Another cartoon drawn by Nadine Scholtes! As well as drawing this cartoon, Nadine made a crucial contribution to the script; she suggested making the final panel a thought balloon, an idea I immediately agreed to.
This cartoon was directly inspired by reporter Felicia Sonmez’s lawsuit against The Washington Post. From her complaint:
Defendant Barr stated that, by speaking out publicly, Ms. Sonmez had “taken a side on the issue” of sexual assault. He also told Ms. Sonmez she was “trying to have it both ways” by publicly disclosing her own assault and continuing to report on the topic. Defendant Ginsberg raised his voice and told Ms. Sonmez that it would present “the appearance of a conflict of interest” if she continued to report on Kavanaugh or any other issues related to sexual misconduct. […] Defendant Barr stated, “We don’t have reporters who make statements on issues they are covering. We don’t want the external perception that we have an advocate covering something she has experienced. He added, “The work you do intersects with what you experienced in your life.” Ms. Sonmez noted that this is no different from any other reporter in the newsroom.
Importantly, these concerns about conflict of interest didn’t always extend to Sonmez’s male colleagues:
Around the time that Ms. Sonmez was interviewing for her position at the Post, she was told about a male colleague who faced sexual misconduct accusations including sending an unsolicited photo of his underwear-covered crotch to a young woman. Defendant Baron never ordered that the reporter be banned from covering stories related to sexual misconduct or inappropriate behavior by men. Upon information and belief, none of the reporter’s editors said his writing on the topic would present a “conflict of interest” or questioned whether he was capable of objective reporting. He was given a prominent position, wrote more than a dozen stories that touched on these issues and continues to do so today.
But that’s hardly the only case I had in mind. In 2018, messages from a private discussion group for journalists – one that had no (out) trans members – were leaked. In one of these leaked messages, Jesse Singal – probably the most prominent reporter on trans issues in mainstream publications – wrote about “groupthink” among trans people, implying that not being trans makes Jesse Singal better at writing about trans issues.
But…trans people, like members of any other group, have their own prevalent forms of groupthink. Time and time again my reporting and research has conflicted with what [the biggest-name trans activists have] told me[.] On other issues, of course, I would trust trans people more than anyone else—who better to talk about the humiliation of living in a state with a ‘bathroom’ bill, or the difficulty of getting hormones, or other stuff that only trans people have to deal with? But overall, no, I don’t think trans people are more qualified to write about the tricky science stuff going on here than I am.
(Since writing that, Singal has apparently removed “the difficulty of getting hormones” from his list of topics that he thinks trans people might know more about than Jesse Singal.)
Ironically, the leaked messages displayed their own form of “groupthink,” as members of the forum rushed to agree that Singal’s reporting is perfect and the many, many criticisms of his work from trans people were, without exception, irrational and meritless.
I’ll mention one last example (although there are certainly more I could mention): in 2020, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette barred two Black staffers from reporting on Black Lives Matter. One of the staffers had tweeted a sarcastic comparison between “looters” and tailgaters; the other seems to have been excluded due to the “conflict of interest” of being Black.
Joshua Axelrod, a white reporter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, tweeted about a looting suspect and referred to them with a vulgar slur. Though Axelrod was reprimanded by his editors, he was not prohibited from covering BLM content like Johnson and Santiago were, despite the obvious show of bias. […]
Tony Mosley, a host with National Public Radio (NPR), has argued that newsrooms who bar Black reporters from covering BLM are essentially saying that “white journalists just by default are neutral and objective and they can cover everything, but somehow [Black journalists] can’t cover [their] own communities.”
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has three panels – although the final panel is divided into two sub-panels, as we shall see.
PANEL 1
In a newsroom (we can see a desk, and framed front-page stories on the wall), an older reporter, who is white and male, is talking to a younger Black reporter. The older reporter is wearing an off-white shirt with a red necktie; the younger reporter is a bit more casually dressed in a gray polo shirt. Let’s call the older reporter “NECKTIE.”
Necktie has his arms folded behind his back, and a condescending expression.
NECKTIE: Percy, you can’t write about police violence. You’re not objective.
PANEL 2
We are looking at Necktie again. In the background, we can see a young male reporter, with a red shirt and glasses, and a younger female reporter, wearing a jacket over a light pink blouse, both sitting behind desks.
NECKTIE: Just like Joey can’t write about trans issues.
NECKTIE: And Alicia tweeted about being sexually assaulted. So she can’t write sex crime stories. Reporters must be objective!
PANEL 3
This panel is divided into two sub-panels. The first panel shows Alicia, having stood up, speaking critically to Necktie; Necktie has his arms folded and is grinning.
ALICIA: But by that standard, isn’t everyone “biased”?
NECKTIE: Not quite everyone.
A thought balloon leads from Necktie’s head to the second (and larger) sub-panel. This panel shows Necktie, now wearing a jacket, a crown, and a sash that has “cis white male” printed on it, standing on a little platform so he’s above the other three reporters. The other three reporters are enthusiastically cheering for Necktie, and Alicia is swooning a bit with little hearts in the air around her head.
Behind Necktie is an enormous lit-up sign – the kind with a border made of light bulbs. The sign says, in large letters, “ALWAYS OBJECTIVE.” Balloons and confetti and roses fall from above. The balloons have lettering, which say things like “upper class” “white” “cis” “male” “abled” “thin” and “straight.”
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” means easily-overlooked and meaningless details in a cartoon the cartoonists put in, which maybe you (and they) find amusing. In this case, the chicken fat can be found in the framed newspapers on the walls in the background.
In panel 1, there are two such newspapers, each partly blocked by foreground elements and by word balloons. Both of them are for a newspaper named “Background Tribune.”
The first is almost entirely blocked by Necktie standing in front of it. But since I wrote it, I know that it says “NO ONE CAN READ THIS! Virtually Entire Text Hidden By Drawings.”
The second article is less blocked, and says “KISSINGER DEAD. Sun Shines Bright, Babies And Unicorns Celebrating.” (Although I wrote the script for this cartoon years ago, I added in the chicken fat on November 29 2023, the day Henry Kissinger died.)
In panel 2, the newspapers on the wall are such tiny elements of the background that I doubt anyone will be able to read them online (although they might be legible in the eventual book collection). The first says “NO ONE CAN READ THIS! This Text Is Simply Too Tiny To Be Legible.” The second says “NO ONE CAN READ THIS ONE EITHER. This Gag Is The Same As The Other One.”
Oh lookie, the guy from panel 10 is back:
https://leftycartoons.com/2016/01/13/the-32-worst-anti-feminists/
The fact that Jesse Singal still gets paid by mainstream media is just infuriating to me. It will be a huge step forward when FTFNYT, etc. stops paying people like him to write bigotry.
Actually (to be “That Guy”), on my Mac, by zooming the whole screen in I was able to read all the ‘chicken fat’ except what was behind ‘necktie’.
And I REALLY liked ‘Background Tribune’.
RandomTroll
I think Singal, regardless of what you think of him and his work, is objectively right on this specific thought, and it describes a troubling trend that we’re eventually going to have to tackle.
People are not good at self-diagnosis. We are generally good at reporting symptoms, and inferences can be made from those symptoms, but like anyone who has doom-scrolled their way through WebMD can tell you, those inferences can be very imperfect.
And yet, there’s a lot of pushback on medical science, specifically, but on other professional sciences, generally, by people who have “their own experience” and who have “done their own research” (the most prevalent, obvious, and obnoxious being anti-vaxxers).
It’s fallout, I think, of having a metric fuckton of available information: Before the internet, people didn’t really have the resources to do any kind of self-research. Not easily anyway. You believed the advice of your doctors, lawyers, or accountants, heck… Even journalists and politicians (to some extent), if for no other reason than out of necessity. Now, you can look at WebMD, you can Google papers, there’s almost certainly an app for whatever you’re looking for! You might even be able to train yourself to read them well enough that you can digest more information than the average person… But you’re still not a doctor, or a lawyer, or an accountant, and while your mileage may vary, this habit of knowing more than the experts, at least in your own mind, takes some people to some wild places.
Taken as a whole, Singal wasn’t just saying that trans people aren’t more qualified to write about “science stuff” than he is; he was saying, or strongly implying, that trans people were inherently less qualified than Singal, because he’s not trans. The sentence you cut out of the paragraph you quoted was:
It’s also telling that no where does he acknowledge, or show any awareness, that his own group – which I’d describe as liberal on many issues but “anti-woke” on identity politics – has their own groupthink, even though they do things like gather in secret discussion lists where they tell each other how right they are. In fact, I’d argue that it’s probably a stronger form of groupthink, since an ideological group inherently has more ideology in common than a more traditional “identity politics” group does.
Also, even by the “it’s about science not personal experience” standard, there are of course trans people who – due to having a much more extensive formal science background than Singal – are more qualified than him. (Of course, since trans people aren’t the Borg, even highly formally educated trans people can disagree on stuff.) In contrast, any layperson who has taken time to “do their own research” is as formally qualified as Singal is.
What makes Singal important isn’t any training or expertise in trans medicine or research, because he has none. What makes him important is his seeming lack of any intellectual humility, his ability to fool himself about what research says, and – worst of all – his high level of skill as a popular writer. His self-assuredness and his skill in writing in a “this is just common sense” tone have, unfortunately, taken him far.
Amp @ 5
What more information do you have? Are you just going to point at his general body of work? Because we don’t even have the whole, unedited quote from the listserv, we have what made to to Jezebel. Yeah, I cut the first sentence and you cut the last, I think both for brevity, but I don’t think either added much.
Again, What was said was:
I think that your reading of him is uncharitable, at best. I think what he’s saying is that the trans people he’s conversing with are contradicting the authorities he’s talking to, and that trans people as a whole are no more or less qualified to interpret the data than he is.
In fairness to you, perhaps he’s also saying that he is more qualified to talk about the science than the average trans person, but in fairness to him, I doubt that he would attribute that to bias so much as he would attribute it to the time he’s spent researching and reporting. And despite you saying that he doesn’t have training or expertise in trans medicine or research, he specifically does have training in research and has done more of it on the topic than I expect the average person has done.
Regardless: Let’s say, rhetorically, that you’re just 100% right: The point is still good. It just makes Singal a posterchild for a lack of self awareness.
There is no memetic memory bestowed on trans people that gives them special insight to their condition outside of how their symptoms effect them or their direct experience. There are specific topics that we can, and should, defer to them on, but the hard science is rarely ever going to be one of them.
Corso, I don’t think you’re being objective. You share an ideology with Jesse Singal, so you’re less qualified to talk about what he is or isn’t an expert in than an objective observer like Barry.
See, that’s cute: That’s exactly what the person in the comic is doing.
But not what I’m doing, and not what I think Singal is doing.
I can’t remember who said this to me, but the point was made that if you’ve read a book on a subject, any subject, then even if your information is imperfect, even if you have a painfully skewed perspective on the topic, you’re still probably better informed than 95% of the general population on that specific topic. It seems like a number pulled from thin air, but the base idea, I think, is valid.
I’m not saying that people are more or less authoritative because they are biased or unbiased: I’m saying that most people aren’t authoritative because there’s no reason to consider the average person authoritative, and there’s a general disturbing trend of ignoring authority in favor of what their favorite streamer tells them… The example I used was anti-vaxxers “doing their own research”, but you could insert hundreds of different discussions and have the same general point. Singal used the trans topic, because of course he did, it’s his beat.
You could say that Singal is guilty of that too. I make room for that argument. He could have a massive blindspot and be a poster child for exhibiting a lack of self awareness.
I’m not in his head, I don’t know what he’d say, but I suspect that Singal wouldn’t call himself an authority. He would point at his journalism, which cites authority. He would point out where the positions of the authority clashes with the positions of the person he’s interacting with. And that’s really as far as he needs to go, most of the time.
My read on this is that you’re putting the cart before the horse. I don’t think he’s saying that a person is wrong because they’re trans. I think he’s saying that a person is wrong because they’re wrong, and in cases where a person who is wrong is also trans, they happen to get to their position through bias.
I’d love to have someone present a counter: How do we think a person comes to a deeply unscientific point of view, if not a product of bias?
Assuming that 95% of the population has never read a book on that subject. Maybe that’s true–there’s a lot of subjects out there and no one can know about all of them. However, it’s hard for me to imagine someone who is trans failing to read multiple books, popular press articles, and scientific papers on the subject and related subjects. So wouldn’t you expect them to be, on average, informed and trustworthy on the subject, more so than some random cis guy who took up the issue because he wanted to make a name for himself?
I am going to go out on a limb and agree with Dianne here – I think most trans folk (or their parents, depending on how old they are) have read pretty extensively on the topic if they are able to. For one thing, when suffering from any sort of mental health issue (such as gender dysphoria, for example), most people are relieved/want to know more when they discover some sort of diagnosis or label that leads to strategies that could help improve their lives.
There is nothing special about Jesse Singal that makes him better able to understand the science and current understanding about being trans – he has just made his name reporting on trans issues, and so therefore has more experience of the background reading material than most people. Most people, but probably not most trans people (and their families), for whom this has direct relevance.
I’ve read some of Singal’s reporting, and he seems to focus mostly on people still exploring their gender identity and on detransitioners rather than on happy trans folk and their experiences. If that’s his bag, that’s his bag, but he should 1) be honest about the bias that mostly dealing with questioning and detransitioning people introduces and 2) should not be selling himself as a general expert in all things trans.
With regard to point 1, I remember reading an article about YouTube content monitors, and they mentioned that spending all day looking at flat earth videos for an extended period had them saying “hey maybe these guys have a point” before realizing what they just thought. Goebbels was definitely right about repeated exposure inducing belief. People are notoriously blind to their own biases, since most people want to think they are rational thinkers who make fact based decisions all the time.
Dianne @ 9
I’m going to separate a couple things, because I agree generally with the point I think you were trying to make, but not the point as stated because of the way it was compounded.
Would I expect the average trans person to have done some amount of research and therefore be more informed on the subject of trans science than the average person?
Sure. Almost certainly.
Would I expect the average trans person to have done some amount of research and therefore be more informed on the subject than the average cis person who also did some amount of research?
Probably not. If the people in both groups have both done some amount of research, then the difference isn’t how informed they are, except on the margins.
Has Jesse Singal done more research on the topic than the person he named?
I don’t know. Maybe. He seems to think so.
Despite what Jane said @ 10, I don’t think Singal has ever referred to himself as an “expert in all things trans”, I think that he makes a pretty serious effort to source and cite the people who are making the points he reports on. What Singal is good at (even if you don’t believe it to be a good thing) is saying a variation of: “This is what the (study/paper/expert/authority) seems to be saying, and this is what (another person) is saying, these things seem irreconcilable.” And this problem is so endemic that he’s basically been able to make a career out of it.
But that’s really just the prelude. Pointing out that there are different levels of being informed is necessary to get to the next stage in the conversation: What happens when different levels of being informed contradict each other.
Do you believe that someone reading “multiple books, popular press articles, and scientific papers on the subject and related subjects” makes them an authority on the subject, or just better informed than average?
Because I think it makes them better informed than average, but in places where their statements directly contradict those of experts and authorities, they can probably be discounted.
And if they’re being discounted for contradicting experts despite having been more informed, then we go back to my question:
How do we think a person comes to a deeply unscientific point of view, if not a product of bias?
Anyone can be wrong. But we should expect, on average, a correlation between people being informed on a topic and having a better understanding of the topic. If there’s a case where a person is (or should be) informed on a topic, but they’re constantly getting things wrong, then I think it’s fair to start pointing to things like bias as an explanation for that expectation gap.
Remember that my first example was actually anti-vaxxers. It’s also possible that the average anti-vaxxer has read more material on vaccine safety than the average person. This doesn’t make them correct or an authority on the topic, and when they contradict authority despite being better informed than the population at large, then I think it’s probably fair to start suggesting that there might be biases in play.
Corso @11: I don’t know much about Singal at all. Maybe I’m being unfair to him. However, the statement of his that has been quoted here–and, as far as I know, the providence of which is uncontested–is “But…trans people, like members of any other group, have their own prevalent forms of groupthink.”
Since the idea that trans people have any form of “groupthink” is pretty clearly contradicted by experts in the field and practically any other field, I’m going to have to say that biases are in play in Singal’s work. He isn’t necessarily malicious. Maybe he, like many actual scientists, has fallen in love with his theory and can’t give it up. But, at least based on what I’ve heard so far, I’ve got to say he looks biased.