TWIBS: Leopards Eat Jessica Riedl’s Face

Jul 18

Despite her insistence that she doesn’t want to be an activist or even talk about “trans issues,” conservative economics journalist Jessica Riedl has found herself at the center of a harassment campaign for merely existing.

by Alyssa Steinsiek

This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek 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.

Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian politician who headed Norway’s government under Nazi occupation during World War II. He was a Nazi collaborator who was arrested and executed by firing squad as the Axis collapsed, and is remembered chiefly for the enduring legacy of his name, which has become a popular shorthand for a traitor who works with enemies of their people.

Jessica Riedl is a transgender woman and, according to one random podcast, “a fiscal conservative of unimpeachable credentials.” She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank that began to bend much of its energy towards anti-trans activism through its public policy magazine City Journal starting in the late 2010s. She has also worked as the chief economist to former Republican Senator Rob Portman, a financial advisor for the Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns, and a lead research fellow for the Heritage Foundation, another conservative think tank and hate group who are actively destroying our nation.

It’s undeniable that Riedl is a very credentialed woman. Unfortunately, she found out this month that the leopards don’t care whose side you’re on or how immaculate your resumé is.

Riedl came out in February of this year with a blog post that contains a lot of hyperlinks justifying the existence of transgender people, some vigorous defenses of her decades of work in the conservative politics sphere, and an almost pitiable attempt at labeling herself truly transgender by saying “medical scans and examinations” confirmed her “predominantly female brain biology,” a mostly fictitious and terribly misogynistic pop science concept.

On Tuesday, Riedl posted to her blog about a harassment campaign she’s endured since late June. She says that, after conservative magazine The Dispatch tweeted an announcement that she was now a “non-staff contributor” for their outlet, the online right-wing hate machine leaped into action to slander her as a “pervert” who “abandoned her family” and then publicly doxed her kids. Not the Bee, a conservative satire website spun off from conservative satire website The Babylon Bee for no discernible reason, shared pictures of Riedl’s children scraped from a private Facebook account, she says.

In response to this dayslong hate campaign, Riedl first posted a very long thread on Twitter trying to counter an angry bigoted mob with facts and reason. She failed to recognize that the leopards don’t want to be educated, even by somebody who pays for Twitter.

This obvious truth yet eludes Riedl, who spent much of her Tuesday blog post clapping back against conservative Christians and MAGA types who have taken to calling her a trans activist, a notion that she deeply despises. She describes herself as a “boring, suburban, 40-something economist and devoted spouse and parent who [happens] to be transgender,” who “[hates] having to address transgender issues.”

She desperately wants to frame herself as one of the good ones. Sure, she’s transgender, but she’s not all in your face about it! She came out and transitioned the right way, and she should be rewarded for that, unlike those of us who are troublesome and noisy about the campaign of oppression being waged against us by the federal government.

For Riedl, this is a singular rough patch to be gotten over as quickly as possible. At the end of her most recent blog post, she says she’ll be “at the grown-up table debating taxes, spending, debt, tariffs, inflation, and growth, publishing studies and op-eds, and working closely with Congressional Democrats and Republicans on bipartisan solutions to soaring debt.”

She won’t be taking this opportunity to learn anything, I’m afraid. She’s absolutely certain that she can continue to keep company of the worst kind and work in spaces where the majority of her colleagues quietly or openly express disdain for her very existence.

I don’t ever want to suggest that a transgender person deserves to be publicly hounded, or that her family deserves to be doxed. I take umbrage not with Riedl’s desire to live a life free of harassment, which all of us deserve, but with her belief that she’s somehow above the rest of us. I’ve seen countless trans women castigated for the crime of existing while trans, but it’s infuriating that Riedl thinks her conservative values and work history can protect her from the truth every Quisling must learn sooner or later:

The leopards are always going to eat your face.

Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.