Read on Twitter
Hey psychology twitter. The journalist Jesse Singal is probably going to be showing up on your radar because he has a new book about social psychology. He has also written about trans people. I want to encourage you to read what trans people have said about that work
There is a lot of stuff out there and it can feel a little overwhelming. Here is one place to start, a collection of links to critiques of a very influential 2018 Atlantic article he wrote https://www.patreon.com/posts/19542136
This tweet and the thread it is a part of encapsulate some of what really sunk in the most to me about the criticism https://twitter.com/JuliaSerano/status/1008818007814967296
Our professional training is to evaluate empirical claims, so it may be tempting to dive into the critiques on that level. To be clear, that is important and there's good work doing that. But there is something else very important: the narrative that brings the claims together
Journalism is more than just a bag of sentences to fact-check one by one. It is also about what's presented and what's not. How things are positioned in relation to each other in a story. What gets emphasis. What's presented by a narrator, a credible source, or a fallible one
And it matters what audiences will bring with them - prior beliefs and assumptions, narratives already living in their heads that they will slot new stories into. All this means it's entirely possible to construct a misleading narrative even from individually true facts
Trans people are affected by those beliefs, assumptions, and popular narratives every day. So they are particularly attuned to how new narratives will actually be received, and how they are likely to be used against them https://twitter.com/GBBranstetter/status/1125867598657331202
If you're cis, your recognition may be fuzzier and slower, and it may be a learning process to understand what's going on. That's been the case for me, if that's any help to hear
I don't have some simple prescription for what to do with a new book that is (afaik) on a different topic. I haven't read it, so I don't have any opinion on its content. I'm certainly not calling for it to be "cancelled" [eyeroll]
But there are ways of engaging with a work that give spillover credibility to an author's other work, and ways that don't. And there are trans people in our academic community for whom this isn't some abstract exercise. All that is good reason for reading-up and reflection /end
