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Comment by catpolice | Hacker News Reader

This is a weird policy for reddit. But also, Jesse Singal (and Graham Linehan, linked elsewhere in this thread) are infamous in the trans community for spreading hateful disinformation and encouraging harassment brigades and then complaining about "cancel culture" whenever anyone criticizes them or they say something hateful enough to actually get banned from a platform.

We wary of "free speech advocates" who have an axe to grind against a specific set of marginalized people and view any criticism they get or moderation techniques employed against them as authoritarian.

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I definitely agree about Graham Linehan based on what I saw in that article but not at all about Jesse Singal and he isn't even mentioning they are trans.

Singal isn't anti-trans but due to researching and writing about topics like de-transitioning, a lot of people tried to paint him as one, perhaps because actual anti-trans people talk about de-transitioning, too.

I won't put Singal in the same camp as Linehan, who is virulently transphobic. But in the Twitter thread you posted there are people misgendering Aimee, bemoaning Reddit's takedown of r/gendercritical and posting multiple Graham Linehan articles. So clearly, anti-trans folks see some common ground as well.

If you judge people by what others post under their tweets I'd advise you not to go to Elon Musk's or any other sufficiently famous person's tweets.

I'm not judging him for that. I'm just saying that it's not only "pro-trans" people who seem to have that impression of him.

Not sure I follow your logic here.

The statement "Singal isn't anti-trans but… a lot of people tried to paint him as one" implies that the people who believe Singal is transphobic tend to be "pro-trans", or at least have some sort of agenda. I'm simply noting that a lot of anti-trans people seem to share that belief about his motivations.

That in and of itself doesn't mean he's transphobic, of course. But it does undercut the idea that one side is smearing him.

Right, but you seem to be implying that because two disparate groups believe the same thing it lends credence to the idea, but have you considered that maybe Group A believes what they believe due to the existence/behavior of Group B, not because of some external facts they've both found?

In other words, maybe pro-trans people assume Singal is anti-trans because there are a bunch of anti-trans reply-guys in his tweets, without actually determining if Singal himself is or not.

Or... maybe the anti-trans people are only gravitating towards Singal in the first place because the pro-trans people are calling him anti-trans (without it being true), so the anti-trans people assume he is/will be a good banner-man.

In both scenarios, there is only one prime motivator, and it is not that Singal is actually anti-trans. Might Jesse Singal be anti-trans/transphobic? Of course. Does the likelihood increase just because two disparate groups see him that way? Not really. The only thing that matters is what the man in question has actually said/done, not how people think of him.

Sure, pattern matching like that is a shortcut that inevitably yields some false positives. I think the amount of credence it lends is basically an inverse of how much time you want to spend on the issue. If you want to engage deeply, you do your own research; otherwise, you end up taking the word of people whom you already trust.

I don't mean to imply that it lends credence beyond that. I just think it's unfair to characterize this as if only one side were doing the painting, when multiple groups of people seem to have reached similar conclusions.

Singal repeatedly denies he is transphobic while also constantly writing articles that align with the anti-trans and gender critical communities, and also ignoring all criticism from actual trans people, even those he specifically sought information from. Weird coincidence if he's not transphobic!

It's a pattern he's done now for multiple years. Just an utter shithead of a bad journalist. https://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2017/12/my-jesse-singal-sto...

Can you point to some proof about what you said re: Jesse Singal? I feel like you've read some tweets and made up your mind instead of actually researching someone you've just lied about on a public forum.

> I feel like you've read some tweets and made up your mind instead of actually researching someone you've just lied about on a public forum

This is par for the course in trans circles in my experience (as someone who's queer).

There's a tendency in a least some segment of the community to be extremely bigoted, casting anyone that says something that doesn't conform to their ideology as "harmful" without ever carrying the burden of producing evidence or explanation (of course even broaching this is met with "it's not my job to explain why what you said is wrong" or "I'm so tired", etc.).

It's weirdly religious in terms of dynamics of the community.

Here is one good example of many:

https://mobile.twitter.com/caitlinmoriah/status/137415749883...

Having a platform covering trans issues, and being insufficiently hostile to transphobia, is transphobic.

As an outsider who doesn't know any of these names or issues, I have to say, none of this is really convincing evidence of anything to me.

Then learn a bit more? As a trans person it's pretty obvious to me that Zucker has committed crimes against humanity.

You really should do your homework on Singal. You're repeating lies about him that simply don't hold water.

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