TWIBS: Don’t Believe Jesse Singal’s Lies
Writing for The Economist last week, anti-trans journalist Jesse Singal has once again poorly interpreted a study that represents a huge win for trans healthcare as, somehow, troubling news.
Humor by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Last Thursday, widely hated professional transphobic journalist Jesse Singal was published in The Economist. Per his typical M.O., Singal misrepresented a study on the persistence of expressed gender identity among trans youth, interpreting an overwhelmingly successful treatment for gender dysphoria as a cautionary tale. From somebody like Singal, that isn’t particularly surprising; when you want gender-affirming care to be dangerous and unhelpful, it’s easy to squish just about any data into the shape you need, as long as you’re a practiced hand at writing disingenuously and have no scruples.
If you aren’t familiar with his “work,” Jesse Singal is a very bad journalist who does a very good job at dishonest anti-trans reporting, and is also a boring white guy who hosts a podcast. Like most of his peers, he has managed to fail his way to the top spectacularly. He got his big break in journalism by outing a trans person against their will in The Atlantic in an article that overstated the rate of detransition and understated the efficacy of medical transition.
Time, as you might have guessed, is a flat circle.
Jesse Singal was also involved in violating the privacy of a bunch of trans children with the help of lying dweeb Jamie Reed, is an obsessive X poster, and is the second most blocked man on Bluesky. I think you get the picture: Jesse Singal is a hapless loser who almost everybody hates, and he likes to tell weaselly lies about trans kids because he is himself a despicable fucking worm.
In his Economist article, Singal commits what I believe to be three cardinal sins. I won’t call them mistakes, because he’s been in the professional transphobia game long enough to have lost all benefit of the doubt when it comes to anti-trans BS. They are instead examples of Singal giving away the game, tacitly admitting his bias against trans people, if you know how to read the signs.
Come with me, fledgling investigator. I will teach you to interpret the dipshittery an anti-trans journalist leaves in his path, and thus, how to identify and track him.
First, Singal addresses the hard numbers to seem magnanimous, but he does so in a cleverly deceptive way. Discussing the trans participants of a study meant to determine how long their expressed gender identity persists, he admits, “The main finding is that many children who transitioned young retained stable gender identities over time. The average child in this study transitioned aged six and a half, and was last contacted by Dr Olson’s team seven years later. Fully 82% of them had been unwavering in their gender identity.”
Stunning news! An 82% success rate is absolutely fantastic. Any unbiased medical professional would tell you as much. Unfortunately, Singal pivots immediately towards downplaying this statistic: “The fact that nearly a fifth of children in the group did not maintain a stable new gender identity,” he says, “ought to give advocates of irreversible medical interventions pause.”
How can this be? He just told us that a strong majority of the children studied experienced absolutely no change in their gender identity across the totality of the study… but in the next breath, he insists this is worrisome? A four in five success rate, he wants us to believe, is not good enough?
You see what I’m getting at, I’m sure. What you don’t know (unless you went and read the study all on your own, in which case I’m so proud of you!) is that only a single participant in the study went from identifying as transgender to not transgender; the remaining 18% of participants who “did not maintain a stable new gender identity” went from identifying as strictly binary transgender (i.e., a trans man or a trans woman) to a gender diverse identity, e.g., nonbinary.
This is not at all uncommon among trans folks. For example, I came out as trans and began medically and socially transitioning in July of 2017 and considered myself simply “a transgender woman” until earlier this year, when I began dangerously experimenting with concepts outside the binary by shifting my accepted pronouns from she and her to she and they, and alerting my friends, “I guess I’m just sort of anything but a man?”
What we’re looking at when it comes to the results of this study is overwhelming evidence that the vast majority, nearly the totality of all transgender people do not desist from their transgender identity. Singal, because of his inherent bias and financial need to spin the data in his favor, must construe this as a win for his side.
Singal’s second sin is pulling quotes from blatantly biased subjects. He first quotes a Dr. Stephen Levine as saying, “The longer the observation, the greater the instability,” without a shred of evidence to back up that claim. He says Dr. Levine “has been working with and studying trans adults and young people for decades,” a self-evident appeal to authority fallacy when Dr. Levine himself provides no meaningful statistical data for Singal to share.
Singal’s more significant biased pull is Zhenya Abbruzzese, a co-founder of the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, an anti-trans think tank whose members are promulgators of anti-trans pseudo-science and even proponents of conversion therapy for transgender minors. I won’t bother reprinting a single word Abbruzzese has to say; anything that a member of SEGM says about trans people can be discarded as anti-trans schlock without a second thought.
Singal’s third and final sin is the whitewashing of reality to suit his needs. He says the results of this study ought to give advocates of GAC pause, and quoted Laura Edwards-Leeper (a psychologist who has long worked with trans patients, and in recent years publicly given in to transphobic talking points about us) as saying “[Social] transition at a young age should be done cautiously.”
The undeniable truth, however, is that we have always pursued the social and medical transition of children as cautiously as possible. From obscenely long wait lists for treatment in the UK (a problem spanning decades, now, and worsening year by year) to the soft intervention of puberty blockers and denial of hormone replacement therapy until mid to late teen years, trans kids have always been told to take it slow. In spite of their insistence to the contrary, no trans child has ever truly been rushed through transition. Lies from people like Singal, Edwards-Leeper, and detrans advocates like Chloe Cole can’t change that truth. If their claims were true, we would see the exact opposite results in this study: large desistance rates from kids who were pushed into transitioning without due caution.
Instead we see what we all already knew to be true: Trans kids are exactly who they say they are, and they should be encouraged to live their truth so they can become happy, healthy adults, whether or not Jesse Singal likes it.
Aly Gibbs (She/They), formerly Alyssa Steinsiek, is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
