# Jesse Singal Jesse Singal (b. 1983) is a Brooklyn-based journalist and podcaster. He is a former senior editor at [[New York Magazine]], where he ran the behavioral-science section Science of Us, and since March 2020 he has co-hosted *Blocked and Reported* with the journalist Katie Herzog, a podcast about internet pile-ons and media controversies. He writes the [[Substack]] newsletter *Singal-Minded*, contributes to [[The Dispatch]], and is the author of *The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills* (2021), a book about overhyped social science. ## The gender-medicine reporting Singal is known mostly for one subject. His cover story in the July/August 2018 issue of [[The Atlantic]], "When Children Say They're Trans," followed families and clinicians weighing medical transition for minors, and gave prominent space to young people who had stopped or reversed course. Supporters read it as careful reporting on an unsettled medical question. Many transgender writers and advocates said it overstated how often young people change their minds and handed arguments to politicians who wanted to restrict care. In March 2021 [[GLAAD]] added him to its Accountability Project, a public list of figures the group says spread anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Singal rejected the entry as recycled online rumor that had already been debunked. The fight over his work has grown along with the policy fight itself: by June 2025 the Supreme Court had upheld Tennessee's ban on transition care for minors in [[United States v. Skrmetti]]. ## The Bluesky episode Singal joined [[Bluesky]] in December 2024. Within about two weeks he was the most-blocked account on the platform, and a petition asking the company to ban him had passed 25,000 signatures. After a brief suspension the account stayed up. He kept the most-blocked title until Vice President [[JD Vance]] joined the site in June 2025. Both sides treated the episode as proof. To Singal's critics it showed a community defending itself from someone they consider hostile to transgender people. To his defenders, including conservative outlets such as Breitbart, which described him as a progressive journalist, it showed a left-leaning platform that could not tolerate a dissenting reporter. ## Why it's on the map Singal is the liberal edge of [[Heterodox Media]]. He shares the model (a subscriber-funded newsletter and podcast) and the quarrel (with progressive consensus and with the newsrooms that enforce it), but he has not made the move to right-wing platforms that defines [[Glenn Greenwald]] or [[Jimmy Dore]]. He still writes for mainstream publications, and a 2025 profile in the British magazine UnHerd cast him as a defender of liberalism against its own activist wing. That makes him a useful test of where the category ends. If "heterodox" means leaving the left, he does not qualify. If it means building an audience by challenging what one's own side treats as settled, he is one of its most successful examples. Compare [[Bari Weiss]], who started from a similar place and built [[The Free Press]] into an institution of its own. ## Connections - [[Heterodox Media]] · [[Bari Weiss]] · [[The Free Press]] · [[Matt Taibbi]] - [[Substack]] · [[Bluesky]] · [[The Atlantic]] · [[New York Magazine]] · [[The Dispatch]] - [[GLAAD]] · [[United States v. Skrmetti]] · [[Cancel Culture]]