Episode 18: “A Tale Told by an Idiot”

We’re not comparing ourselves to William Faulkner, who borrowed a phrase from Macbeth for the title of one of his most famous novels — life, he says, is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” — but we’ve dealt with our share of numbskulls in recent weeks. Not the …

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We’re not comparing ourselves to William Faulkner, who borrowed a phrase from Macbeth for the title of one of his most famous novels — life, he says, is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” — but we’ve dealt with our share of numbskulls in recent weeks.

Not the least of whom is one Jesse Singal, a Brooklyn-based Substacker (that is, blogger), podcaster, and self-professed Twitter addict. No, we won’t link to his various online platforms because we’re not going to give him any more oxygen, but this week’s episode describes a wild ride we recently took through his anti-transgender fever dreams, and let’s just say … that’s some weird, uncharted territory.

For background, this article describes Singal’s descent over the past few years from a superficially neutral writer wondering aloud about the experiences of trans people to a (possibly childless?) man who’s appointed himself the leading expert on the healthcare of … other people’s children. Notice, in particular, the article’s description of Singal’s bizarre and completely inappropriate tweet-storm from March 2021, where raises questions about another person’s gender diverse child. Here’s a guy taking to Twitter and demanding to know whether a complete stranger’s child was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, as though that’s something he, or anyone else, is entitled to know!

But Singal’s intrusion into the healthcare of other people’s children didn’t end there, and that’s what led to our recent interactions with him. Lately, Singal injected himself into the Missouri Attorney General’s politically motivated “investigation” into a clinic affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis that provides care and advice to trans youth and their parents. Then, last Saturday, he posted a piece on his Substack in defense of the Attorney General’s “whistleblower,” a woman named Jamie Reed, who provided details of the clinic’s alleged “mistreatment” of children under its care. (Spoiler alert: as we explain on this week’s episode, Reed does not appear to qualify as a whistleblower under the Missouri Whistleblower Protection Act, and it does not appear the clinic did anything illegal).

So that led one of us — you’ll never guess who! — to tee off on Jesse on Twitter. Not because he or Reed broke any laws (we’re not HIPAA experts and we don’t claim to be), but because Singal’s post included completely unnecessary, salacious details of what minors allegedly told their therapists and caregivers. Of course, he wasn’t quite ghoulish enough to identify the minors by name, but any person with a whit of common sense would realize that detailing confidential information that minors gave to therapists is a patently disgusting thing to do. 

In any event, while Jesse reacted to criticism of that post in the way that any well-adjusted, responsible grown up would do — by lashing out at and mocking anyone who dared to question him — he then did an odd thing. He invited us to appear on his podcast, presumably to make himself look super level-headed and rational to his troll followers. 

And that’s where the story gets really bizarre. As we explain in this week’s episode, he basically ignored multiple emails from us, lied to his followers by saying we never emailed him, and otherwise sabotaged our attempts to confront him in person on his own podcast. Whether it was an intentionally deceptive ploy or the predictable incompetence of a 40-year-old Substacker-podcaster-troll, we finally told him that we were done wasting our time. 

But not without explaining the whole sordid affair to our listeners, of course.

So, please enjoy to this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

The post Episode 18: “A Tale Told by an Idiot” appeared first on In the Shadow of the Evening Trees.