By the time I became aware of her, in 2014, she had become notorious in circles where sex research and journalism overlap. What appears to have curdled her is the work of Ray Blanchard, the sex researcher who proposed the theory of autogynephilia, which posits that some trans women are motivated to transition by sexual arousal at the thought of being a woman. It is seen by some trans people as offensive because, in their view, it pathologises and/or sexualises their identity. An apparently smaller group of individuals, most famously Anne Lawrence, believe it accurately describes their own experiences.

Back in the Noughties, Blanchard and the psychology professor J. Michael Bailey — who popularised Blanchard’s ideas in his 2003 book The Man Who Would Be Queen — became the subjects of a smear campaign that, whatever one thinks of the theory, became abusive. Andrea James was one of the worst offenders. Her behaviour has been well-documented by the medical historian and bioethicist Alice Dreger, who in a 2006 blog post observed that “Ms. James was notable for the way she decided to go after Bailey’s children to extract revenge. She posted on the internet photographs of Bailey’s daughter and labeled her a ‘cock-starved exhibitionist.’”

After she published her blog post, Dreger described in an update how James sent a series of hostile emails, including one referring to her five-year-old son as a ‘precious womb turd’: “She also came to my departmental office (I was not there) and then emailed me, subject line ‘Mommy Knows Best,’ saying, ‘Sorry I missed you the other day. Your colleagues seem quite affable, and not as fearful as you. […] Bad move, Mommy. […] We’ll chat in person soon’.”

These incidents are described in more detail in Dreger’s book Galileo’s Middle Finger, published in 2015, by which point James’s influence appears to have waned. I began reporting on youth gender medicine around that time, and I didn’t get any sense that other prominent transactivists, or LGBT groups, took James seriously. Her name didn’t come up as someone you should talk to, if you wanted to better understand these issues. So why, a few years ago, did she experience a partial reversal in her fortunes?

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It all started in 2018, when The Atlantic published a cover story about the debate over youth gender transition — written by me. The story included quotes from a number of people, including teens, who explained how profoundly transitioning had benefited them. However, it also included quotes from detransitioners, and dug into some of the controversy over youth transition. James was outraged that I would shine a light on the subject’s nuances, trade-offs and difficult questions. From some trans activists’ points of view, it is settled science that youth gender medicine works — indeed, saves lives. To suggest otherwise is heresy.

Because of that view, plenty of people criticised the article, some harshly. But James’s response was something else. She was so outraged that she launched a Kickstarter called “The Transphobia Project”. It went live about a year after the publication of my article — which, in the FAQ section, she called “one of the most disgraceful moments in American journalism this century”, and credited with motivating her entire endeavour. As for the endeavour itself, she described it as “an interactive data visualization of the platforms and people creating biased content about gender identity and expression”. James explained how it would work: “Any time someone publishes media on these topics, a score called a t-index is generated for that work. That t-index also gets applied to the creator, any co-authors or editors, the platform where it appeared, and the organizations that support that platform. … Those with a high t-index become more prominent on the chart.”

And yet, nowhere on her Kickstarter does James clarify how her system would determine someone’s transphobia. Indeed, “appearing on the chart does not necessarily mean a person or organisation is transphobic.” In fact, if you look past the various buzzwords, it’s very hard to figure out what, exactly, the then-proposed project would do, other than show how various writers and editors are connected via the publications they work for (hardly a state secret). Yet despite the vagueness of The Transphobia Project’s actual, well, project, James enthuses on her fundraising appeal that it “will help us identify and expose bias, and maybe even get a few people fired along the way!”

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When The Transphobia Project’s Kickstarter launched, Donald Trump was still president, and liberal institutions were understandably preoccupied with his frequently ugly attempts to get journalists harassed and fired. James’s project didn’t hide the fact that it had similar goals, but, perhaps because James was going to target morally bad journalists for harassment and firing, rather than morally good ones, a cohort of progressives decided to hold her up as a champion in the noble fight against transphobia.

Kickstarter, for example, highlighted The Transphobia Project on its “featured projects” page, and published an article about it in the official Kickstarter Magazine by Rebecca Hiscott. In Axios, the respected tech writer Ina Fried published an article headlined, “Exclusive: Using data to track transphobia in media”. It was effectively a press release. The website Journalism.co.uk published a similarly hagiographic writeup by Daniel Green, which was subsequently promoted by Harvard’s Nieman Lab, one of the most important media-criticism institutions in the country.

None of the articles mentioned that the woman they were championing had once publicly called her enemy’s young daughter a “cock-starved exhibitionist”. None reached out to me for comment, despite James noting that my article had inspired the whole project (though Green, to be fair, posted part of my response at the bottom of his article after I complained). Nor did they interrogate James’s self-professed credentials. (I contacted all the authors — as well as Mike Allen, cofounder of Axios — to ask why they had failed to dig up James’s history of intimidating behaviour, and whether they planned any followup. I didn’t hear back from any, save for a brief note from a Journalism.co.uk editor who didn’t respond to my queries except to note that they wouldn’t be writing about James further.)

A close read of James’s proposal, combined with knowledge of her background, raised serious questions about whether she had the experience or technical chops necessary to pull off The Transphobia Project. And yet various outlets produced prime examples of a growing genre of journalism, geared not at establishing the truth, but at showing you’re on the right side of a raging controversy.

Probably partly because of this coverage, James’s fundraising was successful: 252 backers provided her with $23,302, more than ten times her $2,000 goal. The estimated delivery date, still visible on her Kickstarter, was July 2019. More than four years on, the Transphobia Project still doesn’t exist, and there is no sign James will deliver on her nebulous promises.

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But even if The Transphobia Project remains unrealised, James has been busy. In the past four years, she has vastly expanded and updated her website, Transgender Map. And what she has added is not more data analysis of transphobic networks, but rather shockingly detailed webpages on what appears to be every enemy she has accumulated in recent years — an ever-growing list. These pages include personal information not only about them, but also about family members who are almost always wholly uninvolved in the fight over sex and gender.

The page dedicated to one editor at a mainstream site — who doesn’t appear to ever have written anything about transgender issues, but has edited pieces James dislikes — not only lists their spouse’s name but is, in fact, one of the spouse’s top Google results. The journalist Helen Lewis, a friend of mine, said that her page initially included photos from her first wedding, which James took from Flickr. When Lewis made the page private, James noted the change. Indeed, she seems to keep a very close eye on how her victims respond to their pages. Many of the entries also include caricatures that James has commissioned, likely at considerable cost, given the sheer number of them. In one of the creepiest cases I found, James commissioned a cartoon of not only my podcast co-host, Katie Herzog, but also her wife, who is unconnected to any of this. UnHerd also has its own page, listing many of its contributors and editors.

Many of the people featured have been deeply disturbed by it. “Does anyone know who runs the TransgenderMap website?” asked Prisha S, a detransitioner, on Twitter. “There are web pages about detransitioners with personal info and hate. The page about me is the longest. Whoever runs it seems to hate me a lot. It’s freaky, honestly. Can anything be done?”

Being featured didn’t really bother me initially. But I did become concerned when I received an upset email from my brother asking why the site was showing up near the top of his search results. It transpires James had compiled the most detailed biography of me that exists on the internet, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with my output on youth gender transition. Bringing my family into her perceived conflict with me crossed what felt like a line that would be obvious to most people. The page included the full names of my mother, my father, both my brothers, and everything she could find about all of our work histories. She even included the date my mother died. While accuracy isn’t James’s strong suit — at one point my page stated I am half-Hindu — it felt like an intimidation tactic: Look how much I know about you.

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Recall that one of James’s goals of the Transphobia Project was “get[ting] a few people fired along the way”. The updated version of Transgender Map seems to be operating with very similar motives: the pages seem designed to trigger negative personal and professional repercussions.

“The first time my 11-year-old daughter googled me, this was the first thing that came up,” said Lisa Selin Davis, a friend of mine who has also written at length about gender identity and youth transition. “It includes the names of my children and two family members… It’s designed to silence and humiliate us. I can handle it, but it’s a little heartbreaking to me that my kid had to see this instead of anything else about me.”

Another one of James’s victims is Paul Garcia-Ryan. He is a therapist who trained at a leading gender-affirming clinic in New York City. He is concerned about the quality of care that gender dysphoric youth receive and is seeking to improve it. He recently spoke at the first conference held by the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), a group with similar aims, in New York. (I was in attendance as well.) This alone was enough to rouse James’s ire, and soon Garcia-Ryan discovered his newly published page, which falsely describes him as an “anti-transgender activist” and explicitly instructs any minors who find themselves in his care to break off their therapy with him.

“Efforts to damage the reputations of clinicians creates a chilling effect amongst medical and mental health professionals, deterring them from speaking up, even when their concerns are grounded in legitimate scientific, medical, and ethical considerations,” Garcia-Ryan said in an email. “Clinicians hold an enormous responsibility and thoughtful work with gender dysphoria requires professionals to be courageous and stand firm in their clinical integrity.”

James has targeted a number of other responsible and careful clinicians in the field of youth gender medicine. She has also created a page for Gordon Guyatt, a legend within the field of medical research. He is one of the founders of evidence-based medicine, a (genuinely) lifesaving movement to improve the quality of medical research. Because Guyatt spoke at SEGM, he’s now a transphobe, according to the unerring moral judgment of Andrea James. He is tarred as an “anti-transgender activist” — ironic, given that when I asked him about the claim that questioning the evidence for transgender medicine is itself transphobic, he replied: “You’re doing harm to transgender people if you don’t question the evidence.”

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But James’s website is more about rage than reason. Really, all it takes to land oneself on it is to have said something publicly that she disagrees with, or to have associated, in any way, with any institution or any person she dislikes. For example, she has a page dedicated to a European academic — a far-Left trans man who couldn’t be more in favour of trans people’s dignity and right to medically transition — simply because he has published some (rather excellent) work criticising certain mainstream strains of trans activism, including on this website. This is someone who has dedicated years of his life to radical trans activism, and now his second-highest search result in Incognito mode on Google Chrome is a webpage that suggests he is enabling transphobia.

Garcia-Ryan’s page ranks highly if you search his name, too. That’s the whole point: to scare people off talking about this issue. I’m telling you a tiny fraction of the stories I’ve heard from individuals targeted by James, many of whom don’t want to come forward. In short, very little has changed since Alice Dreger published her first long expose of the Michael Bailey affair back in 2008: “Almost universally those who wrote to me [about their run-ins with James] — including sex researchers — asked that I not ever quote them or mention them by name,” she wrote. “They feared being attacked by James, as Bailey and others had been.”

For that reason, and because of my own involvement, I have been deeply conflicted about writing this piece. But it’s a perfect 2023 story, in a way. It epitomises an approach to social justice and to journalism that is so anti-intellectual, and unforgiving that it’s impossible to imagine it making the world a better place. But perhaps most disturbing is that there’s no accountability. No one can control whether they’re included on James’s site. There’s no one to appeal to other than James herself, and she has proved herself time and time again to be unreasonable. (I emailed James about this piece. She sent a brief response, which didn’t address any of my points, and has not commented further.)

But our information ecosystem doesn’t reward reasonableness — it rewards reaction and outrage. And particularly when the subject is social justice, media outlets are all too eager to abdicate their basic responsibilities as guardians of the truth.

But for some reason, this basic principle doesn’t seem to apply to the hyper-politicised subject of gender medicine. On one side, Republican states are attempting to ban youth gender medicine — and, in some cases, to dial back access to adult gender medicine. On the other, liberals maintain that there is solid evidence for these treatments, and that only an ignorant person could suggest otherwise.

Whether or not you agree with the GOP’s stance (I do not), the latter view is simply false. The trajectory of youth gender medicine in nations with nationalised healthcare systems has been relatively straightforward: these countries keep conducting careful reviews of the evidence for puberty blockers and hormones, and they keep finding that there is very little such evidence to speak of. That was the conclusion in Sweden, Finland, the UK, and, most recently, Norway. As a recent headline in The Economist had it: “The evidence to support medicalised gender transitions in adolescents is worryingly weak.”

Yet despite this evidentiary crisis in Europe, and despite multiple scandals vividly demonstrating the downside of administering these treatments in a careless way, liberal institutions in the US have only become more enthusiastic about them. In recent years, everyone from Jon Stewart and John Oliver to reporters and pundits at the New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR have exaggerated the evidence for these interventions.

The logic seems to be that if activists, doctors and journalists repeat “The evidence is great!” enough times, regardless of whether the evidence actually is great, the controversy will go away — as though the state of Arkansas could be shamed into reversing its policy on trans youth because Jon Stewart made fun of them. Meanwhile, as I can tell you from experience, if you openly question these treatments or highlight just how little we know about them, you’re going to have a bad time.

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But look a little closer, and it swiftly becomes clear that the evidence for both adult and youth gender medicine is frequently drawn from alarmingly low-quality studies. Almost invariably, when you examine the latest study to go viral, there’s much less there than meets the eye — whether because of serious overhyping and questionable statistical choices on the part of the researchers, outright missing data, flawed survey instruments, more missing data, or just generally beyond-broken methods.

Since any individual study or group of studies can suffer from these issues, serious researchers know that you can’t just take a few that point in the right direction and herald them as evidence. Rather, you need to sum up the available evidence while also accounting for its quality. This is what European countries have done, and they have all come to roughly the same conclusion: the evidence supporting these treatments isn’t there.

But even at the level of sweeping summaries, America’s conclusions are often distorted. A prime example came in a recent New York Times column by Marci Bowers, a leading gender surgeon and the president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Bowers paints a very rosy picture of the evidence base:

“Decades of medical experience and research since has found that when patients are treated for gender dysphoria, their self-esteem grows and their stress, anxiety, substance use and suicidality decrease. In 2018, Cornell University’s Center for the Study of Inequality released a comprehensive literature review finding that gender transition, including hormones and surgery, ‘improves the well-being of transgender people’. Nathaniel Frank, the project’s director, said that ‘a consensus like this is rare in social science’.

“The Cornell review also found that regret… became even less common as surgical quality and social support improved. All procedures in medicine and surgery inspire some percentage of regret. But a study published in 2021 found that fewer than 1% of those who have received gender-affirming surgery say they regret their decision to do so… A separate analysis of a survey of more than 27,000 transgender and gender-diverse adults found that the vast majority of those who detransition from medical affirming treatment said they did so because of external factors (such as family pressure, financial reasons or a loss of access to care), not because they had been misdiagnosed or their gender identities had changed.”

Here we have a leading expert (Bowers) citing a leading institution (Cornell) and relating astonishing claims (what medical procedure has a 1% regret rate?). The case appears to be closed — until you actually click the links and read Bowers’s sources. (Bowers and WPATH did not return emailed interview requests.)

Let’s start with Cornell’s data. According to a summary at its “What We Know Project“:

“We conducted a systematic literature review of all peer-reviewed articles published in English between 1991 and June 2017 that assess the effect of gender transition on transgender well-being. We identified 55 studies that consist of primary research on this topic, of which 51 (93%) found that gender transition improves the overall well-being of transgender people, while 4 (7%) report mixed or null findings. We found no studies concluding that gender transition causes overall harm.”

If you are familiar with systematic literature reviews, you will find the above unusual. Researchers don’t generally ask whether a procedure works or not in such a vague a manner, then tally up the results. To usefully gauge the level of evidence, a review has to carefully define its research questions, and factor in the potential biases of the existing studies. The Cornell project does none of this.

I emailed Gordon Guyatt, one of the godfathers of the so-called evidence-based medicine movement, to ask him whether he thought the Cornell project qualified as a systematic literature review. His response was: “It meets criteria for a profoundly flawed systematic review!” When we later spoke, he explained why he didn’t trust it. “Presumably, they are trying to make a causal connection between what the patients received and their outcomes,” he said. “That is not possible unless one has a comparator.” In other words, if you’re only tracking people who received a treatment, and don’t compare their outcomes to another group not receiving the treatment, you simply can’t learn that much. Guyatt offers the example of someone taking hormones and saying afterwards that they feel better. “That does not mean that the hormones have anything to do with your feeling good.” 

This is a very basic, very well-understood problem in both medical and social-scientific research. If all you have is before-and-after measurements of how someone who received a treatment changed over time, there are all sorts of potential confounds, from the placebo effect to regression towards the mean to the possibility that receiving the treatment coincided with some other salutary intervention, such as therapy, that wasn’t accounted for.

Because the Cornell team made no effort to even evaluate the risk of bias in the individual studies it evaluated, the final product tells us very little. It’s roughly analogous to coming upon a pile of coins and trying to determine its worth simply by counting how many coins there are, rather than sorting the pile by denomination. When I raised this with Nathaniel Frank, the head of the Cornell project, he said via email that “we don’t publish traditional systematic reviews”, but rather web summaries of important research questions. So the first words of its overview might confuse readers: “We conducted a systematic literature review.” 

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If Bowers had wanted to cite a carefully conducted, peer-reviewed systematic review of the gender medicine literature, she actually had one at her fingertips: her own organisation, WPATH, funded one a few years ago. The results, published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society in 2021, revealed that there is almost no high-quality evidence in this field of medicine. After they summarised every study they could find that met certain quality criteria, and applied Cochrane guidelines to evaluate their quality, the authors could find only low-strength evidence to support the idea that hormones improve quality of life, depression, and anxiety for trans people. Low means, here, that the authors “have limited confidence that the estimate of effect lies close to the true effect for this outcome. The body of evidence has major or numerous deficiencies (or both).” Meanwhile, there wasn’t enough evidence to render any verdict on the quality of the evidence supporting the idea that hormones reduce the risk of death by suicide, which is an exceptionally common claim.

Oddly, though, the authors of this systematic review conclude by writing that the benefits of these treatments “make hormone therapy an essential component of care that promotes the health and well-being of transgender people”. That claim completely clashes with their substantive findings about the quality of the evidence. So, when Bowers cited the Cornell project, she was citing a review that is of very limited evidentiary value — while also ignoring a much more professionally conducted, and much more pessimistic, though strangely concluded, review that her own organisation paid for.

But what about the study which, she claims, “found that fewer than 1% of those who have received gender-affirming surgery say they regret their decision to do so”? Here’s where things get downright weird.

The study in question, published in 2021 in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Global Open, has dozens of errors that its nine authors and editors have refused to correct. Indeed, it appears to have been executed and published to such an unprofessional standard that one might ask why it hasn’t been retracted entirely. 

Before we get into all that, though, it’s worth pointing out that even if it had been competently conducted, the review could not have provided us with a reliable estimate of the regret rate following gender-affirming surgery: the studies it meta-analyses are just too weak. Many of those included did not actually contact people who had undergone surgery to ask them if they regretted it; rather, the authors searched medical records for mentions of regret and/or for other evidence of surgical reversals. Yet this method is inevitably going to underestimate the number of regretters, because plenty of people regret a procedure without going through the trouble of either reversing it or informing the doctor who performed it. In one study of detransitioners — albeit one focusing on a fairly small and non-random online sample — three quarters of them said they did not inform their clinicians that they had detransitioned.

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The studies included in this review also failed to follow up with a very large number of patients. The meta-analysis had a total sample size of about 5,600; the largest study, with a sample size of 2,627 — so a little under half the entire sample — had a loss-to-follow-up rate of 36%. If you’re losing track of a third of your patients, you obviously don’t really know how they’re doing and can’t make any strong claims about their regret rates. And yet, the authors don’t mention the loss-to-follow-up issue anywhere in their paper. No version of this meta-analysis, then, was likely to provide a reliable estimate of the regret rate for gender-affirming surgery.

Even so, the version that was published was particularly disastrous. Independent researcher J.L. Cederblom summed it up: “What are these numbers? These are all wrong… And these weren’t even simple one-off errors — instead different tables disagreed with each other. The metaphor that comes to mind is drunk driving.”

To take one example, the authors initially reported that the aforementioned largest paper in their meta-analysis had a sample size of 4,863. But they misread it — the true figure was actually only 2,627. They also misstated other aspects of that report, such as how regret was investigated (they said it was via questionnaire but it was via medical records search) and the age of the sample (they said it included some juveniles, but it did not).

Not all the errors were significant, but they were remarkably numerous. And because of the abundance of issues, the paper attracted the attention of other researchers. “In light of these numerous issues affecting study quality and data analysis, [the authors’] conclusion that ‘our study has shown a very low percentage of regret in TGNB population after GAS’ is, in our opinion, unsupported and potentially inaccurate,” wrote two critics, Pablo Expósito-Campos and Roberto D’Angelo, in a letter to the editor that the journal subsequently published. In her own letter, the researcher Susan Bewley highlighted what appears to be an absence of vital information about the authors’ method of putting together the meta-analysis. 

The authors and the editors decided to simply not correct any of this. They did publish an erratum, in which they republished seven tables that still contained errors, while maintaining that all those errors had no impact on the paper’s takeaway findings. But the paper itself remains published, in its original form, complete with those 2,200 ghost-patients inflating the sample size.

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Bewley and Cederblom have continued to ask the journal to reveal the process that led to the paper getting published, and to address why so many of the errors remain uncorrected. In an email in January to Bewley, Aaron Weinstein, its editorial director, claimed that because critical letters to the editor had been published, and because the corrected data was reanalysed by a statistical expert, “the Publisher and the ASPS [American Society of Plastic Surgeons] feel that PRS Global Open has done due diligence on this article and this case is closed”. He also claimed, curiously, that he had no power to force the authors to address the many serious remaining questions raised by the paper’s critics, saying “there is no precedent for an editorial office to do so”. Neither Weinstein nor the paper’s corresponding author, Oscar Manrique, responded to my emailed requests for comments.

Finally, there is Bowers’s claim that “a separate analysis of a survey of more than 27,000 transgender and gender-diverse adults found that the vast majority of those who detransition from medical affirming treatment said they did so because of external factors”. This is technically true, but is also rather misleading because the survey in question — the 2015 United States Transgender Survey (which has profound sampling issues) — was of currently transgender people. It says so in the first sentence of the executive summary. Research based on this survey obviously can’t provide us with any reliable information about why people detransition, because it is not a survey of detransitioners. If you want to know how often people detransition, you need to follow large groups of trans people over time and check in to see if they still identify that way later on — and we don’t have high-quality research on that front.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of studies being discussed here concern adults, while the legislative discussion mostly centres on adolescents. The most recent version of WPATH’s Standards of Care is very open about the lack of evidence when it comes to the latter: “Despite the slowly growing body of evidence supporting the effectiveness of early medical intervention, the number of studies is still low, and there are few outcome studies that follow youth into adulthood. Therefore, a systematic review regarding outcomes of treatment in adolescents is not possible.” Again, WPATH is Bowers’s own organisation — surely she is familiar with its output?

Despite the backbreaking errors of that nine-authored paper, the severe limitations of the Cornell review, and the near-utter-irrelevance of the United States Transgender Survey, all three are chronically trotted out as evidence that we know transgender medicine is profoundly helpful, or that detransition or regret are rare — or both. It’s frustrating enough that these lacklustre arguments are constantly made on social media, where all too many people get their scientific information. But what’s worse is that many journalists have perpetuated this sad state of affairs. A cursory Google search will reveal that these three works have been treated as solid evidence by the Associated Press, Slate, Slate again, The Daily Beast, Scientific American and other outlets. The NYT, meanwhile, further publicised Cornell’s half-baked systematic review by giving Nathaniel Frank a whole column to tout its misleading findings back in 2018.

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Why does such low-quality work slip through? The answer is straightforward: because it appears, if you don’t read it too closely, or if you are unfamiliar with the basic concepts of evidence-based medicine, to support the liberal view that these treatments are wonderful and shouldn’t be questioned, let alone banned. That’s enough for most people, who are less concerned with whether what they are sharing is accurate than whether it can help with ongoing, high-stakes political fights. 

But you’re not being a good ally to trans people if you disseminate shoddy evidence about medicine they might seek. Whatever happens in the red states seeking to ban these treatments, transgender people need to make difficult healthcare choices, many of which can be ruinously expensive. And yet, if you call for the same standards to be applied to gender medicine that are applied to antidepressants, you’ll likely be told you don’t care about trans people.

As Gordon Guyatt, who has done an enormous amount to increase the evidentiary standards of the medical establishment, told me: “You’re doing harm to transgender people if you don’t question the evidence. I believe that people making any health decisions should know about what the best evidence is, and what the quality of evidence is. So by pretending things are not the way they are — I don’t see how you’re not harming people.”

For some people with gender dysphoria, simply changing their hair, clothes, and other aspects of their appearance to present in a more stereotypically male or female or androgynous manner is enough to bring relief; for others, only hormones, surgery or both will suffice. But the only treatment for severe, persistent gender dysphoria for which there’s any real evidence is transition.

While the LGBT community has ever-shifting labels that mean different things at different times, it’s safe to say that most people who identify as transgender have or had gender dysphoria, and transitioned in part as an attempt to alleviate it.

Despite the significant gains made by the trans rights movement in recent years, the scientific underpinnings of gender dysphoria and its treatment are still almost completely unknown. Even the available evidence for the efficacy of hormones is only, according to a 2010 systematic review, “very low quality.” As the British Journal of Medicine pointed out on its website in 2019, drawing on two more recent systematic reviews of youth GD treatment, “There are significant problems with how the evidence for Gender-affirming cross-sex hormone has been collected and analysed that prevents definitive conclusions to be drawn.”

Furthermore, there are also some increasingly-heated culture wars going on in this area that hinge a great deal on certain scientific questions no one knows the answer to: How concerned should we be about what appears to be a growing number of ‘detransitioners’ — that is, people who transition their gender and then transition back? How common is detransition in the U.S. or the U.K.? How often do kids with GD experience ‘desistance,’ or their GD simply abating in time? 

(Desistance is itself an immensely controversial and complicated discussion, and some people wrongly claim it is quite rare — I went deep into the weeds here and here if you’re curious about what the literature on it does and doesn’t say.)

Given all this uncertainty, and given the stakes for people trying to better understand their own struggles with GD, it seems like a particularly important time for the scientific study of this subject to operate in a transparent, careful manner. 

Instead, it is becoming more and more difficult for researchers to study this subject without accidentally stepping on certain political landmines — landmines that are understandable given some of the dark history associated with the scientific establishment’s treatment of gender nonconforming people, but which really are hindering scientific progress.

And an incident that unfolded this spring at a neuroscience journal shows just how bad things are getting. It suggested that only a very particular, very narrow storyline is allowed — and if you deviate from it, you risk professional and reputational damage. In the long run, this sort of science-by-petition, in which activists who can make a loud enough racket can get research retracted that wouldn’t be retracted otherwise, is exceptionally harmful.

Back in December, the journal eNeuro published a paper entitled “A New Theory of Gender Dysphoria Incorporating the Distress, Social Behavioral, and Body-Ownership Networks.” The paper was tagged as “Theory/New Concepts,” and it indeed challenged a common understanding of gender dysphoria.

That understanding holds that, to oversimplify somewhat, gender dysphoria arises from having the body of a male but the brain of a female (or vice-versa). While far from dispositive, some past studies have suggested that transgender individuals with gender dysphoria have brains more like the sex they identify with than their natal sex. (Some of these studies were performed posthumously on trans people who had been on hormones, raising the possibility that the hormones caused the observed brain differences.)

Not so fast, argued the author of the eNeuro article. Stephen Gliske, a researcher who trained as a physicist but who gained sufficient expertise in neuroscience to be hired as a research assistant professor in the University of Michigan Medical School’s department of neurology, posited a new theory questioning “the relevance of cerebral sexual dimorphism in regard to gender dysphoria”.

Instead, he argued that “in individuals with gender dysphoria, the aspects of chronic distress, gender atypical behavior, and incongruence between perception of gender identity and external primary sex characteristics are all directly related to functional differences in associated brain networks.”

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The truth about 'American Dirt'

By Jesse Singal

Almost immediately, Gliske’s paper was denounced by a group of researchers and activists who accused it of peddling dangerous ideas about trans people. Unfortunately, eNeuro did not respond with agility. Over a disastrous, opaque, flawed process that took months to unfold, the journal first demanded Gliske choose between cutting one section of the paper and having it retracted. After he agreed to the cut, the journal put an edited version online. Then, when academics again complained, this time launching a Change.org petition, the journal launched yet another round of reviews and eventually retracted the paper.

Before explaining the way things spiraled out of hand, it’s important to acknowledge that the initial critique of Gliske’s paper had some merit to it. The first version contained a section entitled “Implications for clinical practice”. In it, Gliske argued that “The use of gender reassignment as a therapy is sometimes motivated on the assumption that the distress is due to the individuals having a brain sex different than their gender assigned at birth and that the desire to change genders is based on a correct sense of true gender.”

If, as Gliske’s own theory suggested, this is false, it could call into question such treatments, he argued. “Our new theory furthers the discussion regarding biologically-based treatments independent of gender identity affirmation that might address distress and body ownership in individuals with gender dysphoria.” That is, “treatments based on our new theory could instead involve targeting the distress and/or body ownership networks, perhaps specifically seeking to restore a sense of ownership over body parts perceived as incongruous.”

Anyone even faintly aware of the politics surrounding trans rights will understand why this was an ill-advised passage. While the present state of the evidence that transition works is not as sturdy as it could be, and some people with gender dysphoria are actively hoping for other options, it is still the case that transition is the only real game in town at the moment, and that access to it feels like a life-and-death matter for many trans people. Moreover, there’s also a dark history of attempts to biologically alter LGBT people to ‘fix’ them. 

It’s not unreasonable, then, that a trans person, or someone who simply cares about them, might be alarmed reading a paper that raises, without much context, the possibility of “biologically-based treatments independent of gender identity affirmation that might address distress and body ownership in individuals with gender dysphoria”.

On 7 December, with the article up on eNeuro’s website in a near-final, post-peer-review form, the journal’s editor-in-chief, Christophe Bernard, a French neuroscientist, emailed Gliske. After laying out some of the concerns raised about the paper, Bernard wrote, “We therefore ask you to remove the Implications for Clinical Practice section, as well as any other reference to clinical implications throughout the article, abstract, and Significance Statement, before final publication. These changes will be noted to journal readers with a formal published notice. … If you decline to make these changes, the Editorial Board will move to retract your article on the grounds that the clinical implications are not supported by the available data.”

Whether or not this critique was well-grounded (and, again, I believe it was, although the bit about the “available data” didn’t make much sense given that Gliske was positing a new theory) this is an unusual situation. It isn’t common for the author of a paper that has already gone through the peer-review process to be told he or she has to delete one particular section or choose to have the entire paper retracted. But what came next was even stranger.

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Some of the activists criticizing the paper were not mollified by the revisions made to it. Instead, a group of them led by Troy A. Roepke of Rutgers University, launched a Change.org petition demanding not only retraction of the paper, but revisions to eNeuro’s editorial process which would ensure that “at least one reviewer should come from the community directly impacted by these types of papers to ensure that language and intent are not dangerous, deleterious, or damning”.

The petition distorts and misrepresents the contents of the paper in basic ways. After claiming, without any evidence, that “the clear intent of the paper was to do harm to the transgender community, one of the most vulnerable communities across the globe” (bolding in the original), it argues that there is a “basic assumption that transgender people are a deleterious deviation with a disordered network of brain regions which pervades the entire manuscript”. 

But the paper isn’t about, and makes no moral claims of any sort, about transgender people — it’s about the neurological origins of gender dysphoria. It doesn’t take a particularly sophisticated grounding in philosophy to understand that whether GD is the result of one brain theory versus another doesn’t, on its own, prove anything about the moral status or worth of people with gender dysphoria.

The most vicious homophobic bigots, after all, are just as enthusiastic about gay-bashing whether the theory is that homosexuality is genetic (in which case the responsible genes need to be wiped out), or the result of corrupt cultural influences (in which the responsible influences need to be wiped out). This is just a wild moral leap on the part of the petitioners, and it’s surprising that the journal would pay any mind to such a confused and inflammatory petition.

But not only did the journal heed this group’s input, it let Roepke and eight coauthors pen a response that was published on the eNeuro website alongside the original article. That response is just as strange as the petition, exhibiting a lack of familiarity with the evidence base for treating gender dysphoria, and with the specific arguments of Gliske’s paper. For example, the authors accuse Gliske of making claims which conflict with existing empirical observations about gender-affirming intervention, ignoring the fact that he quite specifically states that treatment can alleviate distress — and they themselves cite a paper pointing out the weakness of the evidence base for hormones.

It would have been strange enough for the eNeuro editors to give so much oxygen to Roepke’s bad-faith petition and response. But it’s what happened next where this story tips over from ‘strange’ into ‘bizarre’ — for now Gliske received an email from eNeuro informing him that, actually, the paper was being retracted. 

The editors’ reasoning is explained in a ‘synthesis statement’ which, again, contains many odd claims that don’t quite line up with the paper that was actually published. It often reads as though the editors simply threw as many complaints at the wall as they could — many of them picayune and easily debunked by reading the paper or the editorial comments sent to Gliske during the editing process — in an attempt to make the paper seem extremely sloppy.

At one point, for example, the authors note that Gliske used the word transsexual, and that this, along with some other terms in the paper, are “no longer adequate terms to be used and  should be adjusted for a more respectful language”. But in the body of the paper itself there is a single use of this term: “I also use the term ‘transgender’ throughout this manuscript, though I recognize that some references instead use the word transsexual to refer to the same concept.” So his only use of this term is to explain that he is not going to use it, and to explain why it appears in the citations (transsexual is simply the older term for “being trans,” and is seen by some trans people as outdated or offensive, while others embrace it).

Similarly, the synthesis statement asks: “[W]hat exactly is the author trying to say in the paragraph noting that trans people have been found to have elevated presence of autistic traits within relation to their theory?”

But in an exchange still visible on the eNeuro site (archive), a reviewer recommended that Gliske add a mention of autism to the section on common gender-dysphoria comorbidities — not a surprise given the well-established link between the two conditions. Again, this is simply strange: in a public statement, the journal’s editors criticised the author of a paper for making an editorial decision the journal itself asked him to make.

But all these odd and nitpicky complaints could be seen as moot, because the reviewers give away the game in a sentence that clearly reveals their gripe is political, not scientific:”[T]he author appears disrespectful to the community because he/she does not seem to believe that a transgender person’s statement of belonging to one or the other gender is taken at face value and believed to be true.” 

This is worth exploring. The authors of the synthesis statement don’t bother explaining what “belonging to one or the other gender” could possibly mean in a neuroscience context. Gliske’s paper has no bearing on the question of whether a trans person is ‘really’ a woman or a man (or neither in the case of a nonbinary person), because of course no theory of gender dysphoria could, on its own, settle such a philosophical and sociological issue.

His paper, again, is simply an attempt to posit a new theory about gender dysphoria. The only neuroscience-related explanation of this phrase which could apply here is something like “Gliske does not seem to believe that a transgender man/woman has a male/female brain”. But that, of course, is exactly the theory he is arguing against! If this is actually what his critics intended to mean, they are claiming that it “appears disrespectful” to posit that the brainsex theory of gender dysphoria is false.

This would be news to many gender dysphoric people. There is, of course, a vast diversity of opinion about what causes gender dysphoria among those who have or had the condition. There are desisters, who appear to outgrow the condition over time, usually in their younger years — they, of course, do not think that they were “trapped in the wrong body,” because their GD didn’t turn out to be permanent.

Detransitioners, meanwhile, don’t tend to believe in the brainsex theory either. While some destransition because they lack the money or support to continue living as their felt gender, others realize they simply weren’t really trans. A subset of detransitioners continue to have gender dysphoria, but do not believe the solution is to transition, because it didn’t work for them — in fact, when some detransitioners in this category tried to hold panels at a trans health conference, one on detransitioning and one on alternate treatments for GD, those panels were abruptly cancelled due to the outcry of activists

Many happily transitioned people, too, believe that whatever GD is, it’s more complicated than having one ‘type’ of body and the other ‘type’ of brain, or the closely related idea of having an innate and immutable ‘gender identity’: Trans writers ranging from Andrea Long Chu to Natalie Reed to Natalie Wynn (aka Contrapoints) to various ‘gender-critical’ trans women have all critiqued these ideas, which they tend to view as oversimplifications which don’t capture the full texture of the trans experience.

It makes no sense, then, to view theories of gender dysphoria as being off-limits if they tell a different story than brainsex-mismatch. To do so is to ignore the views of many, if not most, people with gender dysphoria. It’s also completely unscientific: When you don’t know much about what causes a phenomenon, you can’t draw strict boundaries about what sorts of explanations will be deemed worth exploring versus rejected out of hand.

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This episode bears certain noteworthy similarities to what happened to Lisa Littman, the M.D. who in 2018 published a PLOS One paper on “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” or the very young and mostly unexplored theory that in some cases young people (usually teenage girls) might develop gender dysphoria and/or a transgender identity quite suddenly as a result of peer influence or social media. (For what it’s worth, in my own reporting I have certainly come across kids who fit that bill, but I’m careful not to posit this as a definite explanation in any particular case because so little is known about ROGD and it could be harmful for parents to jump to this conclusion regarding a newly ‘out’ child.)

Like Gliske, Littman was proposing a new theory that was viewed as threatening by some activists (they believe that the concept of ROGD is a means of ‘invalidating’ the claims of trans youth). Like Gliske, she dealt with a wave of criticism within and beyond the academy that often seemed geared at producing a high quantity of claims about her research rather than high-quality ones.

And like Gliske, she had to deal with institutions caving in to activists, and with a bruising post-peer-review re-review clearly designed to appease those activists: Brown University retracted the press release announcing the study and issued a bizarre ‘apology’ without noting anything in the paper that had been wrong, and PLOS One issued a ‘correction’ consisting of many cosmetic updates and then acknowledged to me that there had been no errors in the paper. (I had never heard of a paper being ‘corrected’ when there weren’t any errors.) 

Littman subsequently published a paper showing that just about every critique issued at her paper in an attempt to invalidate it could also be applied to papers on trans youth that had garnered no complaints from activists, probably because those papers didn’t make any politically threatening claims.

“There is a clear double standard,” she told me in an email. “Research articles that do not adhere to the gender-identity affirming narrative are called out as unacceptable, even when their methods are consistent with those cited to support the use of the gender-identity affirming model of care. It appears as if groups are engaging in motivated reasoning — ‘I don’t want this research to be true, so I will aggressively question every single attribute of the work, even if I’m comfortable with those same attributes in research articles that support my view.’ Unfortunately, many people are misusing the terms ‘biased,’ ‘methodologically flawed,’ and ‘debunked’ when they really mean ‘challenges my assumptions,’ ‘comes to a different conclusion than me,’ and ‘has known limitations.’”

Littman, to her credit, hasn’t been deterred — she’s continuing to research this subject, and recently solicited the accounts of individuals who have desisted or detransitioned.

Maybe Stephen Gliske’s paper was completely off-base. Maybe it’s on the right track. Maybe it’s somewhere in between. Now that it’s been retracted, though, a message has been sent, loud and clear: Don’t try to look into this theory. That chilling effect is far more dangerous than any individual retraction or faux ‘correction’. In the long run, it will cut off entire avenues of research that could help lead us to better understand a very important and vexing subject.

Think about what the gender dysphoria research scene must look like at the moment to genuinely inquisitive, compassionate, brilliant 25-year-old neuroscientists, psychologists and psychiatrists-in-training? What possible reason would they have to want to attack this fascinating subject with any of the vigor and intellect they’d apply to other, less controversial subjects? All the incentives point in the opposite direction: Run far from here.

It’s heartbreaking to think of all the knowledge that will be lost as a result — and all the people who will suffer more than they needed to because of the way scientific inquiry was wrongly crimped.

Using the controversy surrounding a group of Covington Catholic High School students filmed in front of the Lincoln Memorial last year as a prime example, I complained that staffers and contributors at mainstream progressive outlets increasingly seem to see themselves more as activists and cheerleaders whose job is to fall on the “right” side of a given controversy, rather than journalists whose job is to investigate that controversy fairly, with a critical eye.

Not two weeks later, I stumbled into a wonderfully specific example of how these dynamics work in action. It involves Huffington Post, a controversial novel, and imaginary Mexicans eating chicken dipped in barbecue sauce.

In the United States, the book publishing industry — or parts of it, at least — is swaying and buckling from certain seismic cultural forces. As America’s conversations on race and identity have gotten louder and more public, some in and around publishing have argued that the industry is unwelcoming to people who aren’t white, straight, cisgender, and so forth, and that this discrimination is apparent when you look at which books gets published, and by whom.

There’s more than a kernel of truth to this. Publishing is (and has long been) a redoubt of the privileged, and the editorial offices of major New York publishers tend to be staffed largely with graduates of top colleges. Publishing isn’t quite as lily-white as some claim it is — yes, it’s about 76% white, but that’s in a country that’s about 72% white, and half of all interns are non-white — but few insiders would argue that there aren’t certain significant issues to address in making it more accessible to a broader swath of the population (which, after all, often leads to better stories anyway).

If the core claims of those criticising publishing on identity grounds are reasonable, that doesn’t mean that individual campaigns targeting supposedly “problematic” books always have been. Far from it, in fact — in the last few years there has been a succession of fundamentally unfair online pileons targeting books, mostly in young adult publishing, that are deemed offensive and emblematic of publishing’s broader diversity issues.

As Kat Rosenfield and others have shown, these campaigns tend to be based on highly exaggerated, ripped-from-context misreadings of the books in question, often spread via social media. Sometimes, for example, the argument a racist character in a book about overcoming racism said something racist, and therefore the book is racist is presented unironically, by grown adults familiar with literary conventions, as evidence of wrongdoing on an author’s part.

In one incident I covered, members of the Twitterati decided a character in the fantasy universe of the then-upcoming novel Blood Heir was black (there was no real evidence to suggest this), decided an allusion to modern-day slave trafficking in Asia was actually about American slavery, and decided that they therefore didn’t like the book’s handling of race and slavery.

They raised a sufficiently loud outcry that the imminent publication of the novel, authored by Amélie Wen Zhao, a Paris-born woman of Chinese ancestry who lives in the United States, was cancelled, though the book was later revised and released. In another instance, a black male author’s book about two foreign boys escaping Kosovo as it is engulfed in warfare was cancelled entirely based, again, on questionable claims.

These campaigns might now be spreading from young adult to general literature. Since late 2019, the biggest story in American publishing has been American Dirt, a novel written by Jeanine Cummins about a Mexican woman, Lydia, and her son, Luca, who are forced to flee their home in Acapulco to the United States after a drug cartel murders much of their family, including Lydia’s husband (Luca’s father), at a relative’s quinceañera barbecue.

While the book appears to be selling quite briskly — reaching Number One on the New York Times’ fiction bestseller list (it now sits at number three) — it sparked a raging controversy that appears to have popped off after Oprah picked it for her very influential book club. Since then, an endless parade of articles and essays have lamented how deeply offensive and harmful American Dirt is, most of them focused on the fact that Cummins is neither Mexican nor a migrant but a white American-born woman who is a quarter Puerto-Rican.

American Dirt’s critics insist, almost unanimously, that it isn’t Cummins’ race that is animating their anger, but rather her handling of the novel’s subject matter, combined with the fact that Latino authors, and authors from migrant backgrounds, rarely get seven-figure advances like Cummins’ (you will notice this hefty sum is mentioned quite frequently; the YA campaigns, too, tend to focus on authors who earned enviable advances).

Their campaign has been successful: according to a press release reported on by the LA Times, Macmillan, the parent company of Flatiron Books, which published American Dirt, met with a group of the book’s critics and stated that they would be “substantially increasing Latinx representation across Macmillan, including authors, titles, staff and its overall literary ecosystem” as well as to “regroup within 30 days with [the activist group] #DignidadLiteraria and other Latinx groups to assess progress.” Cummins’ book tour, meanwhile, was cancelled because of safety threats.

The problem, as I noted in my newsletter, is that many of the examples of the supposedly awful parts of American Dirt bemoaned by its critics are strained at best. In one widely circulated Medium essay, for example, the Mexican-American author and translator David Bowles made extremely basic errors about the book’s plot. For this misleading essay, he was rewarded with a New York Times column (which repeated some of his errors) and a chance to be one of the activists who met with Macmillan. In Jezebel, the writer Shannon Melero exhibited a similar lack of familiarity with the actual writing contained in the novel.

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But the article that is really sticking with me, for reasons that will become clear, ran in Huffington Post. It’s headlined “American Dirt Isn’t Just Bad — Its Best Parts Are Cribbed From Latino Writers” and is written by David J. Schmidt, also an author and translator.

His very strange main argument is that Cummins’ erred, somehow, by including real-life places and events in her novel based on the work of Mexican non-fiction writers — non-fiction writers she explicitly thanks in the book’s Author’s Note, and in one case references in the text of the novel itself. It’s difficult to even suss out a genuine criticism here, given that novelists include real-world elements in their books all the time and, like Cummins, frequently thank the individuals and texts that help inform their world-building.

Schmidt’s piece also includes this sentence: “[Cummins] describes an imaginary country where people put sour cream on their street tacos, dress their chicken with BBQ sauce rather than mole, eat black licorice drops rather than mazapán, and fear the Bogeyman rather than El Coco. American Dirt is also riddled with linguistic gaffes, including a character thinking of her own mother as abuela (grandma).”

This is a useful example of how, during a public outrage, so much smoke is generated by bad-faith actors that the casual passerby will assume there must be a roaring conflagration generating it, that whoever is being targeted did something truly wrong.

Because it’s remarkable, once you’ve read the book, how little there is here, and how conveniently devoid of proper context these examples are. American Dirt contains a single mention of licorice drops — Lydia recalls that her recently-murdered mother enjoyed that particular candy.

I’m not saying Mexicans are huge fans of black liquorice, but is it impossible a middle-class Mexican woman living in a major city lousy with American tourists (Acapulco) could enjoy, and have access to, that particular candy? And Lydia thinks of her own mother as abuela in the same way an English-speaking person might think of her mother as grandma, because that’s how she’s known to her children.

There are two mentions of “bogeymen” in the book, and they both come in the narrator’s voice, not out of the mouths of a Mexican character — “Because these are the modern bogeymen of urban Mexico,” Cummins writes of cartel assassins early on. Later she writes, in relation to a terrible incident in the United States, that “The vigilantes wanted to stoke community fear and incite outrage by inventing a group of murderous migrant bogeymen”. There’s no scene in which Mexicans “fear the bogeyman” himself.

As for the sour cream, it is not served with a street taco. Rather, Lydia and Luca buy it in the food court of “a vast shopping mall with a Sephora and a Panda Express and even an ice rink” in Mexico City — one which also includes a Crepe Factory. The idea of an establishment like this, plopped in the middle of a cosmopolitan megacity, having American-style sour cream, is a lot less ridiculous than the image Schmidt is attempting to conjure.

It’s Luca who eats the tacos with sour cream; he’s the English-speaking son of middle-class Mexican parents and grew up, again, in an American-tourist-heavy city, so in context, the idea of him enjoying sour cream isn’t ridiculous, either. The point, here and elsewhere among some of Cummins’ least honest critics, is to make her look as ignorant as possible, even if that requires massaging the facts a bit.

But when it comes to the chicken dressed with barbecue sauce, the facts aren’t even massaged, but rather snapped in half like a wishbone: there is no scene, anywhere in American Dirt, in which a single Mexican slathers a single piece of barbecued chicken in barbecue sauce. It simply doesn’t happen.

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I think Schmidt confused himself. Right at the beginning of the novel, when Luca and Lydia’s extended family is murdered (I’d say “spoiler alert” but the book’s literal first sentence is about a bullet whizzing past Luca’s head as the massacre commences), Cummins writes: “The clatter of gunfire outside continues, joined by an odor of charcoal and burning meat. Papi is grilling carne asada out there and Luca’s favorite chicken drumsticks. He likes them only a tiny bit blackened, the crispy tang of the skins.”

Then, a bit later, as Lydia, in shock, surveys the scene of the massacre with investigators: “In the shade of the backyard, there’s the sweet odor of lime and sticky charred sauce, and Lydia knows she will never eat barbecue again.”

Nowhere here, in the only mention of a sweet and/or sticky sauce that could possibly apply to Schmidt’s claim, is there any evidence of a Mexican person eating chicken with barbecue sauce on it. These passages prove neither that the sauce in question is barbecue sauce (all we know is that it’s sticky, at least when charred) or that it was intended for chicken (“Papi” is grilling both carne asada, meaning beef, and Luca’s “favourite chicken”).

I emailed Schmidt to ask him about this, and he replied that “The sauce is described as sticky, sweet sauce that is put on barbequed chicken.” But nowhere does Cummins say the sauce is for the chicken, and even if she did, that wouldn’t make it American-style barbecue sauce, which is the basis of Schmidt’s accusation of cultural illiteracy.

I found out who the story’s two editors were and emailed one of them about this, suggesting she correct this. She forwarded my request to the other, a fairly well-known progressive journalist — one whose name I recognised and respect. “The debate about the sauce seems like you’re projecting your own guess on the text rather using the context clues,” she wrote, declining to correct the story.

I was very surprised by this, and I found myself dwelling on it ever since, somewhat fixated. This barbecue chicken issue is a little thing, sure, but it’s a big little thing. That is, whatever disagreements may exist between journalists, we all agree — or at least publicly claim to agree — that, at root, our job is to print stuff that’s true.

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Other critiques of American Dirt may be unfair, but they’re fundamentally subjective. This one isn’t: Huffington Post is telling its readers that a controversial book was written by someone so ignorant of Mexican culture she thought Mexicans dress their barbecue chicken the exact same way Americans do, even though this simply doesn’t happen anywhere in the book. If this doesn’t warrant a correction, what does? If we can’t agree on the norm “Don’t print stuff that plainly isn’t true,” what norms can we agree on? This is the lowest-hanging journalistic fruit imaginable.

I don’t think Cummins or Flatiron Books are blameless here. Setting aside linguistic critiques of the book’s Spanish I’m ill-equipped to evaluate, they did make two very silly unforced errors that warrant criticism: an Author’s Note in which Cummins refers to her previously “undocumented” husband without noting he is Irish (which, yes, is still a stressful situation to be in, but is miles away from being an undocumented Mexican migrant), and a book party at which barbed wire was used, rather insensitively, as a “cute” decorating motif.

But these issues don’t bring us anywhere near the apocalyptic storyline that has settled in as fact — that this is a disastrously ignorant, under-researched, harmful book — in some quarters. Watching the outrage bloom has been deeply depressing, and has only solidified my worries about rightside norms in journalism.

It’s one thing for resentful critics, eager to jump on outrage-bandwagons, to publish bad-faith misreadings of books on random blogs or their Facebook walls. There will always be unfair critics. But when major outlets like the New York Times and Huffington Post are helping to amplify this nonsense, without even checking whether the critics have closely read the books they claim to be furious about? When they won’t even correct textbook errors which hinge on objective facts about the contents of the books in question? We have a problem.

The field is being hit with wave after wave of contraction, and local and regional newspapers are dying to the point where all that’s left, with the exception of a handful of the biggest cities, is a giant news desert dotted with tiny puddles. Countless layoffs have ravaged the industry, leading to many heartbreaking cases of journalists being marooned, midlife, in an unforgiving labour landscape. 

My theory is that “Learn to code,” a meme often hurled at laid-off journalists by Twitter trolls, cuts particularly deep because of how neatly it capture the sheer desolation that engulfs journalism’s professionally dispossessed. I’m sorry to be a professional chauvinist, but there is something unique about what we do: it requires such a specific skillset, and, when done right, it feels so meaningful and serves an indispensable societal role.

But not everyone recognises that; we’re easy to hate. So there they are, those faceless online hordes, thrilling at the idea of us having to chase employment in another field — a field in which, in the very best-case scenario, we’ll somehow succeed in beating out countless energetic 22-year-olds for a chance to work for an on-demand dogfood-delivery app destined for bankruptcy three months post-launch.

And yet, despite the profound structural emergency engulfing my field, I’d like to victim-blame just a little. My desire to do so stems from the fact that we just passed the first anniversary of the Covington Catholic High School debacle in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. It was genuinely one of the worst, most embarrassing recent moments in professional journalism, and there was never any real reckoning among those who screwed it up. Would such a reckoning save the industry? Of course not. But if we don’t grapple with what the Covington debacle revealed about where journalism is right now, we won’t have much worth saving, anyway.

In January of last year, you might recall, someone posted a short video of what appeared to be a group of jeering, cheering white kids — some in pro-Donald-Trump MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) hats — surrounding an older Native American man banging a drum in front of the Lincoln Memorial. These, it was quickly revealed, were students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, in town for the anti-abortion March for Life. The Native American man, it turned out, was a longtime activist named Nathan Phillips.

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In an interview with the Detroit Free Press published on 20 January, Phillips explained that he had ended up surrounded after trying to aid a group of black activists who were engaged in some sort of confrontation with the Covington kids. While acknowledging that those activists hadn’t been entirely blameless, Phillips presented himself as a de-escalator trying to prevent the white kids from getting out of hand.

“They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals,” Phillips said of the teens. “There was that moment when I realised I’ve put myself between beast and prey. These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that.”

This was the narrative that took hold: white predators and black and Native prey. Immediately, online outrage exploded, with internet harassment, death threats and every other form of digital outrage swamping everyone in the Covington orbit. The boys’ behavior was also — quickly — condemned by the Covington Catholic diocese.

But a video covering a longer span of the Covington kids’ experiences in DC, posted the same day as the Detroit Free Press article and almost two hours long, revealed a much different and more complicated story. The difference between what happened during the key moments, and what many journalists said happened, was capably summed up by Cathy Young and others, but is worth reviewing in detail. 

The longer video showed the kids wandering the Washington Mall, being yelled at and ocassionally yelling back at a racist and homophobic religious sect, the Black Hebrew Israelites, known by the denizens of some major American cities for its generally crazy and aggressive street-preaching (and later implicated in a horrific attack on a Kosher market in Jersey City)— these were the black activists in question and the filmer was one of their members.

At 1:12:35 in the video, after protracted jawing between the two groups, the Covington kids are clearly seen in a closed circle and are doing some sort of chant or cheer. Phillips doesn’t, as he claimed, place himself between the Covington kids and the Black Hebrew Israelites mid-confrontation — he works his way right to the edge of into the closed Covington circle, until he is noticed on account of his drumming.

This is completely incompatible with Phillips’ version of what happened, but to acknowledge this would  have toppled a viral narrative that was carried far and wide on the wings of morally satisfying good-guys-versus-bad-guys outrage.

So while some conservative and centrist and even liberal journalists did revise their accounts, apologise on Twitter and so on, and while the Kentucky diocese publicly apologised for its initial condemnation, the more common response was to simply either pretend this video didn’t show what it clearly showed, retreat to a different claim — Phillips caused himself to be surrounded by a circle of Covington kids, but was horribly mistreated by them once he was — or both.

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But just as there’s no video evidence to suggest any sort of real harassment or threat, Phillips was surrounded by the kids. A handful of the Covington kids did do the Tomahawk chop: it’s an offensive gesture to Native Americans, but one unfortunately done by countless fans of not one but three major American teams, many times every year. And there’s dancing and chanting and cheering in time with the drumbeat — a perfectly normal human reaction to the presence of a drumbeat. (In fact, some non-Covington bystanders and activists appear to be clapping and dancing in time with the drum before there’s any interaction with Phillips and the Covington kids.)

The most serious allegations confirmed by an in-depth investigation by a private detective agency hired by the Covington diocese involved the Tomahawk Chop and the kids chanting along with Phillips — that’s it. And Certain feverish internet rumors, like that the kids had chanted “Build the wall,” were proven totally false.

But both before and after the longer video was released, many journalists zeroed in on an infamous, brief moment during which Phillips and one of the Covington students, Nick Sandmann, are standing about a foot from one another, Phillips chanting and banging his drump, Sandmann grinning at him with a hard-to-decipher expression.

 
“The grin” quickly became notorious, and this was where the media really got out of control, tipping over into what can only be characterised as truly disgraceful behavior. “Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?” asked Reza Aslan, an otherwise smart writer and commentator. Others agreed that this grin told us everything we needed to know about the story, while some of the tweets from journalists, like these from Kurt Eichenwald, come across as deeply deranged.

Much of the published coverage wasn’t much better. “The MAGA Teenager Who Harassed a Native American Veteran Is Still Unnamed,” went the headline of a Slate article, “but We’ve Seen His Face Before.” In that one, Ruth Graham — another person who is a deeply thoughtful writer in other contexts — called it the face “of a clutch of white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s”, of men making Nazi salutes and of “Brett Kavanaugh — then a student at an all-boys Catholic prep school — “drunkenly laughing” as he allegedly held down Christine Blasey Ford. Anyone who knew the popular white boys in high school recognized it: the confident gaze, the eyes twinkling with menace, the smirk.”

This is from a brief clip in which a Native American activist bangs a drum and chants, and a kid stands there, doing nothing but grinning strangely.

Now, Graham’s piece, and some of the other more embarrassing observations made by professional journalists and writers, did come before the full video dropped. So the single most important article one needs to read to understand the ridiculous, embarrassing extent to which journalists doubled down after the release of that video came a couple days later — written by Laura Wagner, then of Deadspin.

“Don’t Doubt What You Saw With Your Own Eyes,” was the headline of her 21 January piece, which racked up more than a million views as my fellow left-of-center journalists eagerly passed it around to prove to one another, and themselves, that they’d done nothing wrong.

Posted a day after that video went online, Wagner criticised those who had backtracked from their earlier condemnation of the Covington kids, deriding them for “doing the work of the gibbering masturbators who had risen up in defense of the MAGA teens”. Bizarrely, it continued to take Phillips’ account as accurate, simply ignoring the evidence to the contrary: the new video, Wagner claimed, showed “that Phillips and other demonstrators present for the Indigenous Peoples’ March were interposing themselves between between teens draped in racist, misogynist paraphernalia and members of the Black Israelite cult,” strongly implying there was an ongoing confrontation at that precise moment.

Wagner’s article was an outrageous misinterpretation, and a particularly strange one in its insistence that it was others failing to respect the truth, but she was no outlier. Hence the million-plus views. Hence the lack, in most left-of-center quarters, of any sort of real reckoning with what a journalistic disaster this was. Once the outrage has set in, there’s very little incentive to let it go, because it feels unsatisfying and ego-threatening to admit such strong, morally charged feelings were unwarranted, that one’s own tribe was in error.

More than anything else, it sums up the increasingly potent belief among journalists that we must always be on guard about public instances of wrongspeak, that it’s potentially career suicide to be seen as falling on the wrong side of a given day’s most white-hot controversy (and, of course, every such controversy always has two sides and two sides only: a right one and a wrong one).

I call this the difference between rightside norms and accuracy norms. This is an oversimplified model, of course, but within a given community, accuracy norms incentivise people to seek out and state out loud the truth — to be the insufferable nerd who watches the video frame by frame, and who relies on that and only that if that’s what needs to be done — while rightside norms encourage people to loudly broadcast that they are on the right side of the issue, even if that requires twisting the evidence: Video be damned, I am not siding with those MAGA sickos!

Suggested reading

Drinking in the madness of social media

By Gareth Roberts

Of course there are conservative rightside norms, too, and a great deal of climate-change denialism falls into that same bucket — a point Yale’s Dan Kahan has done some important work on. In fact, there’s a case to be made that Right-wing journalism has, in the not too recent past, suffered from a bigger rightside-norms problem than its left-of-center counterpart. This, at least, is the credible argument Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum has been making for a long time. “The hack gap is a liberal problem of long standing,” he wrote in 2012: “Conservatives outscore us considerably in the number of bloggers/pundits/columnists/talking heads who are willing to cheerfully say whatever it takes to advance the party line, no matter how ridiculous it is.”

I think the hack gap is shrinking, though. As social media has carved out a bigger and bigger part of the daily existence of progressive journalists, and as mainstream outlets have shuttered, shed their older, more traditionally journalistic staffers  — with the new blood flowing into the industry being generally younger, more privileged, more partisan, and less interested in or well-trained to do what is seen as “old-school” journalism — rightside norms have begun infecting mainstream journalism and spreading within it like a plague.

That’s my diagnosis, at least. But if you disagree, just go on Twitter, which is where just about every left-of-center journalist 40 and under spends a big chunk of each and every working day. Over and over and over, you will see people whose job is to report the truth responding with strong half-baked opinions, or retweeting their friends’ and colleagues’ strong half-baked opinions, in response to breaking-news events about which very little is known so far.

This is a problem for obvious reasons. Imagine you’ve just finished watching a film. You loved it. But when the lights come up your three friends all begin whinging about how much they hated it. When this happens, unless you have superpowers, you will inevitably tamp down on your own professed enthusiasm for the film. It’s very hard to publicly go against the crowd, even in a low-stakes situation like that one.

Social media makes it much harder, because you are never more than a few seconds away from knowing what the “right” stance is on a given issue. In the case of Covington, which did not feel low-stakes, we progressive journalists were presented with such a starkly moralised template — white kids in red MAGA hats versus Native protester — that rightside norms quickly piloted many of us into an iceberg.

These dynamics have a real chilling effect on journalism. Freddie deBoer wrote eloquently of them in an essay about “the backchannel,” explaining how social-justice-oriented communities will inevitably rot from the inside when public disagreement on certain sacred subjects is verboten.

“When within-group criticism is only voiced privately,” he wrote, “there’s no opportunity for the group to evolve, to shore up its weakness, to evaluate its own problems, to correct its own course. And political movements have to evolve or die. It’s a classic cause of political self-destruction, when a group’s inner dynamics become so ossified and conformist that no one is willing to point out the group’s problems. That’s the condition in far too many left spaces today: a near-total inability to point out the cracks in the foundation for fear of being shamed yourself.”

I want to be crystal clear about what I am not arguing here, lest I be misinterpreted. I am not arguing for a return to some sort of view-from-nowhere style of journalism. I have no problem identifying as both a journalist but also as a progressive and someone who dislikes Trump rather fiercely. There is nothing wrong with having your journalism be driven by a sense of general ideological mission; some of the best journalists covering the working poor care deeply about the working poor, believe they are treated unfairly, and want to see their station improved. They’re still capable of, and produce, honest journalism.

What I am saying is that if you call yourself a journalist, there needs to be some distance, somewhere, between your tribal allegiances and the way you do your job.

To be clear, a return to a slightly more “traditional” understanding of journalism’s mission won’t save us. We’re probably doomed either way, but our doom is only going to come sooner, and be far uglier, if we can’t demonstrate our ability to add value, if we advertise, loudly and sanctimoniously, that we have nothing to offer an increasingly hyperkinetic and confusing informational ecosystem other than just another set of screaming outraged Twitter avatars.