Jesse Singal is not mad. Please don’t put in the newspaper that he got mad

Jesse Singal has ostentatiously quit Twitter–at least for a couple of weeks, he promises–penning not one but two articles explaining this momentous decision. You can totally tell how much he simply does not care about this because he joked in his second piece that he was “writing this from prison. Internet Prison, which is the worst kind.”

HA HA, WOULD HE EVEN JOKE ABOUT THIS IF HE WERE MAD, LMAO?

The self-consciously contrarian journalist, who has proved himself over the years to be quite the useful idiot for the anti-trans forces, had landed himself in hot water over a piece he wrote attempting to vindicate a “whistleblower” who came forward last month to reveal what she said were abusive practices at a St. Louis gender clinic for minors, alleging that doctors and staff at the clinic pushed patients towards hormones and ultimately surgery without giving them adequate information or vetting. The whistleblower’s account was called into question after it appeared in ex-NYT columnist Bari Weiss’ online publication, the Free Press. most notably by a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who spoke to some twenty parents of children who had been patients at the clinic and found zero evidence that anything the “whistleblower” said was true.

Anyway, Singal’s article managed to reveal a lot of personal information from the medical records of various patients at the clinic, which for some reason the whistleblower apparently still has, even though she no longer works at the clinic. The information was anonymized, but enough details were given that any of those whose information was revealed would know the whistleblower was talking about them. As a result, various online critics suggested that at least one person involved in the story–the whistleblower herself and perhaps Singal as well–had committed HIPAA violations by revealing private medical information. (According to the CDC, the “Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law that required the creation of national standards to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge.”)

I’m no lawyer, so I don’t know if anybody violated anything, but I can tell you that Singal is definitely NOT MAD that people are suggesting he may have violated the law, which he DEFINITELY DIDN’T DO, GUYS.

He’s also NOT MAD that some people think he didn’t recognize the common transphobic joke about “identifying as an attack helicopter.”

In his second post on his Great Twitter Self-Suspension of 2023, he announced that he was definitely going to ignore his critics on Twitter, several of whom he quoted in the piece, and that he wasn’t going to respond to their attacks.

I could devote thousands of words to these tweets and how batshit insane they are. I could rush back onto Twitter to defend myself.

He then went on to devote hundreds of words to these tweets, asking:

—Does it make sense to claim I’m hiding evidence (for violating HIPAA, a law I’m not subject to) by deleting my Twitter account, but leaving the article in question up, unaltered save for one sentence I tweaked slightly, in a transparent manner?

—Does it makes sense to claim I was unaware of the helicopter joke/meme when I have written about it, podcasted about it, and when very early on in the article the junior detectives are mad about, I wrote “ ‘I sexually identify as an attack helicopter,’ after all, is a well-worn internet meme, often used as an attack against transgender people”?

But see? There I go again. Even there, I spent far too much time on these ghouls than they deserve.

Totally not mad.

My counterarguments are completely beside the point. The folks tweeting these rumors aren’t doing so because they’re true — they’re doing so because the goal is to inflict as much reputational damage on me as possible, and because at a certain point this becomes a bizarre, religiously infused sort of online spectator bloodsport governed by its own incomprehensible internal logic rather than any clearly thought-through goals or norms or tactics.

Or perhaps they genuinely feel you violated patients’ privacy in order to defend a dubious “whistleblower” who seems to want to do great harm to the trans movement.

Well, one part of it is comprehensible: they are wishcasting. Alejandra Caraballo is spinning what is, for her followers, a deeply satisfying yarn in which my own ignorance and carelessness led to my downfall. Her evidence my career is destroyed is I. . . logged off Twitter. That should tell you everything you need to know.

Of course, earlier this month, Singal also tweeted this, suggesting he’s not necessarily up on all the little details of HIPAA.

Not that Singal is mad that people keep reposting this. Not at all. He’s smiling and laughing, having the best time.

Follow me on Mastodon.

Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.

We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.