In person, Jesse Singal is a surprise. The journalist, podcaster, and UnHerd contributor is in the spotlight — again — for his early critical stance on youth gender medicine, as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on Tennessee’s ban against transgender care for minors, and the New York Times drops “The Protocol,” a buzzy six-part podcast investigation on the evolution of the issue.
Singal has been a bête noire for transgender activists going back to 2018, when he wrote an essay for The Atlantic suggesting that the medical case for youth gender medicine is weak. Ever since, he has been ruthlessly, relentlessly attacked online. In quieter, more rational circles, his rigor have made him a hero, especially as the evidence mounts that he was right all along.
Democrats and progressives seeking a way to refocus on their party’s strengths — and to walk back the dogmatism that characterised the party during “peak woke” — might learn from him.
Singal and I met in Brooklyn in late April, shortly after the latest round of online drama between him and his critics. In person, he is physically large and unexpectedly striking. And he displays an equally unexpected millennial masculinity — half “my therapist thinks I have ADHD”, half patience and problem-solving. His slight haplessness and disorganisation with technology form a running joke on “Blocked and Reported”, the podcast focusing on internet controversies he co-hosts with fellow journalist Katie Herzog. Yet he’s solicitous about my recording and sound quality throughout the interview, perhaps from painful personal experience.
All successful journalists claim integrity and rigour, but few since the journalist-as-activist era began have had the nerve Singal has shown in going against the consensus on their own side. In part as a result, many centrist Democrats who have felt disillusioned with their party’s direction have swung Right. Through it all, Singal has stuck with his bog-standard liberal beliefs, despite the enormous outpouring of hatred against him.
At our meeting, however, he was determined to deflate any grandiose claims about himself or his work, often with the same mild, undramatic rebuttals he has offered before, and that his critics have found unsatisfying. His reporting on trans issues is “a small part of my overall career”, he says. And his unusual ability to be contrarian in his reporting was because “things just worked out in a very lucky way”.
Singal’s early résumé is as normie as it gets for successful male talking heads, including a youthful stand-up comedy phase. He is 41 and grew up in an affluent suburb of Boston. Like many of his generation, he was “politically activated” by the administration of George W. Bush. “I couldn’t believe anyone could be conservative,” he says. “We didn’t think it could get any worse.”
He spent two years at Brandeis and another two at the University of Michigan as an undergraduate, writing columns for his college papers in what he calls the “true-but-insufferable” category of “very basic liberal stuff”. It was only later, while working at The Boston Globe, that he had the distinguishing insight that he was writing ill-informed hot takes (many of us never learn) and that he instead wanted to better understand how the world works. He enrolled in a public-affairs master’s program at Princeton, which he describes as “aimed at do-gooders” and which stressed quantitative skills, teaching him to read and evaluate research papers.
Princeton set him on the path of debunking phoney science that has since made his career. His first job out of grad school, in 2014, was working under Adam Moss at New York, where he edited the magazine’s new social-sciences vertical. In his 2021 book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, he writes that when he started the job, “thanks to a fairly stats heavy master’s program… I knew some of the differences between good and bad research, and some of the ways quantitative claims can mislead.”
Even so, he was surprised by “the fire-hose of overhyped findings that would fill my e-mail inbox daily”. Many deeply penetrating, popular, and influential cultural beliefs, it turns out, are based on really questionable research. In fact, the most grabbed-onto claims might be the most specious, Singal argues, in that they’re convenient to believe, and offer us supposedly easy fixes for complex social ills.
He published the first big, in-depth feature on researcher findings that the implicit-bias test — notorious for proving that everyone is secretly racist — was “weak and unreliable, statistically speaking” and “barely measures anything of real-world import”, as he recounted in The Quick Fix. Many of his New York headlines from this era are surprisingly freewheeling, given the later evolution of the magazine, such as “Is a Professor Getting Railroaded for Questioning Social-Justice Dogma?” (2019) and “Business Insider Retracted a Bad Piece — and Set a Terrible Precedent” (2018).
Singal says he believes that today’s version of the magazine has “hollowed out some of the most interesting thinkers”. Nonetheless, he remained an establishment-friendly voice on the larger issues, and places in The Quick Fix read very 2021. The false implicit-bias information, for example, is important because it might be detrimental to “urgent tasks like police reform”. A quote from a song mentioning “crossdressers” gets the apologetic aside that “it was the 1950s”.
“Many deeply penetrating, popular, and influential cultural beliefs, it turns out, are based on really questionable research.”
None of this — neither the rigour nor the careful hewing to many liberal values — spared Singal from the outrage on his own side over trans issues. Singal is the most blocked user on Bluesky, the Lefty alternative to X (formerly Twitter). He is listed by the GLAAD Accountability Project as a purveyor of disinformation. And at least one trans activist website has compiled a truly sick biographical dossier on him that also targets his family. This and other websites accuse him, among other things, of “sea-lioning” — apparently the crime of harassing others by persisting in asking reasonable and polite questions.
This persecution has taken a new turn recently, with the re-election of President Trump, as the far Left has singled out dissenters on the centre Left for the disaster. In a recent thread on X, the Nation columnist David Klion wrote that Singal’s “many haters warned him for like five years that his work was going to empower the Right’s crackdown on trans people. We were all right and he’ll never erase what he did.” Ross Barkan, an UnHerd contributor, also declared himself a “hater” on the same thread for the same reason, and condemned Singal as having “like replacement level Dem opinions coupled with trans obsession”.
Singal tends to counter these charges with several assertions that can seem myopic to his critics. He’s vociferously anti-Trump, and always has been, he says. And he believes that reporting in elite coastal media outlets doesn’t actually influence public opinion in ways that can swing elections. “People don’t realise how small even the big outlets have gotten,” he told me. And “I’ve always been a sceptic of how much influence the media has.” In other words, youth gender medicine was going to be controversial regardless of what Jesse Singal had to say about it. This may be true but seems like a bit of a dodge. Critics like Barkan have called Singal “obsessed” with a “fringe” issue — yet his reporting implies that he thinks otherwise. So why not say so?
On April 30, Singal and Herzog dropped an episode of “Blocked and Reported” on the criticism from the Left, in which they semi-jokingly explored the topic of who was responsible for the so-called vibe shift to the Right and the perceived horrors of Trump II. Asked the duo: “The question is, is it literally our fault?” The charges against them, Singal and Herzog argued, are a case of the “slippery-slope argument.” Meaning: if you allow a whisper of dissent on a topic, before you know it a crazed dictator is making the whole thing illegal.
“What always gets me about these arguments,” Singal said, “is that it’s a very long, very slippery slope, with like spinny parts and tunnels and loop de loops…. We pointed out there’s weak evidence for youth gender medicine… OK, people are going to jump from that to ‘therefore we should elect Trump’?”
I am, I fear, a person of the slippery-slope mindset, because I can see the connection between debunked trans science and the election. But the more I try out my theories on Singal, the more persuasive his stubborn precision of thought becomes. It’s never flashy, and it’s often something he’s said before, or else a simple and hard-to-evade question: How does X thing you just said actually cause Y? Talking to him reminds me that Democrats were once very good projecting ownership of superior facts — they were the ones who’d followed the process, focused on the details, and had better research and policy on their side. A return to this kind of authority anywhere in government would be incredibly welcome, and Singal’s narrow focus on the granular truth suggests a direction for his party.
I’m not the only critic he’s disarmed. After the online spat with Barkan, the two men participated in a peacemaking podcast, at which Barkan walked back his online claims that Singal had “reaped what he sowed on anti-trans”, and ended up mostly agreeing with Singal on trans policy. “I think trans people are absolutely entitled to lives of safety and dignity,” Singal told me, “but I have some questions about whether the maximalist form of self-ID is tenable. An intelligent liberalism would understand this as an area where there are conflicting rights claims, depending on whether you view biological sex or gender identity as having primacy, and where those conflicting rights claims need to actually be resolved via discussion and compromise and democratic sense-making.”
His friend Mike Pesca, the journalist and host of the daily podcast “The Gist”, tells me via email that while Singal has been “more directionally right and specifically right on [the youth-gender-medicine] issue than anyone else covering it,” he is “still a pariah among the staffs at the major outlets.” In Pesca’s opinion, “the better editors know he’s good and are willing to work with him. The New York Times has published him, I doubt the New Yorker ever would, for fear of a riot. The Atlantic might. New York magazine probably won’t.”
Pesca also tells an anecdote about having coffee with Singal, and his friend telling him “this is the coffee shop where the barista went on Reddit, told the community I was here, and there was an earnest discussion about whether to poison me.” This, of course, represents the epistemic ditch that liberalism has fallen into — on one side of the counter, people like Singal, making their careful case for a balanced and reasonable system of human rights; on the other, those who have turned the rights into a religion and don’t give a shit what the science says.
It’s significant that Singal hasn’t broken through to the people who should be his allies — on the contrary, they want to poison him. And it suggests that human rights on their own can’t sustain serious politics without deeper claims and higher aspirations. Trump has offered his own incoherent version with American Greatness. Singal isn’t the type, but it almost seems he could do the same with a kind of reasoned excellence. “Make Our Systems Work Again” sure has a nice ring to it.
Unfathomably, Singal hasn’t stopped going to the coffee shop. Stubborn to be sure — or perhaps the science on barista-poisoning is weak.
