Concerning a screed by Pamela Paul
Singal is on it
Jesse Singal's version of anti-trans trolling is (a) wait for someone to publish an anti-trans article (b) wait for trans people to criticize it (c) counter-criticize by saying that's not exactly what the anti-trans person said on some excruciatingly tiny point.
An analogy of my own making, for illustrative purposes: (a) A random transphobe might say: You're a trash human being and you belong in a dumpster! (b) Trans person replies: Not gonna jump in a dumpster for you. (c) The Jesse Singal-ism would be: No one said they expect you to jump in it of your own free will. You should apologize to the transphobe for misrepresenting what they said.
Pamela Paul wrote, "As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word 'women' has become verboten," linking to an NYT article by Powell a month earlier that noted that an ACLU tweet "neglected to mention a relevant demographic: women."
"Verboten" means "forbidden," FYI.
Thus the reply of Rebecca McCray, an ACLU writer: "I work at one of those civil liberties orgs being accused by the NYT of forbidding the use of the word 'woman'...this [is] a harmful lie..."
So the predictable Singal response was "at no point in the column did Paul say the ACLU has a policy outright forbidding the use of the word 'woman'".
No, she just used the German word for "forbidden," mentioned the ACLU, and linked to an article that also mentions the ACLU, ostensibly to support her claim that the word is forbidden.
The particularly infuriating part of this Singal response is that he says (in his 2nd tweet) that Paul never said the ACLU has such a policy, even though (per his 1st tweet) Paul, in his view, might have reasonably observed that the ACLU sure appears to have such a policy.
You can probably understand why people are confused, right?
It's his trolling method to say: The transphobe didn't say that — but very reasonably could have said it, or did say something functionally identical — but nevertheless can't be held accountable for it because your paraphrase will never be the exact actual thing they said.
Or:
Transphobe: I accuse you of X
Trans people and allies: Actually, Not-X, because Extra Details that disprove the accusation
Singal: Original Transphobe never alleged Not-Extra-Details, and your suggestion that they did is untrue and you should correct the record
Of course, he's shut off replies.
Yes, bad NYT articles have consequences — The column ate Bette Midler's brain
Bette Midler tweeted her concern that people were avoiding the word "woman." The Washington Post clarified on July 6:
In a tweet, Midler said her statement was in response to a “fascinating and well written” opinion piece that ran in the New York Times over the weekend, which argued that “women” was becoming a forbidden word, edged out by gender-neutral terms such as “pregnant people.”
“There was no intention of anything exclusionary or transphobic in what I said; it wasn’t about that,” Midler wrote.
Others commented:
If you're famous, here's a thing you can do
Did you miss the column?
I have picked it apart. See "
One Kind of Transphobia: Imagining Cis-Phobia". It's a 12-minute read on Medium. Medium lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.
