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| Jesse Singal wonders if his Kiwi Farms tech support is any good ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
Kiwi Farms is a website known for targeting people, encouraging doxxing and swatting, and encouraging people to commit suicide. Several articles have been written about their tactics.
Mother Jones had this to say about Kiwi Farms:
Most websites aren’t known for having a “kill count.” Kiwi Farms is. Its victims reportedly include Julie Terryberry, who in 2016 took her life after being targeted by users of the site. Two years later, after years of harassment from Kiwi Farms trolls, Chloe Sagal lit herself on fire in a public park. In June 2021, an American video game developer based in Japan, named David Ginder, took their life amid a campaign of Kiwi Farms abuse.
Kiwi Farms is a forum similar in design to 4chan or 8chan, where anonymous posters gather. But instead of just spreading noxious discourse, Kiwi Farms users turn to the site to plan and coordinate. They work to make the lives of their targets a living hell. Their tactics include doxxing, SWATing, defaming, encouraging self-harm, and stalking, online and sometimes off.
The nearly decade-old US forum is notorious for hosting hate content — including the Christchurch mass killer’s footage and other terrorist manifestos — and coordinating harassment, stalking and revealing private information about people (known as “doxxing”).
Kiwi Farms members have relentlessly bullied people who’ve expressed suicidal ideation, often picking on marginalised groups. Multiple suicides have been linked to the forum.
The reporting on Kiwifarms continues to be abysmal. I have no doubt the site harassed Fong-Jones, but to leave out the fact that Trans Lifeline's old leadership IN FACT EMBEZZLED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS FROM THE ORGANIZATION is inexcusable.[81]
"A kiwi farmer reached out to me claiming to have figured out the tech problems I'm having. Does this makes sense to those who are techier than me? I indeed get an error when I click on the user name so no idea how to block."
Bluesky users noticed.
For the better part of a week, Bluesky has been engulfed in a crisis over uneven enforcement of its terms of service. Anti-trans pundit Jesse Singal joined the platform, was automatically banned, unbanned, then labelled with "intolerance" to limit his reach, then finally manually unlabelled. He has remained up on the platform since last Friday, and has been using his presence on the platform to post private health information, direct harassment mobs at vulnerable people, and otherwise serve as a lightning rod for "colonizing Bluesky with 'normal people'" drawn from his Twitter following.
As Bluesky crosses 25 million accounts, it is faced with the ire of its longest standing users who supported the platform in its earliest years. A public petition launched today demanding that Bluesky not grant a special exemption to people who are "famous" or "journalists" that allows them to break the Terms of Service and drive marginalised people off the platform. In only 8 hours, the petition has 13,000 signatures. Thousands of users have separately pledged to not subscribe to the service's forthcoming premium product until confidence in moderation is restored.
Personally, I do not blame Aaron Rodericks here; the buck stops with Jay Graber, her executive team, and the board. It is her right to make a business decision to choose to keep Singal on the platform. That choice will have far reaching consequences for whether the platform is truly a change from Twitter for the better, or merely a repetition of the same problems with moderation and safety Twitter faced.
Strangely enough, Platform T&S saw no problems with immediately yeeting Libs of Tiktok and Kiwi Farms / Joshua Moon off the platform. The only reason I can think of that Singal has an exemption is because he wears the cloak of journalism while stabbing with transphobic harassment.
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| Nina Paley included Jesse Singal as one of her anti-trans good guys in her "Gender Wars" cards along with Matt Walsh and Kiwi Farms. -------------------------------------------------------- |
And yet in the case of Pinker and Singal, they persistently ally with extremists. Pinker with Steve Sailer and Richard Hanania, Singal with Nina Paley (a big fan of Kiwi Farms) and... Richard Hanania. But Pinker never uses the N word and Singal never uses the word "Troon" so the ill-informed may believe that Pinker and Singal are just fine, just asking questions in good faith about their area of interest.
When Steven Pinker was criticized for his positive comments about the alt-right, Singal defended him.
It really is remarkable, the overlap between people who promote race pseudoscience and the people who promote hostility towards the personal lives of trans people.
I knew of Alice Dreger for her support of the racist E. O. Wilson and her connection to Quillette, but I only recently became aware of something called "the Dregerian Narrative." Dreger is an influential anti-trans activist.
It's like they're all part of an organized group, all using the same talking points.
I think that journalist Tom Scocca has provided the best analysis of the Jesse Singal narrative:
In absolute numbers, there are many, many more people who regret having gotten abortions than who regret a gender transition. But like detransitioners, they are a tiny fraction of the relevant total. Presented with a study showing that the percentage of patients who regret getting abortions appears to be in the low single digits, Reuters did not send its investigative team to find the exceptions, but simply went with the headline “Overwhelming majority of U.S. women don’t regret abortion: study.”
What makes trans care different? The ordinary liberal reader may be squeamish about this or that aspect of abortion, but they are fundamentally committed to the idea that abortion patients and their doctors are the ones best equipped to figure out what to do with a pregnancy. It is not the job of some outside party or institution—a controlling parent or spouse, a church, a Republican legislative majority, a major national newspaper—to step in and second-guess what they do with their bodies.
For trans care, this liberal theory of autonomy and decision-making is cast aside. The theoretical Times reader is ready to consume 15,000 words about the risks, controversies, and downsides of contemporary gender treatment because, at bottom, they are assumed to be dismayed by it all. An abortion patient is really pregnant, but trans youth—children who “say they’re transgender,” as the Atlantic put it back in 2018—maybe aren’t really trans, or wouldn’t be, if they had more time and better information.
The finer points of this belief are usually laid out only in bits and pieces. Jesse Singal, in a newsletter post defending the Times story about the perils of undisclosed social transition at school, was more direct than the Times itself dared to be:
A lot of kids appear to suddenly (or seemingly suddenly) come out as trans, and anecdotally, at least, it seems like it happens more often in the case of kids who are on the autism spectrum and/or have other mental health problems and/or are dealing with some sort of jarring event, whether a pandemic or a divorce or something else.
That is, the gender dysphoria that leads young people to seek gender treatment is only a side phenomenon of the fact that they are emotionally disturbed, and possibly mentally disabled. In their vulnerability, they’ve been caught up in a wave of sudden public approval for gender nonconformity and pushed to identify themselves as trans. Singal wrote:
…you’ll see that mere discomfort with the way you are “supposed” to act or dress as a boy or girl, and a desire to act or dress differently, means you’re trans (if you want to be), even if you don’t have gender dysphoria. Sure enough, a lot of people, particularly young ones, seem to come out as trans much more to make a statement about their desire to transgress gender boundaries than because they are suffering serious anguish at having a (fe)male body or being seen by others as (fe)male.
The recent increase in the number of young people identifying as trans, by this account, is not mainly because some of the brutal societal barriers against being visibly trans have been lifted, but because fashion and social contagion are capturing more and more adolescent tomboy girls or homosexual boys, lumping them in with the smaller population of genuine trans kids who truly need transition to treat their dysphoria. And then, the story goes, a combination of overeager clinicians and bullying activists—hostile to the very idea of skepticism or doubt—works to steer the not-really-trans kids onto the path toward hormones and surgery, away from their natural bodies and true identities, as fast as possible.
Singal has also been accused of unprofessionalism, per Protean Magazine:
Singal’s habit of consistently and viciously attacking his critics poisons the well; it deflects any chance of real criticism, since it allows him to claim that any given critic simply personally dislikes him. He has, of course, helped ensure that this is the case by treating them poorly. This bad behavior extends beyond minor Twitter slap fights—it’s also a means of warping the conversation, punishing and dismissing dissenting voices before they can even speak. Leveling threats and directing abuse at sources and experts in this way goes beyond mere unprofessionalism—for a journalist, it’s genuinely unethical.
Perhaps this is why so many trans people and their allies detest Jesse Singal.
And Singal for his part does not seem at all concerned about his reputation. After all, he is still a mainstream journalist, and journalists like Benjamin Ryan of the NYTimes, NBCNews, Washington Post, and the Guardian are his devoted defenders. Plus Singal pumps out right-wing propaganda for Reason Magazine.
And with Trump ascendent, anti-trans hatred is ascendant. It looks like Jesse Singal is ready to take his place as a courtier of the kakistocracy, partying with the Bari Weiss gang of grifters on election night.
So that is probably why, even though he was in the middle of a controversy over whether or not he should be allowed to stay on Bluesky due to antagonizing trans people, Jesse Singal decided to reveal that he had a comfortable relationship with people at Kiwi Farms.
