non-binary. He lists them in his paragraph of how ‘transitioning is not the answer’ Non-binary people are, of course, trans, even if many of them don’t use that term, and asserting it was somehow harmful for kids to pick the _other_ binary gender before ending up off the binary is just another example of his complete dumbness towards trans issues. And most of them socially transition, and others have surgery and hormone changes.
He, of course, does not know any of this, because, again, he is a complete idiot who somehow has been put in a transgender beat he doesn’t seem to care about learning anything about yet is constantly paid to write articles about.Report
I really don’t want to wade into this mess, but I do recommend Serano’s writings on Singal: http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2017/12/my-jesse-singal-story_11.html
It has a lot of links. If you want the full picture, you’ll be reading for a while.Report
Here is an important paragraph from that:
It’s not that Jesse Singal is being accused of being a cattle rustler, it’s that he is actively immune to facts _and_ lashes out at people who disagree with him.
And since he’s wrong about a lot of facts, that includes a lot of lashing out.Report
The most recent incident on that list involves Grace Lavery’s Foreign Policy piece. Singal does appear to have been correct on the facts in that dispute. He had to go over her head, and over her editor’s head to the editor in chief, but if you look down at the bottom of her piece (not linking because of spam filter, but it’s her only piece there) there’s a lengthy correction note.
Also, VanDerWerff’s behavior in the Harper’s blow-up was…not great. Yes, she said she wasn’t trying to get Yglesias disciplined, but saying that it made her feel “less safe” as a trans person at Vox was either insane or a deliberate HR whistle.
The letter wasn’t even about trans people. There are oblique references to recent (at the time) high-profile incidents, but most of them were about race, and I can’t think of a single one where the most likely referent had anything to do with trans people. Yet she referred to the letter as “full of transphobic dog whistles.” As an illustration of what she had in mind, she linked this:
https://mobile.twitter.com/emilyvdw/status/1280661254118322177
I’m willing to cut trans people some slack because because they have faced and to a lesser extent continue to face legitimate bigotry, probably more than any other minority today. This paranoia isn’t coming from nowhere, but it’s just way over the top here.
Anyway, the complaint seems to be that when VanDerWerff took this beef public, Singal responded publicly, and then, possibly as a result of that (and definitely not as a result of her tweet being linked from actual right-wing anti-trans news sites), there was a pile-on, in which she claimed to have received (but, as is the custom, provided no evidence of) death/rape/whatever threats “on every platform.”
You don’t get to publicly criticize people and then complain when other people publicly disagree with your criticism.Report
Those ‘lengthy corrections’ are almost completely unrelated to things he pointed out. He said nothing about Maya Forstater, and he said nothing about where the judgement applied, to start with, which are half those corrections. And as she points out, he’s very wrong in a lot of things he ‘corrected’.
He said she’s wrong to say ‘the court did not in fact collect any evidence on what that percentage actually is’. But she’s correct there. The court used as evidence the percentage at another clinic, in a completely different country. In fact, the exact wording he cites is still in her article, so, no, she did not ‘correct’ that. There’s a footnote about something in that regard, but it clearly wasn’t the part he thought was wrong, as that is still there.
He’s also wrong about whether or not puberty blockers are reversible. He;’s contstantly wrong about this, and by wrong I mean lying. No matter how much ‘gender critical’ people try to stir up nonsense there, they are, flatly, wrong about it. Puberty blockers are completely reversible, and ‘reversible’ is doing a lot of work…literally just stopping taking them reverses the effects. (Singal did some handwaving on bone density that a) isn’t the basis the court decided on, and b) isn’t actually true either.)
His claim that Bell case’s isn’t ‘the case that the court sought to address’, or that it was a ‘judicial review, not a lawsuit’ is completely nonsensical. The name of the _lawsuit_ was Bell v. Tavistock. This was a decision in a lawsuit! It was a court decision in a lawsuit that created new medical standards, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a lawsuit about a person. What is he even talking about?
The only actual mistake he pointed out was the date of Bell first taking testosterone, it was 17 not 18. Which is something a lot of people reporting on this got wrong, and Lavery corrected it.
You don’t know when marginalized people feel safe and when they don’t. I don’t feel safe around anyone who signed that letter, either. At least not in a position of authority. Now, if they clarify they didn’t understand the issue, fine, I’ll accept an apology. But otherwise, no.
By definition, dogwhistles are not audible for people who have not be taught to hear them. I see plenty of dogwhistles in that letter. For example, ‘the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty’ and ‘But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting.’. And ‘The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away’ is almost inexcusable.
But you probably do agree with those sentence. You don’t see anything wrong. And I get why, I’m not saying you should, with your experience.
But trans people have to constantly debate whether we even exist or should be allowed to exist, exactly under the idea that we should have a ‘reasonable debate about the issue’.
Or to rephrase: The Jewish Question is not a valid question, and society should not be in a discussion about it. Note that’s not the same thing as saying it should be outlawed, that people should be arrested for it, I’m not saying that. But there’s a large distance between ‘outlawed’ and ‘a debate we have in newpapers’. Or between ‘outlawed’ and ‘shunned by society if you argue it publicly’.
Asserting that we should have a nice reasonable debate about ‘The [marginialized people] Question’ in the public sphere, does indeed make marginialized people feel pretty damn unsafe. Because sometimes we lose the debate.
Did Yglesias realize he was making that arguement? No, he did not. Was he making it? Yes. (Again, that’s what a dogwhistle is.)
And that’s not even getting into the fact that the debate itself is harmful, both in that it is _exhausting_ to marginalized people, and that the debate itself moves the Overton window or whatever to include ‘Well, maybe they shouldn’t exist’ into acceptable debate…in fact, that’s sorta the premise of the Overton window…and we can disagree politically where that window should be, but actual Nazis should not be in it.
And saying ‘The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away’ is allowing Nazis into the Overton window. That doesn’t occur to you, but it is what happens.
Don’t. Debate. Nazis. Not in public. Don’t put them on a stage and debate them. It does not help. Even if they lose it doesn’t help.
And also you’re a cis American, so you probably have absolutely no idea how bad the situtation has gotten in Britian WRT ‘The ‘Trans Question’. They are currently having a ‘healthy debate’ over whether trans women are all pedophiles and sex offenders in their papers. Their conclusion seems to be veering towards ‘Yes, probably?’. In Britian, the debate is being won by the wrong people, the fascist side is winning, because they have very large platforms and the debate is making them money.
(Before someone gets confused, I’m not calling Jesse Singal a Nazi. This is a different discussion, about a letter. Singal is not a Nazi…he’s just someone who debates in a way that Nazis like. He moves the Overton window, but not that far. But far enough that Nazis can pick it up and run from there.)
The Federalist argued the government should take trans kids away from their parents if those parents affirm their gender identity. Texas lawmakers are pushing to do just that. The thing you just commented about, Tavistock v. Bell, resulted in bunch of kids losing access to their existing medical care, denied them medications they were already on. That’s just the stuff about kids….the UK is having a discussion over whether trans _adults_ should exist.
Hey, do you know how to have a genocide without anyone noticing? Set up a system where a huge percentage of trans kids run away from home. About 40% of of homeless kids are LGBT, in fact. And on top of that, set up a system where half of transgender kids try to commit suicide if they can’t live how they are…and then deny them medical care. In fact, take their existing medical care away. And watch them kill themselves. It’s not quite genocide, but it does sorta thin out the ranks, and remove the political ability of a good chunk of the rest, because they were homeless runaways without an education or any money.
How do think ‘right-wing anti-trans news sites’ found that tweet? It’s because they follow Singal. Because he makes constently arguments that supports their position.
And what happened on Twitter is public. We could all see death/rape/whatever tweets there. What happened on Facebook and in her email is less so, and she has no obligation to wad through that and repost it. I don’t know what sort of lie you think this is, but claiming it’s a lie is nonsense. A good chunk of it happened visibly.
Vox _called Twitter_. The company she works at called Twitter, directly, and got them to do something. It was that unmanagable.
Pretty sure you do get to complain about how they publicly criticize you, though. Also, threats aren’t criticism.
Also pretty sure you get to complain when they are lying about stuff, or cheerleading decisions to hurt people.Report
Why is it always trans women? If you look at his Atlantic article, it’s almost exclusively about AFAB people. But it seems to be almost exclusively trans women who have a beef with him.Report
Speaking for myself, I support the rights and dignity of trans masc folks the same as trans femme folks. I support enbies as well. There are two reasons. First, laws that hurt trans dudes will hurt trans gals just the same, so it’s partly self interest. But more than that it is basic morality. Dishonest attacks on minority groups are prima facie wrong. I oppose such attacks on principle.
The reason people like Serano and others have a personal beef with him is detailed in her post. She explains it better than I can, as do those she links to. In short, he has a pattern of behaving unprofessionally toward them. However, I don’t personally want to get in the weeds on that. It’s exhausting. You can read what she says and judge for yourself.Report
I almost want to frame this, because it shows _exactly_ the frame the media gives this, two different ones.
Firstly, there’s nothing in that article that applies only to AFAB people. It’s just about trans kids, period.
As for why you got that impression while reading it…you got primed to think most trans kids are AFAB. Or, at least, most the kids who are the ‘victims’ of people leaping to conclusions and asserting they are trans when they aren’t. They’re just innocent little girls who don’t like wearing dresses or something.
Meanwhile, the exact opposite is true about people having a beef with Singal. Basically all trans people have a beef with Singal. All of trans twitter, the entire thing, have a beef with him. At minimum, they think he’s not very good at understanding trans topics,w hich makes him an incredibly bad choice for being assigned that beat by the Atlantic. That’s the _best_ opinion you will get from any trans person who has an opinion about him, that he just doesn’t know things.
The reason you think it’s only trans women that have a problem with him is that the internet hates trans women and attacks them violently in response to things like this. It’s not that they have more a problem with Singal, it’s that the internet _cares_ they have a problem with Singal. And thus they are a lot more visible.Report
There’s something about this entire discussion that makes my skin crawl.
Even in the most generous possible light, there is something awful and unsettling about discussing other people’s identity and dignity and sense of self as things to opine on, as debatable issues with which reasonable people can disagree.
Is someone discussing defending the rights of people who are being transitioned against their will? It doesn’t appear so.
Is there a discussion about coming to the aid of people who are disturbed and asking for our help? Doesn’t look like that either.
It seems like any and all discussions about trans people take the form of some sort of inquisition which probes the most intimate aspects of other people, weighing their motives and evaluating their state of mind to determine if we find them sufficiently sincere, their hearts sufficiently pure such that we can grant them recognition as our equals.
I keep coming back to the concept of etiquette, of “making other people comfortable in our presence” to the degree possible.Report
Who gets to speak about what. The Republic of Online Letter is engaged in a big debate about who gets to speak about what. That’s what all these arguments really boil down to, x person wrote about a topic that y person thought they shouldn’t write about. The reason why so many media personalities across the political spectrum, especially if they have a presence in legacy outlets, are disturbed by this is that they are used to a world where they could write about what they want and not get challenged.Report
It’s not that simple. Yes, Singal would probably get crap from the far end of Twitter crazies no matter what he did. However, Serano would not be going after him had his reporting been honest. She’s absolutely not a “Twitter crazy,” not even close. Nor would I object. Sure, I want more trans voices, but this isn’t about that.Report
Hit Report by accident.Report