Jesse Singal formerly wrote for New York Magazine, but he currently has his own Substack. Which, as we all know, means that he’s a right-wing culture warrior.
The people going after Substack will not stop until writers they deem as not sufficiently morally pure are not allowed to make a living writing *anywhere*. That's their goal. They drape it in other stuff but they are complaining that people choose to pay to read *private* posts.
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 13, 2021
2/ Most of the people in this camp write stuff that is, to me, unreadable dreck. I would never in a million years attempt to interfere with their fans ability to pay directly to read that dreck. It's just gross, the attempts to attack other people's livings.
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 13, 2021
The thing is, Jesse Singal isn’t so much a right-wing culture warrior as he is a liberal journalist who’s just fed up with cancel culture.
But to the woke, he’s just plain evil. And a creepy transphobe, to boot.
I really hope Sady Doyle has some evidence to back up these very serious claims pic.twitter.com/6uxTKMXKLr
— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) March 13, 2021
This is somehow even worse than the Broderick piece. Enjoy! https://t.co/FCiPZqxjoL
— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) March 13, 2021
I can’t believe “journalists” are so comfortable defaming people. Don’t you know that’s illegal?
— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) March 13, 2021
They don’t care.
This, from Jude Doyle, is really disturbing. He accuses me of supporting conversion therapy (linking to an article that makes no such claim) and of *stalking* people. On what planet is it acceptable for a professional journalist to hurl accusations like this with no evidence? pic.twitter.com/WsRBOsmt0w
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 13, 2021
2/ Jude has a yearslong history of doing exactly this — of launching unhinged, unevidenced claims against his perceived enemies and then crying HELP I AM BEING HARASSED when they subsequently complain about it, as anyone subjected to his harassment would. He should stop.
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 13, 2021
3/ For the record/transparency's sake, I sent Doyle a note asking him to correct this. He will undoubtedly spin this as an act of 'harassment.' I did the exact same thing a day ago when Ryan Broderick made *his* false claims. The lying among these guys is just endemic. pic.twitter.com/eof0Qshj1d
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 13, 2021
Here’s what Jude Doyle did with it, for the record:
Are you fucking kidding me pic.twitter.com/IwR9vMbkos
— Jude Ellison S. Doyle (@sadydoyle) March 13, 2021
Nice, huh?
5/ Some support for my claim that Doyle regularly does this. (At the time she had a different name.)https://t.co/tADE8GSctg
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 13, 2021
(Tweet #5 should have been 'he' — sorry about that)
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 13, 2021
6/ YEARS of this, guys. Unrelenting. pic.twitter.com/Pl0Jl1Eds2
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 13, 2021
“Unrelenting” is an understatement.
Blue-checked nonbinary lesbian cat parent Dianna E. Anderson recently wrote a long thread detailing the extent of Singal’s transphobia. Buckle up, because it’s about to get bumpy:
I wanna talk about this Jesse Singal stuff for a minute, and how to spot transphobes who claim they are not tranpshobic, as is his claim.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
Singal is a cisgender journalist who, without much knowledge or expertise, managed to become a “go-to” for covering trans issues for a lot of big magazines. This was because, as trans women have pointed out, he seems to be singularly obsessed with trans issues.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
Singal would claim that having an interest and a beat is different from an “obsession” and would object to my characterization. But trans women who encountered him disagree it. Julia Serano outlines her experiences with his behavior on her blog from 2017: https://t.co/Yq1WgqlHUr
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
It’s totally *fine* to have an area of interest. Lots of journalists specialize in particular issues. But Singal’s focus seems to have started around 2016/2017, when he started speaking to trans women for articles and began working on stories on trans kids.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
At that time, a lot of trans women flagged creepy/boundary crossing behavior that felt, to them, dehumanizing. They quickly flagged this up through the whisper network of trans women – most women have had similar experiences where a man seems to see you as an object.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
But this kind of behavior is squishy and hard to pin down and if you’re disinclined to believe trans women about themselves, it is fairly easy for Singal and his followers to dismiss such things as hysteria and cancel culture. So let’s look at his actual work.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
One thing to note when reading a journalist’s work on the trans/GNC community is to see who they speak to, and what they highlight as important. In a 2016 article in The Cut, Singal told us that an important part of the “debate” around trans kids was missing: detransitioning.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
He insists that medical doctors are rushing ahead, quoting critics of transgender identity, and purposefully making trans affirming doctors sound extreme by suggesting they want to perform surgery on 12yos.
These are *classic* transphobic talking points.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
His most controversial piece, a cover story in The Atlantic about transgender kids, repeats this same focus on detransitioning, and speaks to almost no transgender people or people friendly to trans affirming health care.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
This is a red flag. When anti-trans people want to deny the depth and breadth of transgender identity, they argue that people decide they aren’t trans all the time. They highlight desistors, argue that their experience is actually the norm, and focus largely on their stories.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
Instead of talking about trans identity as valid and persistant and undeniable for people, transphobes focus on the very small percentage of desistors, and insist that their existence invalidates trans identities and is “not talked about” or “ignored” by establishment activists.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
This leads many gender critical feminists and journalists like Singal to argue for conversion therapy. You see bits and pieces of this in Singal’s work, though he never outright says “I support conversion therapy for transgender kids.” He doesn’t have to.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
All he has to do is lay out his claims that 80% of trans kids desist (a much criticized statistic: https://t.co/lVSx4L2fu7…), defend Kenneth Zucker, and quote desistors who believe conversion therapy would have helped them.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
Singal wrote a “story of a martyr” profile on Zucker for NY’s The Cut, in which he mentions the WPATH Standards of Care only in that Zucker was part of the committee that put them together, not that Zucker caused great controversy within WPATH himself.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
He also neglects to note that Zucker was protested at WPATH, was contemporaneously seen as out of step with the standards of care he helped craft, and that his therapeutic method was condemned by Gay and Lesbian associations as well as trans ones. Singal discounts trans voices.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
These are all red flags. He consistently fails to balance his articles about desistors with voices from trans adults in the field. He persistently leans into the idea that trans kids are being “mutiliated.” He focuses on young trans boys while creeping out adult trans women.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
In order to argue that Jesse Singal only has concern for the trans community, you have to ignore a multitude of actual, real trans people who have said that his focus on desistance in the name of trans kids is suspect. A big red flag.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
And I haven’t even gotten to his twitter. He is an expert at deflecting, positioning himself as the calm, rational guy who has science on his side, while simultaneously refusing to listen to trans voices.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
Here, for example, is him obfuscating and claiming that readers are seeing things that aren’t there. In fact, what’s not there is precisely the problem – there are no trans voices. There is no credibility or weight given to our own experiences. It’s all cis concern trolling. https://t.co/XmPz44dAD9
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
Growing up evangelical, you really learn how to read between the lines of what people say. “I don’t hate gay people! I love them like God loves them” sounds fine on the surface. What it means, however, is “I believe gay people are going to hell and that is righteous and just."
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
So when Jesse Singal puts out article after article about his CONCERN about the KIDS, it sends up *all the red flags*. “Concern” is the tool church ladies use to talk about things they really hate and find disgusting. It’s part and parcel of that same strategy, just sanitized.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
So, no, he’s not outright promoting conversion therapy for kids. He’s just writing cancel culture profiles of a guy who promotes it, and making his focus about trans kids who aren’t really trans which gives him the right to be *concerned* about The Tranzez taking over.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
It’s blatant, obvious, concern trolling, and he’s fantastic at deflecting any criticism by arguing that he didn’t really MEAN the subtext and narrative choices are out of his hands, really! He gaslights.
Fin.
— Mx. Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 14, 2021
Did you get through all that?
According to Singal, despite Anderson’s employment of a lot of words, they/them’s post amounts to nothing but falsehoods. Anderson is the one doing all the gaslighting.
Here's my response to the insane bullshit being thrown at me by pathological liars completely unfamiliar with my work but so morally broken they will make up lies about my writing, my offline behavior (including sex-pest rumors), about everything. These are awful human beings. https://t.co/HAQcmdtWdQ
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 15, 2021
Have a look:
1/I think I sound like a genuinely crazy or hopelessly resentful person when I try to explain how much people lie about me and my work on Twitter. So here's a free post demonstrating how much effort it takes to debunk ONE (1) insanely dishonest tweetstorm.https://t.co/FF7I4jCGx0
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 15, 2021
2/ The tweetstorm lives here (I am blocked, as are, I believe, all my followers because of some blockchain thing, but maybe not) and is by a writer named Dianne E. Anderson. I'll give a few concrete examples from the post.https://t.co/gumrk27VDK
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 15, 2021
3/ Anderson, referencing an article in which I quote six trans people and many clinicians, all of them trans-affirming (though some with qualms about certain details), claims I spoke "to almost no transgender people or people friendly to trans affirming health care" pic.twitter.com/ekABCUVFuU
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 15, 2021
4/ Anderson writes, "He persistently leans into the idea that trans kids are being 'mutiliated.' [sic]"
I've never said this one. Anywhere. This is a lie. pic.twitter.com/L0L6WptJNo
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 15, 2021
But, as Singal points out in his piece, lies like that are designed to overwhelm the target. Responding to and dismantling egregious and complex lies requires a great deal of effort. The longer those lies are out there, the more effort is required to refute them. At a certain point, the burden to clear one’s name becomes so overwhelming, it’s all but impossible to set the record straight.
He writes:
So, excluding the introductory scene-setting and rant, that was almost 2,000 words just to respond to most of the key falsehoods or misinterpretations or distortions in one viral tweetstorm about me that is a fraction of that length. Not even as bad as I thought it would be, but I feel like I’ve made my point about how Sisyphean this gets? I bet while I was working on this, a dozen even worse and more dishonest tweetstorms popped up. Am I going to do the same thing with those, just respond point by point? Of course not. I’d like to, at some point, do actual ‘journalism’ and ‘commentary’ rather than just angrily respond to lie after lie after lie. But because so many people simply retweet those lies without checking them, and because a lot of writers and journalists seem to have shockingly few qualms about telling and spreading lies themselves, here we are (again).
This is exhausting. My view — a surprisingly controversial one — is that maybe people should stop lying so much? Sorry, sorry. That’s ridiculous.
Based on the way things are going, it’s sadly safe to say that we’ll be here again and again and again.
Noah is himself lying! At no point today have I said a word about any legal threat.
Do you guys understand the level of fabrication we're dealing with here? Just lie after lie after lie. There is no accountability. How can you just straight-up lie like Noah is? pic.twitter.com/AJo1iwqKPu
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 13, 2021
This is also a lie.
They won't stop lying! There is nothing you can do about it and it sorta eats at you a little, even when it's coming from people with smaller platforms.
They lie and they lie and they lie and they lie and they lie. It's endless. Won't stop. pic.twitter.com/bALb31swMa
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 13, 2021
This is a staffer at the Center for American Progress, a major think tank. She wants you to knows that there are TONS of stories out there about me. They're really bad What stories? What did I do? Where are the screenshots? No one can say.
On what planet is this acceptable? pic.twitter.com/qBTKZWkra4
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 14, 2021
The woke mob believes it’s acceptable because according to them, their cause is a just cause. It’s the only cause worth having.
Almost exactly 2 years ago, I wrote about the time one of @jessesingal's accusers scrubbed her claims after they were disproved by Jesse's records.
This is a smear campaign. https://t.co/dWy6SyVEuz
— Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63) March 14, 2021
That’s all it ever was.
I'm honestly not even sure how you are able to deal with this. It's truly awful.
Hang in there man. Lots of us, well, trying to help but not sure how much good we're doing.
— Paul Heckman (@Paul_J_Heckman) March 13, 2021
It's all good — thank you! Much of this stems from anger that they don't have much control over my career at this point
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 13, 2021
Do yourselves a favor and read Jesse Singal’s full piece. It’s thorough, well argued, and a searing indictment of the dangers of woke journalism.
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Update:
Brianna Wu says she's got 'receipts' for '[her] own Jesse Singal stories' but doesn't feel like sharing them (good thing Singal has his own receipts) https://t.co/2h8YolPCSz
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) March 16, 2021
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