Jesse Singal Explains How GLAAD Used False Information To Put Him On SPLC-Style Hate List

Jesse Singal, who has been targeted by the transgender community after writing a fact-based cover story for The Atlantic on transitioning children, recently explained on his Substack how GLAAD used false information about to him to add him to a kind of hate list akin to that of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Rather than engage with Singal’s arguments, activists have insisted he is transphobic and called it a day. As Singal demonstrated, GLAAD appears to have taken this tactic when adding him to a list of people it claims “spread misinformation and harm LGBTQ people.”

GLAAD made three separate claims about Singal, which he disputed point by point in his Substack post. The first claim was that Singal “Wrote—without evidence—in a cover story for The Atlantic, that  “Trauma, particularly sexual trauma, can contribute to or exacerbate [gender] dysphoria in some patients.” As Singal explained, he has already addressed criticism of this line, noting that those who criticize him for it “are completely unfamiliar with the literature on gender dysphoria and rarely, if ever, talk to the youth gender clinicians I’ve spent dozens of hours interviewing and otherwise interacting with.”

One of the clinicians Singal quotes is Diane Ehrensaft, a hero in the LGBT community, who wrote in her 2011 book “Gender Born, Gender Made: Raising Healthy Gender-nonconforming Children” that children do, sometimes, develop gender dysphoria after trauma.

“There are also children who suddenly show up with a gender issue after a trauma and with no previous history of gender bending. Here, too, we may be seeing children who are expressing other troubles through gender. For example, the three-year-old who suddenly announces that he is a girl after losing his mother to sudden death may be in a desperate emotional search to reclaim his lost mother by becoming her, rather than in a journey toward discovering his true gender self,” Ehrensaft wrote in her book.

Singal noted that Ehrensaft made similar comments in her second book as well.

The second claim from GLAAD is that Singal “Admitted to wildly misinterpreting a study on trans kids that he relied on for the article. Singal had wrongly claimed that adolescent patients who did not return to a clinic for gender dysphoria had ‘desisted’ and no longer desired to change genders.”

Singal explained that this claim is based on a falsehood that has been circulating online for years. In 2018, Singal wrote a Medium post about misreading “the single biggest published study on childhood gender dysphoria desistance and persistence.” He later updated the title to say the study “offers stronger evidence for desistance than we thought” because people like those at GLAAD didn’t read the article and simply assumed he was admitting to including wrong information in his article. GLAAD, despite claiming that its list includes members’ own words, linked to a Daily Dot article that completely twisted Singal’s admission about misinterpreting the study. The Daily Dot insisted that he misinterpreted the study and therefore children do not desist from gender dysphoria, when in fact, Singal’s misreading of the study showed the exact opposite.

The final claim from GLAAD is that Singal “Parrots the notion of ‘social contagion’ [sic] the baseless theory that kids are somehow being ‘influenced by the gender-identity exploration they’re seeing online and perhaps at school or in other social settings, rather than experiencing gender dysphoria.’” By the time Singal posted his Substack piece, GLAAD had changed the claim to read: “Explains the unproven theory of ‘social contagion’ [sic] the unproven theory…”

Singal quoted his own Atlantic article, which included information from “a leading gender clinician, a young trans man, and a former trans boy” who all said the same thing: They have seen instances where some people seem to be claiming they are transgender simply for social reasons.

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