Ben Ryan Rages at Me on Twitter
Instead of looking into the glut of research that doesn’t fit his confirmation bias, Ben Ryan is angrily asserting that he’s an industry pro after I dared to question his venerated Washington Post piece.
Opinion, by Alyssa Steinsiek
It appears I have acquired… a nemesis.
Yesterday we ran what I thought was a solid story about a perplexingly angry cisgender journalist, Benjamin Ryan, and his Washington Post opinion article that I characterized as “a meandering bore.” Well, Ryan, having found my article two hours after it published, tweeted 27 times about how normal and right he is, and how unfair and inaccurate my article was.
screenshot from Twitter
Ben, it seems, has taken yet another step down the path of transphobes everywhere: degendering trans women you don’t like. I don’t list my pronouns often, so I’ll cut Ben some slack and clarify: They are “she” and “her,” and I am a woman, not “this person.”
Now he can get it right in his next thread!
At Assigned Media, we take requests for corrections very seriously. Nobody gets it right every time, so we do our best to receive critique gracefully and, when necessary, make changes and issue corrections quickly. To that end, two changes were made to my article.
First, I made a transposing error in counting the number of words in his article. It was not “nearly 1,500 words,” but instead 998 words. I apologize for this mistake, but Ben seems to think his article was 993 words, so I guess everybody slips up here and there. I’ll extend Ben the grace that he so staunchly refuses to grant me. I am magnanimous. [I’ve got 995 -ed]
Second, I swapped the words “Review” and “Report” in one place, which we corrected.
Now that those corrections are out of the way, I’d like to address the rest of Ben’s grievances, which he considers factual errors, for some reason. I won’t be going through each and every one of them because, frankly, most are as lame as his Washington Post article. Many are simply his opinion. Which I don’t agree with.
totally unrelated screenshot from Twitter
Ben asked me to correct the headline, which describes him as raging at trans women. I think I substantiated that pretty well in the article, but since he’s fussing about it, we asked two women he’s raged at.
“Ben Ryan mentioned me in over 80 tweets over the course of 5 days before I had to block him,” said independent journalist Erin Reed. “His behavior towards transgender journalists and writers goes far beyond typical fact checking and well into what many have described as ‘raging.’ I think that the characterization is fair.”
Harvard Law lecturer and activist, Alejandra Caraballo, said: “Tweeting about someone hundreds of times over the course of a few weeks in this obsessive manner would constitute raging against someone.”
Ben’s third and fourth points dispute the safety of puberty blockers. Listen, Ben, I cited five respectable groups who think blockers are A-OK. Your beloved Cass Review found no evidence of any harms or dangers. The drugs have been used to treat precocious puberty since at least the 1980s.
Ben’s fifth point, callously titled “the mass suicide claim,” cites a single weak study on suicidality among trans youth. Trans youth aren’t just a set of data points, and it is frankly obscene to treat them as a statistic to play games with. Medical experts largely agree that gender-affirming care saves lives, and there are other studies that refute Ben’s favorite.
Also, the Finland clinic from which Ben’s cited study originates has been accused by patients’ parents of psychologically torturing and abusing young trans children.
This wasn’t the only time Ben cherry picked fringe researchers to cite as authoritative sources. After more ranting, he mentions a presentation given at a Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine conference. SEGM is an anti-trans activist organization that promotes medical misinformation, has a very long history of anti-LGBTQ+ work, and whose board members include self-admitted conversion therapists.
Ben’s sixth point is about youth fertility—a very normal topic that only normal people obsess over. Here he references “The WPATH Files,” which… come on, dude. Grow up.
For his seventh point, Ben argues about whether or not “trans-identified” is a slur. I was very clear about this in yesterday’s article, and I see no need to dignify his prevaricating with any further remarks.
Points eight through twelve are, if I’m being honest, some of the most tedious nitpicking I’ve ever seen. I do not have enough time or energy to rebut childish prodding, so we’ll move on to points thirteen, fourteen and fifteen, for which I’ve wrangled quotes from powerful cisgender man and Sausage King of Chicago, Evan Urquhart.
Regarding Ben’s 13th gripe, that I said the Cass Review “discarded valuable data,” Mr. Urquhart says: “Different phrases can be chosen to characterize the Cass Review's approach to scientific evidence, which included speculation and poorly sourced claims in places where it was skeptical of trans medicine, but held evidence on the other side to an extremely high standard. Assigned Media considers the shorthand ‘discarded... valuable data’ one among many potentially accurate ways to describe this pattern.”
On Ben’s 14th snicket, about “Confusing the Cass Review with the lit reviews,” Evan says: “Assigned Media house style allows writers to refer to the Final Report of the Cass Review as ‘the Cass Report’ and subsequently ‘the Report.’ It allows writers to refer to the full 4-year Cass Review, including all papers commissioned specifically for it, as ‘the Cass Review’ or ‘the Review.’ In one spot in Alyssa's piece Report was used in place of Review. We updated it to Review for reader clarity.”
Finally, in response to Ben’s 15th boohoo, that “Cass reportedly said puberty blockers are safe,” Urquhart says: “The Kite Trust is a longstanding LGBTQ+ youth organization in England. They published a transcript of answers Hilary Cass gave to questions they put to her concerning the Cass Report. No one has denied that Cass met with the Kite Trust or that she made these statements. As a journalistic organization, Assigned Media does not consider the fact that the Cass team didn't officially sign off on her statements material to their accuracy.”
screenshot from Twitter, where pro journalists should know what libel is
At long last we have reached Ben’s final critique, another mixup between fact and opinion. He claims I “falsely characterized the tone and tenor of [his] responses to criticism.” To counter that claim I present to you Ben’s response when Evan Urquhart reached out to him on my behalf for a comment:
“My comment to you is that you are a true disgrace as a reporter. You constantly publish and tweet falsehoods about medicine and science and make false and defamatory claims about other reporters. You do not do the work to get it right. You have no business lording over other reporters.”
Suffice it to say, I do not believe I mischaracterized Ben’s tone or tenor. I believe Ben has thin skin, an unhealthy obsession with transgender people, and a deeply biased perspective on transgender medicine.
In short, I think Ben should stop writing about trans people, because he clearly hasn’t got a clue.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer and video games nerd who cohosts a podcast about trans news!
