John Horgan is a widely published science writer. In this article, he expresses his sorrow that Scientific American bowed to pressure to oust its outstanding Chief Editor Laura Helmuth. Right wingers love to attack Democrats for “censorship,” but it is Republicans who forced Helmuth’s ouster and Republicans who ban books.
He wrote:
Well before Scientific American’s editor vented her despair over the election, social injustice warriors were bashing the magazine for its political views. Critics include anti-woke bros Jordan Peterson, Charles “The Bell Curve” Murray, Pinker wannabe Michael Shermer, Dawkins wannabe Jerry Coyne and the right-leaning Wall Street Journal and City Journal.
On election night, Sci Am editor Laura Helmuth called Trump voters “racist and sexist” and “fucking fascists” on the social media platform BlueSky, a haven for Twitter/X refugees. Yeah, she lost her cool, but Helmuth’s labels apply to Trump if not to all who voted for him.
Although Helmuth apologized for her remarks, Elon Musk (perhaps miffed that Scientific American recently knocked him) and others called for her head. Yesterday Helmuth announced she was stepping down.
Trump spews insults and wins the election. Helmuth loses her job. Critics of cancel culture cheered Helmuth’s cancellation. I’m guessing we’ll see more of this sickening double standard in coming months and years.
I’m writing this column, first, to express my admiration for Helmuth. She is not only a fearless, intrepid editor, who is passionate about science (she has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience). She is also—and I’ve heard this from her colleagues and experienced it first-hand–a kind, considerate person. That’s a heroic feat in this mean-spirited age.
I’d also like to address the complaint that Helmuth’s approach to science was too political and partisan. Yes, under Helmuth, Scientific American has had a clear progressive outlook, ordinarily associated with the Democratic party. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden four years ago, shortly after Helmuth took over, and Kamala Harris this year.
Sci Am presented scientific analyses of and took stands on racism, reproductive rights, trans rights, climate change, gun violence and covid vaccines. Critics deplored the magazine’s “transformation into another progressive mouthpiece,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. Biologist Jerry Coyne says a science magazine should remain “neutral on issues of politics, morals, and ideology.”
What??!! As Coyne knows, science, historically, has never been “neutral.” Powerful groups on the right and left have employed science to promote their interests and propagate lethal ideologies, from eugenics to Marxism. Science journalists can either challenge abuses of science or look the other way.
I became a staff writer at Scientific American in 1986, when Jonathan Piel was editor. The magazine bashed the Reagan administration’s plan to build a space-based shield against nuclear weapons. I wrote articles linking behavioral genetics to eugenics and evolutionary psychology to social Darwinism. I got letters that began: “Dear Unscientific Unamerican.” My point: the magazine has never been “neutral,” it has always had a political edge.
Under Piel, as well as successors John Rennie, Mariette DiChristina and Helmuth, the magazine published plenty of articles with no political ramifications. But if you just stick to uncontroversial science, and you decline to take a position on topics like climate change or reproductive rights, you aren’t “neutral.” You are just looking the other way.
Robert Kennedy, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health, has linked vaccines to autism, and he has conjectured that the covid virus was engineered to attack Caucasians and African Americans and spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Trump says some Mexican immigrants have “bad genes” that make them killers, and as recently as 2022 he called climate change a “hoax.”
Meanwhile, Trump is vowing to cut federal aid to schools “pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.” And The Guardian reports that Trump is filing lawsuits against The New York Times and other media “that have been critical of him.”
Using your power to silence your opposition sounds pretty fascist to me. Will the next editor of Scientific American have the guts to challenge Trump and his minions? Will anyone?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Elon Musk complains and somebody gets the sack. These immigrants are indeed ruining our country. Immigrant singular, that is.
If a fascist wants to preach on campus, and receives pushback, he is a victim of “cancel culture.” If a democrat wants to push back, she is canceled. If this is not in plain focus for people today, they are either militantly stupid, or hiding their head in the sand of right wing propagandists.
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Roy: Both. CBK
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Diane and all: It’s the same problem that the Press and the Courts have. One can stay neutral in some sense by reporting the back and forth of the different arguments and by distinguishing a writer’s “opinion pieces” from “hard news.” And for scientists, just reporting their findings under the best scientific research protocols and methods available; and for the courts, following and judiciously applying the rule of law and sticking by their oaths to the Constitution.
The problem of “becoming political” occurs when one side “gets a big head” and realizes that the scientist’s truthful findings, or some writer’s opinion, or some judge’s ruling, don’t support, or actually conflict with that side’s political ideology or, in this case, a person (Trump)–and then takes steps not only to disagree in peaceful argumentation, but to attack the political foundations that support the existence of the press, the sciences, and the courts.
It actually could happen here, and it is.
THEN, what does one do? What Helmuth did, in this case, by criticizing Trump and Trumpism was to defend his long-term penchant for attacking, not specific arguments, but the foundations of whatever he deems disloyal TO HIM. When you attack the foundations, and you are successful, get ready to watch the whole house fall down, especially for “high-rise” cultures, e.g., the United States of America.
It’s a horrible vacuum we are in. He is pissing off half the country before he even takes office, while we wait for those who voted for him in trust to realize what they have done to all of us? And when it’s too late . . .?
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CORRECTION: Not “to defend,” but “to take issue with and to criticize.” Thus:
“What Helmuth did, in this case, by criticizing Trump and Trumpism was TO TAKE ISSUE WITH AND TO CRITICIZE Trump’s long-term penchant for attacking, not specific arguments, but the foundations of whatever he deems disloyal TO HIM.
IDEA: Maybe we could give the problem over to RFK. Jr. to find a curative vaccine for. CBK
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“Trump is about to get security clearance despite criminal conviction”
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-security-clearance/
I think trump & his MAGATS are way too stupid and short sighted to realize that giving this Russian agent access to top secret info again could take matters to the most logical conclusion. Like fulfilling Hitler’s dream of taking over the other countries in the world, including the US, and making them part of his 3rd Reich, as such, this could result in fulfilling Putin’s aspirations to incorporate former Soviet countries into Russia. And, with this supreme dolt in the WH, I don’t think it would be a stretch for Putin to flatter him into somehow turning us into the United States of Russia ultimately.
(Fear of things like this are why I peak at the news sometimes – tho usually vicariously, like on twitter et al.)
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BTW, due to this jerk’s allegiance to Putin and other despots, he could trigger WWIII. I’d suggest being on the lookout to see if he finally gets his tRump Moscow, and others in former Soviet countries, like Crimea etc., since we know how that self-aggrandizing idiot can be easily bought off –and Putin et al didn’t play that card yet.
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ECE: Who knows? My guess is that the deportation talk is a hugely destabilizing movement that is already reverberating throughout the country, while our enemies on the international scene are licking their lips.
Trump is apparently STILL talking about the Biden laptop and the letter from CIA people that there was nothing to it–and prosecuting anyone involved.
I also would not be surprised if all along Putin has had stuff on Trump that he doesn’t want to get out (like it still matters?) and keeping it under wraps is at least a part of the background motivations for what Trump does.
But speculation aside, the vision of Biden sitting there with Trump–with the fire behind–a democratic president giving power over to a known fascist–is beyond believable. What about Biden’s oath to protect the American people from the enemy within, and what about NATO and our commitments to them and to Ukraine? Hell, they are even going after college libraries (see recent Truthout (online magazine).
If something is not going on behind the scenes, especially with the apparent destabilizing that is coming, including in the military, and with Bannon’s breakdown of the administrative state, which will affect people’s life-order even further, we are entering a very dark time in history. We are in a watershed of the lies that have been bed-spreaded all over the country on a minute-by-minute basis.
Again, ECE, who knows? CBK
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CBK, Good points about what Putin has on him! Golden-showers tapes probably wouldn’t matter much now, but I think hard evidence of money laundering would –and there are a number of indicators of this, including Russian oligarchs who’ve bought his properties. That includes condos in places like tRump Tower, as well as the home in Palm Beach that Jeffery Epstein was planning to buy –when tRump undercut his purchase and bought it first (which ended their friendship). tRump never lived there. He sold it for a much higher price to a Russian oligarch, who then tore down the house. (More examples of him running for POTUS to avoid the law catching up with him, I think, and for which Putin would have the goods.)
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ECE: . . . the whole world moves to the tune of that idiot. CBK
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She should have had a sit down heart to heart with James Baldwin a long long time ago.
“So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper and God knows we have tried. We must do what we can do and fortify and save each other. We are not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt. And we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to contend even with the inexorable forces. In order to change our fate and the fate of our children and the condition of the world!
We know that a human is not a thing and is not to be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water belong to all humanity and not merely to industrialists. We know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else’s profit. We know that a Democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly and finally wicked mediocrity. Democracy is the liberty for all to aspire to the best that is within or that has ever been.”
Syonara Scientific American. Time to stop making it easy for them.
https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/itcitmbaldwin.html
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Sadly, it looks like today virtually anyone can be bought by “Agent Orange” & an invite to Moola Lago:
” ‘Bent the knee’: Morning Joe watchers outraged by hosts’ Mar-a-Lago meeting with Trump”
https://www.rawstory.com/morning-joe-mar-a-lago/
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Let’s see if Rachel Maddow holds up against the pressure to go along to get along:
https://x.com/KeithOlbermann/status/1858509648275366151/photo/1
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ECE: Maddow was superlative. CBK
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CBT, Good to know, Thanks! (I don’t have cable & I looked online but couldn’t find anything about this.)
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Sorry, CBK (not CBT) I injured a finger & can’t type now!
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ECE: “Come to heal” is another lovely totalitarian phrase I’ve heard from the Mouth of a Maga. CBK
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Morning Joe cost the Election not right wing media. As a never Trumper he echoed / amplified the right wing messages on crime and inflation starting in 2021.
That message was carried in the Nations Papers of Record the Grey Lady and WaPo . People may get their news from other sources but the echo chamber feeds on itself.
Economist Dean Baker explains it well.
https://cepr.net/did-bad-economic-reporting-doom-harris/
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Do you want every media outlet to be blatantly partisan left-wing? Yes you do. I don’t want to be force fed politics of any type in everything I read, especially in publications that are supposed to be technical in nature like Scientific American was many years ago.
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Though clearly you did not want an answer to your question, “Do you want every media outlet to be blatantly partisan left-wing?” since you answered it yourself, “Yes you do.” That’s also evident because Horgan already addressed the matter when he wrote, “science, historically, has never been “neutral.” Powerful groups on the right and left have employed science to promote their interests and propagate lethal ideologies, from eugenics to Marxism.”
Since such lethal ideologies helped to spawn the Holocaust, I have to agree with his conclusion: “Science journalists can either challenge abuses of science or look the other way.“
I think there is no one better to correct inaccurate notions and misguided ideological conclusions about science that can harm people than scientists themselves –and especially in scientific journals that are accessible to the people.
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Mark Meckling: Do you think it’s “blatantly partisan left-wing” politics to want to uphold the U. S. Constitution and the rule of law, and to recognize and fight against the fascism? There’s no choice about your note however: it’s written by someone who is either politically way off course or deliberately trolling here.
But with the media . . . even with them . . . the choice is not left or right, but at least attempting to tell the truth and not . . . not pushing the blatant DELIBERATE lies we can see any time you turn on Fox news. And we’ve been through all the “what abouts” we can stomach. You are coming from a different place than anyone here, leftist or not.
The disgust with their lies and misinformation (and your apparent ignorance and/or contempt about those who write here) is now like the smell of a rotten corpse–you can still smell it when you remove the corpse or turn off the TV. Does that make you happy? Is there an authentic thought in your head, or is it all just mush and junk? CBK
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Here’s another perspective from a journalist I respect.
How Scientific American‘s Departing Editor Helped Degrade Science
JESSE SINGAL | 11.18.2024 2:54 PM
Earlier this week, Laura Helmuth resigned as editor in chief of Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. “I’ve decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief,” she wrote on Bluesky. “I’m going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching), but for now I’d like to share a very small sample of the work I’ve been so proud to support (thread).”
Helmuth may in fact have been itching to spend more time bird watching—who wouldn’t be?—but it seems likely that her departure was precipitated by a bilious Bluesky rant she posted after Donald Trump was reelected.
In it, she accused her generation, Generation X, of being “full of f*cking fascists,” complained about how sexist and racist her home state of Indiana was, and so on.
“F*ck them to the moon and back,” she said of the dumb high school bullies supposedly celebrating Trump’s victory.
Whether or not Helmuth’s resignation was voluntary, it should go without saying that a few bad social media posts should not end someone’s job. If that were the whole story here—an otherwise well-performing editor was ousted over a few bad posts—this would arguably be a case of “cancel culture,” or whatever we’re calling it these days.
But Helmuth’s posts were symptoms of a much larger problem with her reign as editor. They accurately reflected the political agenda she brought with her when she came on as EiC at SciAm—a political agenda that has turned the once-respected magazine into a frequent laughingstock.
Sometimes, yes, SciAm still acts like the leading popular science magazine it used to be—a magazine, I should add, that I received in print form every month during my childhood.
But increasingly, during Helmuth’s tenure, SciAm seemed a bit more like a marketing firm dedicated to churning out borderline-unreadable press releases for the day’s social justice cause du jour. In the process, SciAm played a small but important role in the self-immolation of scientific authority—a terrible event whose fallout we’ll be living with for a long time.
When Scientific American was bad under Helmuth, it was really bad. For example, did you know that “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy“? Or that the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, SciAmpublished a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented “his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.” That author also explained that “the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.” But the normal distribution doesn’t make any such value judgments, and only someone lacking in basic education about stats—someone who definitely shouldn’t be writing about the subject for a top magazine—could make such a claim.
Some of the magazine’s Helmuth-era output made the posthumous drive-by against Wilson look Pulitzer-worthy by comparison. Perhaps the most infamous entry in this oeuvre came in September 2021: “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” That article sternly informed readers that an acronym many of them had likely never heard of in the first place—JEDI, standing for “justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion”—ought to be avoided on social justice grounds. You see, in the Star Wars franchise, the Jedi “are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.)”
cont.
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Part II, cont.
You probably think I’m trolling or being trolled. There’s no way that actual sentence got published in Scientific American, right? No, it’s very real.
But what really caught my eye was SciAm‘s coverage of the youth gender medicine debate. This is one of the few scientific subjects on which I’ve established a modicum of expertise: I’ve written articles about it for major outlets like The Atlantic and The Economist, and am working on a book. I found SciAm‘s coverage to not just be stupid (JEDI) or insulting or uncharitable (the Wilson story), but actually a little bit dangerous.
I know, I know: We’re not supposed to call mere words “dangerous.” Hear me out: The evidence for youth gender medicine—blockers, hormones, and (sometimes) surgery for minors to treat their gender dysphoria—is scant. We really don’t know which treatments help which kids in which situations. Every major government or government-backed effort to look into this question, most recently the U.K.’s Cass Review, has come to this conclusion. The supposed leading professional organization, WPATH, is mired in scandal, with evidence from court cases strongly suggesting it has suppressed negative research results. One of the leading clinicians and researchers in the country admitted to the New York Times that she and her team suppressed negative research results (not the first time, I don’t think).
Rather than cover these important developments, Scientific American has hermetically sealed itself and its readers inside a comforting, delusional cocoon in which we knowyouth gender medicine works, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and only bigots and ignoramuses suggest otherwise. Over and over, SciAm simply took what certain activist groups were saying about these treatments and repeated it, basically verbatim, effectively laundering medical misinformation and providing it with the imprimatur of a highly regarded science magazine.
This was a chronic problem at Scientific American. One article, to which I wrote a rebuttal for my newsletter, contained countless errors and misinterpretations: Most importantly, it falsely claimed that there is solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates adolescent suicidality, when we absolutely do not know that to any degree of certainty. As far as I can tell, every article SciAm published on this subject during Helmuth’s tenure followed the exact same playbook of reciting activist claims — often long after they’d been debunked.
Some of these articles might have done serious damage to the public’s understanding of this issue. For example, SciAm ran a response to the Cass Review written by a pair of writers who were somehow able to issue a searing critique of the review despite having clearly never read it. They wrote that the document’s problems “help explain why the Cass recommendations differ from previous academic reviews and expert guidance from major medical organisations such as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the American Academy of Pediatrics.” But part of the Cass Review’s remit was to evaluate the strength of these exact pieces of expert guidance—the Cass Review explicitly explains why the WPATH and AAP guidelines are weak and untrustworthy. Anyone who read the document would have understood that. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Cass Review argued that the WPATH and AAP guidelines were shoddily constructed, and SciAm published a response accusing the Cass Review of differing from the WPATH and AAP guidelines. That’s the sort of error that can only occur in the context of lax editorial standards married to ideological certitude.
People trust Scientific American. It’s not out of the question that parents of trans or gender-questioning kids, who are (unfortunately) more likely to get their information on this subject from media outlets than from carefully conducted efforts like the Cass Review, will ‘learn’ from SciAm that blockers and hormones are safe, effective, and likely to reduce suicidality—even as the jury is still out on all these claims. This false belief could prove disastrous for obvious reasons, and yet SciAm has had no qualms about spreading what can only be described as medical misinformation on this subject—something it decries when the sources and claims in question are right-coded.
To be sure, Scientific American was not alone in its abysmal coverage of the youth gender medicine debate. The popular science show Science Vs, which bills itself as a swashbuckling effort to cut through politics and get to the truth of scientific controversy, repeatedly debased itself on this subject, and CNN took such a hard turn toward propaganda on gender medicine that it recycled the same false passage about the supposedly strong evidence base for youth gender medicine in dozens of its articles.
The crisis of expert authority has many causes. But one of them is experts mortgaging their own credibility. When magazines like Scientific American are run by ideologues like Helmuth, producing biased dreck as a result, it only makes it more difficult to defend the institution of science itself from relentless attack. This lack of trust absolutely contributes to the sorts of dunderheaded, reactionary populism presently threatening America and much of Europe.
If experts aren’t to be trusted, charlatans and cranks will step into the vacuum. Tomangle a line from Archer, “Do you want a world where RFK Jr. is the head of HHS? That’s how you get a world where RFK Jr. is appointed head of HHS.”
Going forward, Scientific American can right the ship by simply hiring an editor who cares more about science than progressive political goals. That doesn’t mean the editor needs to be apolitical or that there’s no role for SciAm to chime in on social justice issues in an informed manner, with the requisite level of humility and caution. It simply means that Scientific American needs to get back to its roots—explaining the universe’s wonders to its readers, not lecturing them about how society should be ordered or distorting politically inconvenient findings.
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Maybe it would help the public if Scientific American had a prominent caveat emptor in each edition. Something like: Science is always subject to revision! Or Science lives in light! (though something similar didn’t work out so well for people reading WaPo recently.) But the point is to remind people that scientists are always studying the world using scientific methods, and that results in learning new things that can add to or alter what was previously known.
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P.S. I severely injured the tip of my index finger today and had to craft a new kind of bandage tonight to be able to type. It took a number of tries with different kinds and shapes of existing bandaids –and using just one hand. Ultimately, I think I was probably able to do it successfully because I was trained as a scientist myself. (It’s not marketable though because it looks too damn weird.)
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ECE: Always looking for metaphors for injuries, but I don’t know you, so we can go back to Freud’s “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” I remember when I broke my arm and learned the real meaning of “contortion.”
I hope you get better soon. CBK
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CBK, Thanks so much! I know what you mean about contortion. My bandage is purposely large enough to remind me to remember to not use my finger, for typing or anything else, while also having a big pocket at the end to supply a topical antibiotic to my injury.
And a psychology metaphor works for me, since my doctorate is in Educational Psychology!
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Just a heads up that a writer mentioned above, Jesse Singal, writes for Libertarian Reason Magazine and he has made unsupported conclusions based on his mischaracterizing a few studies to present himself as the protector of trans children who knows much better than their parents do about how they should be treated.
Singal’s obsession with the treatment of trans minors is odd, given how very few minors have medical intervention when compared to the multiple times as many minors being given all sorts of therapeutic drugs for ADHD and depression and anxiety that Singal somehow does not worry about. I guess it is far more fashionable (and no doubt profitable) to be the anti-trans writer just “protecting the children”. Singal does not trust parents of trans minors – why? Does he also impose his own judgement over parents of kids with anxiety?
Singal clearly has a double standard – which is to side with the right wing critiques of medicine and science. When the far right was claiming that there was tons of evidence that covid came from a lab-leak, Singal one of those folks attacking the media for not amplifying the right wing view that it was a lab leak and the fact that there was a complete absence of any credible evidence that covid came from a lab leak was of absolutely no importance to him – he still demanded the media give more attention to that evidence-free theory. Why? Because the right wing was pushing it?
Singal’s obsession with attacking Scientific American seems to be based in a belief that science is a “both sides equal” issue instead of evidence-based. There are of course always good critiques to be made of science, but like Emily Oster, Singal makes all kinds of errors by exaggerating their “evidence”. Errors that they only acknowledge a long time later.
Singal’s obsession with trans minors medical treatment is not because this is a crisis – it is because he apparently has never met a trans minor who is happy. Or a trans young adult who still regrets they didn’t start the transition process before puberty. They exist. The hate some people like Singal have for those minors and their parents is beyond my understanding. Singal isn’t protecting kids — if he was he would be far less screeching and would be wary of exaggerating evidence.
I always wonder why Singal’s writing never talks to parents who do a lot of research and know the pros and cons of giving puberty blockers or hormones to trans minors (which is still quite rare) and STILL decide that it is a good thing. I am quite positive Singal would learn that they are just like parents who give their kids ADHD or anxiety medications despite knowing the risks. Or give growth hormones to their extremely short children. Or puberty blockers for kids with early onset puberty. Most trans minors do not even get any medical intervention, but Singal’s odd “I read the studies” misinformation makes him a suspect critic of Scientific American’s editor.
Among the criticism of Singal, the self-annointed “protector” of trans youths:
“Singal’s story was criticized for frontloading the rarer cases: “as the piece goes on—notably without a single happy, well-adjusted trans teen among its host of central characters for the first 9,000-plus words—it becomes apparent that certain voices and fears are privileged over others.” The Atlantic published follow-up letters from parents: “I write to you as a mother of a transgender son: This piece penned by you is highly problematic. It muddies the water for parents navigating this path of raising a trans child, and is damaging to our trans youth.” The Atlantic published additional articles to explain the concern for the transgender community, including one headlined: “The Loaded Language Shaping the Trans Conversation: To focus on “desisters”—people who experience gender dysphoria and then ultimately decide not to transition—is to focus on the rarest of cases, and to ignore the vastly more common experience of trans teens: that of being second-guessed.” Analysis from a sociologist at Columbia University explains: “The frames journalists use to discuss these controversial issues are themselves political and moral decisions, and ones of great consequence. They set the terms by which the public understands trans youth… a critical point is that these are rare cases: In my own conversations, even the most conservative clinicians told me they rarely, if ever, see someone make a full social and medical transition and then experience serious regret.” Singal’s story was cited in a legal brief filed by seven state attorneys general in a federal lawsuit seeking to roll back a trans person’s access to healthcare.”
Oh yes, Singal makes the moral and political decision to falsely claim that “evidence” supports his anti-trans view that just happens to support anti-trans right wing legislation. Like Emily Oster, Singal irresponsibly claims there is evidence to support exactly what the right wing wants, but then claims to be powerless that the right wing is misusing their exaggerated data when it is shown to be exaggerated!
https://glaad.org/gap/jesse-singal/
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Salon Magazine, “Sacred Bodies Transitioning is an effective medical treatment that improves millions of lives. Why are we so fixated on the few who regret it?” By Alex Barasch, June 20, 2018
“The problems with Jesse Singal’s cover story for the Atlantic, “When Children Say They’re Trans,” have a way of creeping up on you. It purports to be a nuanced portrayal of a thorny issue: parents who want to do right by their trans and gender nonconforming kids, navigating a system and a society not necessarily optimized for that. But as the piece goes on—notably without a single happy, well-adjusted trans teen among its host of central characters for the first 9,000-plus words—it becomes apparent that certain voices and fears are privileged over others. This, unfortunately, is a trend that can be seen throughout Singal’s history of biased reporting on trans lives.
One precursor to this cover story is particularly revealing: his defense of Kenneth Zucker, a disgraced advocate of anti-trans “reparative” therapy, as the victim of an activist-driven, unscientific crusade against his “politically incorrect” practices. In the Atlantic piece, Singal notes that reparative therapy “has harmed and humiliated trans and gender-nonconforming children” and “is now viewed as unethical.” But Zucker is never mentioned by name, nor does Singal admit, here or elsewhere, that he’s been wrong about the perceived “excesses” of trans activism before. His other long-standing fixation—one that manifests more overtly in the current cover story—is with those who “detransition”: by his definition, “people who undergo social or physical transitions and later reverse them.”
……..
This is not the first time he has disregarded inconvenient accounts from trans people—and in the absence of these voices, he is responding to a strawman. Trans people and trans advocates don’t argue that desistance—per Singal again, instances in which an individual ceases to experience dysphoria “without having fully transitioned socially or physically”—is itself a “myth,” though they’ve written compellingly on the shoddiness of some of the underlying science. It’s not in our interest or anyone else’s for a child to be wrongly identified as trans, but it’s just as painful for a trans child to be misidentified as cis or denied access to care in the hopes that they might grow out of it—which, as others have noted, makes it all the more troubling that well-meaning parents who Google “my kid says she’s trans” might find Singal’s article first.
Within the piece, Singal seems to use the parents of detransitioners as a proxy for his own anxieties about the “ruin” of cis bodies—and fails to push back against the misconceptions that inform their concerns. The first parents featured express the worry that if they “had heeded the information they found online, [their daughter] Claire would have started a physical transition and regretted it later.” The reality is that a twelve-year-old with no history of dysphoria would not have been administered testosterone—official (though non-binding) guidelines call for “an expert multidisciplinary team of medical and MHPs” to oversee such treatment in anyone under 16—and certainly wouldn’t have been eligible for surgery. At most, she would have been put on blockers: a kind of “pause button” for puberty, which can resume unimpeded if the child is not, in fact, trans.
Later, Singal writes that the pair were told “the most important thing they could do was affirm their daughter, which Heather and Mike interpreted as meaning they should agree with her declarations that she was transgender”—but this interpretation, too, is wrong. Clinically, all that “gender-affirmative care” entails is giving children the space to explore their identities and listening when they speak about their experiences. If they identify persistently, consistently, and insistently with a gender that does not match the sex they were assigned at birth, that exploration might include social transition—changing the pronouns used to refer to them, and perhaps their name, in order to see whether that feels right. Sex hormones and surgery do not enter the picture until years down the line, and as a paper published in May put it succinctly, “There is no evidence that affirmative support traps cisgender youth in a transgender identity. Affirmative care does not equate to transition.” But in his tacit praise of the parents who waited and his decision to foreground misguided transitions, Singal reinforces the notion that simply allowing children to entertain the possibility puts them on an inexorable path to transness, expedited and abetted by this model of care.
Implicit in Singal’s body of work on trans children is the sense that he is telling a difficult but essential truth that others are unwilling to acknowledge, but neither the media landscape (which is littered with pieces exactly like this one, down to the same subjects) nor the medical one reflects this. For legacy publications with enormous resources and readerships to focus endlessly on the handful who regretted their transition—and simultaneously to claim we are in an unprecedented era of trans positivity that’s sweeping up misguided children—is disingenuous at best. It’s an idea that has more than a whiff of the intellectual dark web mentality about it: No one is willing to engage with our politically inconvenient opinions … except the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, major TV networks, and prestigious publishing imprints. And this framing seems to willfully ignore both the social context and human cost.
There are many unanswered questions and concerns about trans healthcare that do go largely unacknowledged in mainstream media. And there is a real and complicated story to be told about the hyper-medicalization of dysphoria—the phenomenon that prevents some trans people from accessing care while leading others to be misidentified as such. That this was instead the story the Atlantic chose to tell, and that it was entrusted to a man whose own neuroses leave him so unqualified to tell it, is a loss for cis and trans people alike.”
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Remember, this is the same Jesse Singal who chided the media for not giving more credibility to the right wing theory about covid being from a lab leak DESPITE THERE BEING NO CREDIBLE EVIDENCE for this favorite theory of Republicans.
Singal, like Oster, never acknowledges his mistakes except obliquely, long after all the damage is done.
It is not surprising that Singal claims no responsibility for the damage his articles do.
Singal does what people who write articles in the right wing press hyping some bad outcome from someone who had a covid vaccine.
It’s not that it isn’t “true” that people have bad outcomes, but when you focus only on the bad outcomes and ignore all the good outcomes, you have an anti-vax or anti-trans agenda that is the opposite of informing people and the opposite of science.
There has yet to be any credible evidence that Covid is from a lab leak. But when stories are written hyping the possibility in a way that falsely presents that as being a near-certainty, then that is intentional misinformation.
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Jesse Singal is one of the most smeared writers I’m aware of, spearheaded by a hysterical army of activists on Twitter and fellow travelers in journalism. Anyone who actually reads Jesse’s work and listens to his podcast knows he is extremely careful, even-handed, and forthright about what is known and unknown. He acknowledges the gender dysphoria is a real thing and has done an amazing job reporting on the rot inside the trans medicine industry in the U.S. The misinformation about puberty blockers in particular is extremely dangerous and is doing real harm to thousands of children, and it continues to be repeated uncritically, sanctimoniously, and shamefully by people like Jon Oliver and Jon Stewart for worldwide audiences.
As a consequence, he—along with people like Helen Lewis and Ben Ryan—is the subject of nonstop ad hominem attacks and outright lies. “He writes for a libertarian magazine!” is par for the course.
Rather than rely on second-hand attacks, I encourage people to read Jesse’s work themselves. Here is the Substack article he referenced in the story I passed in below. https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/a-critique-of-scientific-americans
I’m not someone who believes the arc of history always bends toward justice. But it gladdens me very much that the gender affirming care model is crumbling worldwide and will continue to fall apart in the U.S. In ten years or less, everyone will claim they agreed all along with Singal and other critics of gender affirming care.
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I should have added that the claim that Singal is “anti-trans” or even the suggestion that he supports Republican efforts to legislatively block minors from getting puberty blockers is blatantly false, and either ignorant or an outright lie.
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FLERP,
I don’t know who is right or wrong on the trans issue. My view is the same as on abortion: the decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not politicians. Frankly, it’s none of my business or yours or Singal.
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I agree, and I have no interest in making medical decisions for anyone else. Jesse Singal isn’t trying to make decisions for anyone, either. He’s a reporter and one of the things he covers is transgender medical care. So it absolutely is his business to make sure that people aren’t lying or peddling misinformation about what the science says about this stuff. And it should be all of our business to encourage that.
The idea that Singal is trying to stop parents from making medical decisions in consultation with doctors is either an ignorant statement or a lie that would be easily debunked by just reading any of his work or listening to his podcast.
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I understand that Singal is reporting and trying to correct errors. But….The Republicans in the states have passed laws banning transgender medical care. Congress might do the same.
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That’s true but that’s no reason for people to lie about Singal. To be clear, I’m not saying you’re the one doing that.
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Here is an except of the Substack link I pasted above:
“For the last almost-decade, one of my main areas of focus has been on bad and overhyped popular science and its impact on society, so that’s the lens through which I write about youth transition (if Donald Trump publishes a p-hacked study on social priming, I promise I will be all over it). There are a lot of journalists better equipped than I am to explain what is going on at the state level, and I’m content to let them do their thing. Again, this has been a pretty consistent policy for me: I also haven’t written a lot about state-level attempts to ban or severely restrict abortion, except here, when the aforementioned intersection occurred.
That said, I did write about the youth gender medicine bans before they got national attention: on May 4, 2020, before the attempted bans ramped up and before most major outlets had caught on that this was going to be a major story, I published “Why The Hard Age Caps On Youth Gender Transition Being Proposed By Conservatives Are A Very Bad Idea.” So it’s not as though my own views on this are unclear.
But I think there are multiple bad things going on at the moment. One of them, surely, is the campaign to restrict and ban these treatments. It’s a terrible way of dealing with the genuine controversy surrounding them. It’s had exactly the effect anyone could have anticipated: there’s been panic (justifiably so, in many cases), a circling of the wagons, and it has become only more difficult to have any sort of careful national conversation about these treatments, free of the increasingly deranging influence of our partisan politics.
Lackluster media coverage of this subject precedes these Republican efforts, though. This has been frustrating me for years. Journalists and pundits are utterly failing to disseminate accurate information about very serious treatments, in some cases straightforwardly misleading their audiences — among them parents trying to make medical decisions for kids who are too young to consent on their own — about vital questions involving mental health and suicide. I believe that this will go down as a major journalistic blunder that will be looked back upon with embarrassment and regret.
So I remain committed to calling out this sort of coverage when I come across it. I don’t see a lot of other journalists doing that. And I’m most likely to call it out when it emanates from respected sources of science news, like Science Vs or Science-Based Medicine. That’s why I’m spending this much time criticizing a single article in Scientific American. These outlets have to do better.”
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Jesse Singal is like Emily Oster. They both claim there is very strong credible evidence for supporting the right wing view and their proclamations of certainty is cited when politicians pass terrible and harmful far right policies. And they remain silent whenever their work is used to pass such laws, which tells you that their complicity is intentional.
They both have a history of making serious errors and not admitting it. Even when their serious errors cause bad public policy that harms people.
They both have a history of insulting and attacking their critics instead of actually defending their misuse of “evidence”.
It’s not surprising their defenders use words like “hysterical” when there was nothing at all “hysterical” in that Salon article that simply asked for balanced reporting that presented reality, not hyped rare cases.
What is “hysterical” about this?
“There are many unanswered questions and concerns about trans healthcare that do go largely unacknowledged in mainstream media. And there is a real and complicated story to be told about the hyper-medicalization of dysphoria—the phenomenon that prevents some trans people from accessing care while leading others to be misidentified as such. That this was instead the story the Atlantic chose to tell, and that it was entrusted to a man whose own neuroses leave him so unqualified to tell it, is a loss for cis and trans people alike.”
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Diane, I would say that Jesse Singal’s actions speak much louder than his words. All the Republican politicians telling folks that Haitian immigrants are kidnapping and eating their neighbors’ pets claim not to be at all racist just because they are warning people about dangerous Haitian immigrants who kidnap and eat pets.
Jesse Singal’s extreme anti-trans biases were evident when he presented Kenneth Zucker – famous for his “reparative” therapy for trans people – into a victim and wrote stories to demonize and attack the people he really hated – those who “unfairly” criticized Kenneth Zucker.
When Singal was writing articles defending Zucker, Singal certainly didn’t care about science or evidence, since Zucker’s reparative theory had none to support it. Singal seemed to just be very angry that the people he didn’t like – people who were too supportive of trans folks – were being too mean to Zucker.
Singal has never acknowledged his error. As the Salon story points out, Singal now refers vaguely to now discredited reparative therapy as unethical, since he can no longer get any career mileage for defending Zucker. “But Zucker is never mentioned by name, nor does Singal admit, here or elsewhere, that he’s been wrong about the perceived “excesses” of trans activism before.”
And that nails what Singal is really all about. He perceives that the huge crisis is the “excesses” of trans activism and all of his stories are about that.
But it isn’t a crisis, just like the trans bathrooms issue wasn’t a crisis in 2016.
It is a right wing MANUFACTURED crisis that Singal is happy to help hype, and when his articles are cited to pass harmful laws, Singal remains silent and complicit.
Singal obviously didn’t care about evidence-supported practices when he so rabidly defended Zucker and attacked Zucker’s critics. And Singal has little evidence to support what he helps the right wing hype as a huge crisis. But he professes to bear no responsibility for hyping exactly what the right wing wants hyped.
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