| Jesse Singal | |
| Education: | Princeton University (MA) |
| Occupation: | Journalist |
Jesse Singal is an American journalist. He has written for publications including New York magazine, The New York Times and The Atlantic. Singal also publishes a newsletter on Substack and hosts a podcast, Blocked and Reported, with journalist Katie Herzog.
Much of Singal's writing deals with the social sciences, and he previously edited New York magazine's behavioral-science vertical, "Science of Us". In 2021, he published a book, The Quick Fix, about the failings of popular psychology. Singal's writing on transgender issues has attracted controversy, particularly in his 2018 cover story for The Atlantic, "When Children Say They're Trans".
Singal's political orientation has often been described as liberal but "heterodox", though he has expressed an aversion to the latter term as a descriptor of his work.
Singal is one of three sons born to Sydney L. (née Altman) (1949–2021) and Bruce A. Singal.[1] Both of his parents were attorneys. He received a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is of Jewish descent[2] and lives in Brooklyn.
Singal has been described as one of the most prominent journalists working in the area of transgender issues, though has also been criticized as writing with an anti-transgender bias.
Singal wrote the cover story for the July/August 2018 issue of The Atlantic. Originally published under the title "When a Child Says She's Trans", the online version was later retitled "When Children Say They're Trans". The long-form piece includes profiles of several adolescents who identify or previously identified as transgender, interviews with youth gender clinicians, and reviews of some of the studies, statistics, and protocols related to youth transition. In a follow-up, The Atlantic published four letters from parents of transgender children reacting to Singal's article with a mixture of criticism and praise. Alexandria Neason, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, stated that despite being fact-checked, the story was considered transphobic by many readers, journalists and activists, and suggested that more diversity in editorial oversight could have averted the problem.
Among the controversial aspects of the article was the proportion of weight given to stories of adolescents who had desisted or detransitioned—that is, reverted to identifying with their genders assigned at birth, either before or after undergoing physical transition. In the article, Singal acknowledges that the stories of detransitioners are sometimes viewed with skepticism or suspicion by the transgender community, in part because they have been used by conservative media to further misleading narratives. Alex Barasch, writing in Slate, faulted the article for not including the story of "a single happy, well-adjusted trans teen" in its first 9,000 words. However, one of the reader response letters published by The Atlantic identified in the article two stories of happily transitioned teens, though the author referred to them as being "buried deep in the article". Barasch also criticized Singal for failing to include the stories of individuals who had detransitioned for reasons other than a realization that they were not trans, such as social stigma. Some transgender advocates questioned whether it was appropriate for a cisgender man like Singal, rather than a transgender writer, to write on the topic.
The Atlantic also published a series of responses to Singal's article. One was a personal story of de-transition after being physically assaulted and transitioning again when it was safer to do so.[3] Another focused on the fact that detransitioners make up a relatively small subset of those who access transition related care.[4]
In March 2021, Singal was listed on GLAAD's "Accountability Project", which the organization described as serving to document "anti-LGBTQ words and actions from politicians, commentators, organization leaders, journalists and other public figures". Among other things, GLAAD criticizes Singal for misinterpreting a study on desistance among transgender children and for promoting unsupported hypotheses that sexual trauma can cause gender dysphoria and that gender dysphoria can spread via social contagion. Singal responded on Substack, stating that his inclusion on the list was based on "previously disproven internet scuttlebutt".
Since March 2020, Singal has hosted the podcast Blocked and Reported with Katie Herzog, a journalist based in Washington state. The podcast's content focuses on internet culture war controversies. According to its website, "Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal scour the internet for its craziest, silliest, most sociopathic content, part of an obsessive and ill-conceived attempt to extract kernels of meaning and humanity from a landscape of endless raging dumpster fires. (And sometimes they talk about other stuff, too.)"[5] Herzog and Singal have both been described as politically liberal, "heterodox" and "woke-skeptic."[6] Herzog was also the subject of online ostracism (characterized in The New York Times as an attempted cancellation) as a result of a controversial 2017 article she wrote for Seattle weekly The Stranger about people who have undergone detransition.
Within three months of the podcast's debut, it had more than 1,400 financial supporters through Patreon, collectively paying more than $8,000 per month. As of July 2021, this had increased to approximately 5,600 patrons and $37,000 per month. In October 2021, the podcast's website hosting and patronage services were migrated to Substack, where it has over 46,000 subscribers as of February 2024.[7] [8]
Singal's debut book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, was published in April 2021. The book examines a number of popular psychology fads such as positive psychology, power posing, and the implicit-association test which, according to Singal, turned out to have weak empirical support or reproducibility, or which were exaggerated into stronger claims which are "scientifically questionable but sexy and exciting". The book examines the replication crisis in social sciences, and some of the underlying causes such as p-hacking, and suggests remedies for "how both individuals and institutions can do a better job of resisting" exaggerated pop psychology.
Writing for National Review, Michael M. Rosen called the book "engaging and persuasive", and wrote that it was based on "rigorous research and thoughtful interviews". An anonymous review in Publishers Weekly called the book "impassioned yet disappointing", complaining that its presentation of scientific details was too convoluted for lay readers.