So I’ll try to just take these claims one at a time, and I’ll include both screenshots and links so you guys so you can see the original tweets.

1. The accusation I harassed or contributed to the harassment of Serano on Twitter

Serano says:

[S]ometime around August 12, 2016, when my Twitter notifications were suddenly flooded with social conservatives, TERFs, and (to a lesser degree) people who have detransitioned, all of whom were virtual-yelling at me for supposedly denying the existence of people who detransition. Even though I never said or insinuated either of those things in my Medium essay or Vox interview (this is plainly obvious if you read the actual pieces). Turns out that this backlash was largely attributable to an alarmist tweet (or tweets, I don’t remember if it was more than one, and I cannot access them now that he shut his Twitter account down) Singal posted wherein he falsely claimed that this was what I was saying. In other words, he flat-out spread lies about me. This is how I responded upon learning about this (click the tweet to read the entire thread).

It looks like I indeed tweeted some stuff criticizing her for telling Vox’s German Lopez “In my article, I debunk this ‘cisgender people turned transgender’ trope, which seems to be driving much of these debates. For one thing, these are not ‘cisgender people’ per se — they are people who fall somewhere along the transgender spectrum, but for whom transitioning was not the right answer.”

I thought, and think, it’s pretty nuts and offensive to describe people who self-ID as cisgender after detransitioning, and many of whom believe they were supposed to be cis lesbians all along, as “fall[ing] somewhere along the transgender spectrum,” similar to how it would be offensive for me to say that people who say they are trans after a period of living as cis really “fall somewhere along the cisgender spectrum” — I mean, obviously not the same thing, but same basic idea.

That was what I tweeted about — I was a little snarky but I guess I just don’t see this as “harassment”? I think these days I’d be less likely to be so snarky about it — I’ve gotten somewhat better at letting my work speak for itself rather than getting mad on Twitter, though I still have my slipups. Vox’s treatment of this just really annoyed me because I had interviewed a lot of detransitioners who I thought were getting thrown under the bus by the site’s attempt to be “pro-trans” in a pretty superficial way that denied detransitioners could possibly point to actual problems in the TGNC care system. Plus, the detransitioners themselves didn’t like being told they were on the “trans spectrum,” as some of them informed her via Twitter, if memory serves. At least one of them did a YouTube video, too. The interview really pissed them off.

Serano is correct, at least to a reasonable degree, that I was, in fact, accusing her of saying genuine detransitioners don’t exist. But I don’t think that’s a “lie,” as she claims. My reasoning is that if, as she claims, the women weren’t really cisgender (rather, they’re on the “transgender spectrum”) then they can’t have actually detransitioned (that is, what would they have transitioned from/to?). I pretty much laid that out here, again with more snark that I’d like to think I’d use two years later.

Anyway, here is a link to view all the times I have mentioned the term Serano on Twitter. I’m counting 21 out of approximately 84,500 lifetime tweets (I am wasting my life), albeit mostly bunched up around the time the bad Vox article came out. The only time I have ever tagged her in a tweet is here, to request an interview. She’s only tweeted at me twice, in both cases to accuse me of “slutsham[ing]” her for linking positively to her Daily Beast piece about dating while trans (it’s a good piece). Obviously I could be deleting damning tweets on the down-low, but 1) I’m not; and 2) if I were, someone would have a screencap of my alleged harassment.

I have no doubt some detransitioners and radical feminists/TERFs were mean to Serano online, and like I said my own tweets were probably too snarky. But she is a professional writer and activist, and people are going to be mean to her online when she talks about fraught issues like detransition. Obviously anything that rises above the level of merely mean to harassment is unacceptable, and I would gladly chide anyone who did that. I do think women, trans and cis alike, get harassed and yelled at more than cisgender guys like me, for sure. But still: I believe I’m presenting a pretty complete account of my own tweets about/to her, and I don’t think they crossed a boundary into what could reasonably called harassment or incitement. We disagree on this stuff.

2. The accusation I directed harassment at Katelyn Burns by quote-retweeting her with the #GamerGate hashtag

Serano writes: “In the aforementioned Katelyn Burns thread, she says about Singal, ‘I was one of hundreds of trans people trying to explain why he was wrong. He singled me out and quote tweeted me with the GG h/t before blocking me.’”

There are no tweets with the terms @jessesingal, @closettransgirl (her handle at the time), and #GamerGate, nor are there tweets with my name, the hashtag, and her current handle, @transscribe. I guess it’s possible that I accidentally quote-retweeted her with the hashtag and then deleted it? I definitely wouldn’t do that on purpose, but I’m also frankly skeptical that me disagreeing with Burns on a technical/scientific matter pertaining to the Zucker story — the sort of stuff we were arguing about — would cause her to be beset with online harassment. (There are also no tweets with just her handle at the time and the GG hashtag, which, while not dispositive, also runs a bit contrary to the idea she dealt with much online harassment from GamerGaters at the time — if there had been any attempt to swarm her with harassment, the hashtag likely would have popped up.)

Anyway, it could be two different claims are getting confused here. I do have an email from Burns from back in 2016 in which she says a screenshot of our interaction was posted in KotakuInAction, the GamerGate subreddit (I had basically told her it’s tough to argue technical stuff about Zucker/CAMH on Twitter, and that I was going to block her but she was welcome to email me):

This seems to be a different claim, and when I asked her to send me a link to the thread, she replied:

The thread is here — GamerGate has long been fixated on me so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they were following the drama that popped off after my Zucker article went up closely. I’m not seeing any reference to her or anything that would have caused her to be harassed, and as she acknowledges whatever she is claiming was posted there didn’t lead to anything. So I’m not sure how to respond to these charges that I incited GamerGate harassment against Burns unless someone can provide me with more information about what I was alleged to have done.

3. The accusation that I sicced GamerGate supporters on Burns by tagging my Medium post debunking her lies about our interactions with “GamerGate.”

Serano writes:

Shortly after this piece went live, Katelyn Burns/@transscribe announced that she had to lock her Twitter account because conservative media interlopers started quote-tweeting her. (So if you already follow her, you can access it; if you do not, you cannot access the thread, at least for the time being.) Neither she nor I have a high enough profile that right-wing media outlets are following our every move. If I had to venture a guess, I'd bet it was a result of Singal tagging his post with "GamerGate", which he knew full well would attract alt-right/anti-SJW types, who may have in turn spread the word about her thread. I am only speculating here, but this is the simplest explanation (one that does not involve anyone purposefully contacting right-wing media outlets about trans women speaking up).

First off, this doesn’t make any sense at all. I have a large Twitter account that I used to publicize my blog post defending myself. Plus, both the alt-right and GamerGate supporters have written at length about me, view me (mostly) as an enemy, and gleefully attach themselves to any drama which occurs between myself and the more intense corner of the online social-justice left (this is why I now have an article on Milo Yiannopoulos's website painting me as someone who “harasses” trans women, which is lovely — thanks to everyone who spread those rumors despite not seeing a single bit of evidence to support them). Given that I was absolutely going to write a Medium post debunking Burns’ claims and accusing her of dishonesty — since she did, in fact, fabricate multiple interactions between us that never occurred — there was simply no conceivable scenario in which the right-wing end of the spectrum of people who were going to care about this drama in the first place weren’t going to find out that I was accusing Burns of dishonesty. The idea that I would need to sneakily (except right out in the open) tag a Medium post to somehow publicize it to them doesn’t make sense or jibe with a basic understanding of the online communities at play here. And, again, my goal wasn’t to have people harass Katelyn Burns — my goal was to defend myself against the serious, potentially career-damaging allegations she leveled, almost all of which were clearly contradicted by the email record. The only stuff that wasn’t easily contradictable was her claim that during what was in fact a friendly lunch I badgered her with offensive questions, which also didn’t happen, as well as a few claims covered in communication that was explicitly off the record. (For now, I’m not comfortable sharing those conversations, but I feel no moral compunction about eventually posting them if these allegations continue to swirl — I can think of no conceivable understanding of “off the record” in which, after an interview subject accuses a journalist of harassing them during an off-the-record conversation, the journalist doesn’t then have a right to publish that conversation. It’s nonsensical to imagine “off the record” would still apply in such a situation.)

Anyway: The Medium post was, in fact, tagged #GamerGate for a spell. Burns lied about plenty of other stuff, but not this. When I first found out about the tag I had genuinely no explanation why, and I deleted it. What I realized after someone got the Medium post taken down and I had to repost it was that Medium automatically generated the GG post as a default tag. I don’t know why Medium did this — I only mention “GamerGate” once in the body of the article so it’s strange it would autopopulate it with that one tag. Either way, in what is almost certainly an act of over-explanation, I posted a video of this happening for you guys here. If you are extremely bored it isn’t hard for anyone with a Medium account to replicate this — just copy and paste the body of my post into a Medium account, and that hashtag should pop up.

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I think I addressed the main accusations. If I missed any definitely let me know. I’m going to a friend’s to watch basketball but I’ll bring the laptop so I’ll be available tonight. I completely understand why you guys want to be careful about this stuff and I appreciate both the time and care so many staffers have put into this piece, and you giving me a chance to defend myself.

-Jesse