Jesse Singal

Jesse Singal (born 1983) is an American journalist. He has written for publications including New York magazine, The New York Times and The Atlantic. Singal also publishes a newsletter and hosts the podcast Blocked and Reported with journalist Katie Herzog.

Much of Singal's writing deals with the social sciences, and he previously edited New York magazine's behavioral-science vertical, "Science of Us". He is one of three sons born to Sydney L. (; 1949–2021) and Bruce A. Singal. Both of his parents were attorneys. He attended Brandeis University for two years before transferring to the University of Michigan, and wrote for student newspapers at both institutions. He received a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. and lives in Brooklyn.

2018 Atlantic article Singal wrote the cover story for the July/August 2018 issue of The Atlantic. Originally published under the title "When a Child Says She's Trans", the online version was later retitled "When Children Say They're Trans". The long-form piece includes profiles of several adolescents who identify or previously identified as transgender, interviews with youth gender clinicians, and reviews of some of the studies, statistics, and protocols related to youth transition.

Among the controversial aspects of the article was the proportion of weight given to stories of adolescents who had desisted or detransitioned—that is, reverted to identifying with their genders assigned at birth, either before or after undergoing physical transition. In the article, Singal acknowledges that the stories of detransitioners are sometimes viewed with skepticism or suspicion by the transgender community, in part because they have been used by conservative media to further misleading narratives. Alex Barasch, writing in Slate, faulted the article for not including the story of "a single happy, well-adjusted trans teen" in its first 9,000 words. In The Advocate, Amanda Kerri criticized his understanding of the issue and lack of expertise in the subject matter, while acknowledging "a legitimate concern about the politicization of science and social justice".

In the New York Times, Andrea Long Chu described the article's focus on detransitioners as "compassion-mongering" and "peddling bigotry in the guise of sympathetic concern". In a 2019 paper, Chu calls the article "mostly a heaping pile of garbage", but writes that "a few of the questions [Singal] raises about trans kids are important", and that his article had been "quickly brushed aside" on release with the "easy out" of dismissing him as a cisgender transphobe.

The Atlantic published four letters from parents of transgender children reacting to Singal's article. One said it "goes a long way to covering all aspects of [being transgender]. It's very impressive". Others described it as "simply unhelpful and largely harmful to a marginalized community", and playing on the worst fears of parents. Another response, by Tey Meadow, criticized Singal's focus on a 16 year-old girl whose gender dysphoria had abated without transition, an outcome that Meadow writes represents "the rarest of cases", and that Singal had participated "in an inherently stigmatizing discourse" in characterizing the girl as a "desister".

Legal scholar John Inazu characterized the backlash as "widespread outrage from progressive commentators" and that in some criticisms, "ad hominem attacks far outpaced their substantive critiques".

In December 2024, Singal joined the social network Bluesky. Within 12 days of joining, he became the most blocked account on the platform (later surpassed by JD Vance ) and faced a petition calling for his account to be banned. Singal reported receiving death threats from users, and some users allege he engaged or encouraged harassment of them, but Bluesky found no evidence he violated guidelines. In his coverage of the story, journalist Ben Smith called Singal's views "well within the mainstream of US and UK politics".

Podcast

Since March 2020, Singal has hosted the podcast Blocked and Reported with Katie Herzog, a journalist based in Washington state. Herzog was also the subject of online ostracism (characterized in The New York Times as an attempted cancellation) as a result of a controversial 2017 article she wrote for Seattle weekly The Stranger about people who have undergone detransition.

The Quick Fix Singal's first book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, was published in April 2021. It examines a number of popular psychology fads, such as positive psychology, power posing, and the implicit-association test which, according to Singal, turned out to have weak empirical support or reproducibility, or which were exaggerated into stronger claims that are "scientifically questionable but sexy and exciting". The book examines the replication crisis in social sciences and some of its underlying causes, such as p-hacking, and suggests remedies for "how both individuals and institutions can do a better job of resisting" exaggerated pop psychology. Writing for National Review, Michael M. Rosen called the book "engaging and persuasive" and said that it was based on "rigorous research and thoughtful interviews".