Jesse Singal Says He Didn’t Delete Twitter Account Over Trans Coverage Uproar — He’s Just on a Break
Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via AP
Writer Jesse Singal said he did not delete his Twitter account over a fresh uproar that met his coverage of transgender issues, he’s on a pre-planned break from the platform.
Singal, a prominent journalist who has written for New York Magazine and The Atlantic, once again drew the ire of Twitter after he published an interview on his Substack with Jamie Reed, a whistleblower who claimed she saw “morally and medically appalling” treatment of trans children when she worked at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. His reporting came under fire from critics who alleged Reed committed HIPAA violations by revealing the medical information of patients at the hospital.
When Singal’s account was deleted this week, speculation ran rampant that he shut down his account in response to the backlash, or even to cover up HIPAA violations.
In a statement to Mediaite he said the deletion of this account was pre-planned and had nothing to do with the criticism he faced:
I tweeted on March 9th that I would shortly be taking a full Twitter break, shutting down my account and starting up an alt (@jsingalfeed) that I would use simply to tweet out my work, but for nothing else. I’d been considering this for a long time simply because the site has a toxic effect on me. It makes me twitchier and less charitable and angrier than I would be otherwise, and many of its most active users tend to have — I’ll phrase this diplomatically — arguably fraught relationships with concepts like decency and accuracy. On March 14th, shortly before deactivating, I did a quick Substack post explaining my decision, linking to the March 9th tweet. I figured I should document the decision somewhere other than Twitter, since once I shut down Twitter my non-archived tweets would be unavailable.
Naturally, once I shut down the account a thousand new lies bloomed, most of them claiming my departure was related to this article which I posted the day after announcing my break. These theories — rigorously researched and super serious — ranged from “He deleted Twitter because he is worried he is going to jail” (for violating HIPAA, a law to which I am not subject, and which many of Twitter’s most astute legal analysts belief is known as “HIPPA”) to “He deleted his account because he was so humiliated he didn’t recognize that ‘I sexually identify as an attack helicopter’ was an internet meme” (very high up in the story in question, I explicitly explain that it is an internet meme). It was exceptionally stupid, and nicely summed up why I left Twitter. I couldn’t resist a final, cathartic parting shot once my cohost, Katie Herzog informed me that I was a trending topic (THANKS FOR NOTHING, KATIE), but tl;dr, as the kids say, is that this was a planned departure having nothing to do with anything but my desire to break a very stupid and embarrassing addiction. I regret to inform Twitter I am alive, well, and not going to prison — at least not until the police figure out what I did during my ill-fated trip to Wilmington, Delaware in the summer of 2015.
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