Journalist & Podcaster
I’m Jesse Singal, a Brooklyn-based journalist and podcaster. My webpage is embarrassingly out of date and needs to be rebuilt, so I’m using this as a temporary placeholder in the meantime. I’m a former senior editor and writer-at-large at New York Magazine, where I ran the Science of Us vertical. I’ve also written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, and a bunch of other outlets. My first book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, was published in April of 2021.
These days I divide my time between:
-this very newsletter, Singal-Minded. The main idea is to cover instances in which science and social-justice-advocacy get in fights, with an eye toward helping them get along better. But I write a little bit about everything. If you subscribe to the paid version, you get seven posts per calendar month, right into your inbox. I do free posts too, though less frequently. Here are a few free ones I think are pretty solid. Oh, and definitely this more recent one….
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Researchers Found Puberty Blockers And Hormones Didn’t Improve Trans Kids’ Mental Health At Their Clinic. Then They Published A Study Claiming The Opposite. (Updated)
A critique of Tordoff et al. (2022)
Singal-Minded – Jesse Singal – April 7 2022
An article called “Mental Health Outcomes in Transgender and Nonbinary Youths Receiving Gender-Affirming Care” was published in JAMA Network Open late in February. The authors, listed as Diana M. Tordoff, Jonathon W. Wanta, Arin Collin, Cesalie Stepney, David J. Inwards-Breland, and Kym Ahrens, are mostly based at the University of Washington–Seattle or Seattle Children’s Hospital.
In their study, the researchers examined a cohort of kids who came through Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic. They simply followed the kids over time as some of them went on puberty blockers and/or hormones, administering self-report surveys tracking their mental health. There were four waves of data collection: when they first arrived at the clinic, three months later, six months later, and 12 months later.
The study was propelled into the national discourse by a big PR push on the part of UW–Seattle. It was successful — Diana Tordoff discussed her and her colleagues’ findings on Science Friday, a very popular weekly public radio science show, not long after the study was published…
The University of Washington Is Putting Trans Kids At Risk By Distorting Suicide Research
This has been a shameful episode
Singal-Minded – Jesse Singal – Sept 2022
Anyone who has read my work knows that I am not a fan of harm inflation. I don’t like the tendency to treat more and more things as “harmful” or even “violent,” because I think this is usually a derailing tactic employed by individuals who don’t want to engage in conversation or argument.
But it’s obviously true that in some cases, the propagation of some types of information can be reasonably described as harmful or even potentially dangerous. Few of even the free-speechiest of free speech bros would deny this. And I genuinely think what the University of Washington School of Medicine is doing — has been doing, since April — could put trans kids at risk.
For those late to this: In April I published a very long post laying out the severe flaws in a study about puberty blockers and hormones University of Washington researchers published in JAMA Network Open, and how they exaggerated the results when describing them to the media and to UW’s own PR apparatus. The very short version is that the study has so many flaws that it does not provide us with any evidence whatsoever supporting the idea that kids who went on gender-affirming medicine (GAM) experienced beneficial outcomes relative to the kids who did not…