Substack is Still a Problem

The controversial newsletter company capped off a bad week by acquiring a company with multiple TERFs on its masthead. Surprise.

For one hot second, transphobia at Substack was a major news story. The newsletter platform was trendy in media circles. Its content often went viral. It paid writers, sometimes in the six-figure range. It also hosted a growing number of vehemently transphobic pundits, and because it refused to disclose which writers had received advances, there was no way to know which TERFs had been hired by Substack and which ones were just doing it for the love of the game.

The tension boiled over last spring, when many trans writers (including me) left the company in protest. Substack responded by calling their critics “the thought police” and insisting that it would never bow to pressure campaigns; after all, co-founder Hamish McKenzie wrote, “a hero can be thought a villain, and a villain a hero. History makes this clear.” Substack eventually hired a few high-profile trans writers, criticism mostly died down, and it was down to History to determine the heroism or villainy of the people involved.

History took about four months. This week, seemingly every reactionary on their platform made a fool of themselves simultaneously, culminating in an announcement that Substack had acquired a company which boasts multiple TERFs on its masthead. Substack has made its stance on hate speech very clear: They don’t care, and they don’t plan to care. The question is whether anyone still wants to hold them accountable.

Let us begin by surveying the wreckage. It’s hard to sum up any series of decisions this stupid, but I’ll start with the top earner: Matthew Yglesias, who reportedly received a $250,000 advance from the blogging platform for his political insights. Yglesias responded to a bit of viral news about Matt Damon using “the f-slur for a homosexual” by recommending that Damon run for office as a Democrat. Then, using his $250,000 brain, Yglesias himself dropped the f-bomb.

Meanwhile, across town, Jesse Singal (who denies receiving a Substack advance, but says he has a “good relationship” with the founders of the platform) was once again flipping out about “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” ROGD, a fictitious mental disorder in which teenagers are persuaded to identify as transgender through “social contagion,” is Singal’s particular raison d’shitre, and the unspoken premise of his best-known work. Now, over thirty mental health associations, including the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association, have co-signed a letter saying that it doesn’t exist. Jesse Singal boldly stepped forward to declare that if doctors won’t endorse this made-up mental illness, then the doctors are wrong:

The circle of Hell beneath Jesse Singal is dire indeed, but this is where we must go, directly to the part of Dante where everyone is buried in human shit up to their nostrils: The unholy alliance of Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald.

Bari Weiss is a former New York Times staffer who used her tenure to flirt openly with the far right. Glenn Greenwald is a former leftist hero who used his platform to… also flirt pretty openly with the far right, but he still used to hate Bari Weiss. However, Glenn’s had a real bee in his bonnet about trans people recently, and that’s evidently enough to overcome their differences. The article Glenn links to is by Jesse Singal’s equally irritating but more obscure podcast co-host, Katie Herzog — herself a ubiquitous presence on TERFstack, having contributed rants about the woke trans agenda to users such as Greenwald, Weiss, and “race science” enthusiast Andrew Sullivan.

This particular rant, about how med schools are “denying biological sex” by using gender-inclusive language, made it all the way to the top of r/med before moderators stepped in to affirm that Katie Herzog is just a random transphobic person, and not an expert on medicine or biology. Citing recurring problems with “the highly political and dubiously sourced Bari Weiss Substack,” the moderators banned blog and newsletter links from their forum. Thus, we get the week’s second temper tantrum about medical research standards from Jesse Singal:

People: It is Wednesday.

Now, for the crowning glory. Yglesias was barely done scrubbing the slurs out of his Twitter feed when TechCrunch publicized the news that Substack had acquired the debate platform Letter. That company’s co-founder, Clyde Rathbone, has publicly fulminated against “cancel culture” and applauded the Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” which was widely understood to be a statement of support for author J.K. Rowling’s transphobia. Letter’s list of writers includes a murderer’s row of transphobic and reactionary figures, including Harper’s-letter mastermind Thomas Chatterton Williams, “wokeism” opponent Ayaan Hirsi Ali, British TERF Louise Perry, and Abigail Shrier, whose book on trans children, Irreversible Damage, is so notoriously bigoted that Amazon refuses to advertise it.

Hearing that Amazon thinks you’re too evil to advertise with them is like hearing that Satan won’t come to your birthday party because he thinks you’re a bit of a dick — but this did not evidently pose a concern to the founders of Letter, or to the top brass at Substack, who rejoice that “the Letter team shares Substack’s values” and say they’re “thrilled” to have Clyde Rathbone and the rest as colleagues. In a statement to TechCrunch, Substack brushed off concerns with some anodyne corporate language about “views that you or I may not like,” noting that “the fact that Letter allowed writers to openly debate and discuss is consistent with [our] philosophy.”

It sure is.

It’s true that not all of the above malefactors are directly on Substack’s payroll, though they have all been allowed to generate comfortable or more-than-comfortable incomes from it. It’s true that the writer we do know to have an advance, Yglesias, is the most nominally “centrist” — but the fact that Yglesias’ anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment is quiet does not mean it isn’t real. Aside from the casual homophobia above, Yglesias signed the Harpers’ letter, publicly blamed a trans colleague who criticized that letter for the fact that he left Vox, and likewise defends Singal against trans criticism. He might be respectable, but that arguably makes him more dangerous than a figure like Greenwald, who increasingly strikes people as a crank.

After months of furious criticism and protests and bad PR, Substack waited for the story to die down on social media and went right back to handing money to reactionaries.

It’s also true that, if media gossip is to be believed, Substack has seemingly tried to recruit more trans and queer writers following criticism. (You’re welcome?) Media is precarious, and I can’t blame marginalized writers for doing what it takes to earn a living. All I can do is invoke old sayings about what you get when you lie down with dogs, and say that what you get when you lie down with Matthew Yglesias is probably much worse. Substack’s team has already shown why they want trans writers, which is that they want to be able to release a statement about “trans writers on Substack” whenever there’s a new headline about transphobia on their service. If I had agreed to sign up to help them diversify, I would be feeling mighty betrayed right about now.

VC money can buy a lot of things, including “diversity,” but diversity is not the same thing as accountability, and accountability is what Substack has refused at every point down the line. Whether through oversight or intent, Substack has allowed a group of bigoted and increasingly well-networked media professionals to promote false and inflammatory anti-trans talking points. This has been pointed out to them many times, and they still invoke vague ideals of “free speech” to disclaim responsibility for people getting hurt.

That people will get hurt is not in question. Anti-vaxxers and coronavirus deniers have shown that even ludicrous claims can acquire a veneer of legitimacy on the Internet, and that when people lie about public health, sickness and death result. Transphobic scaremongering about “rapid onset gender dysphoria” or “woke culture” is no more grounded in science than those other conspiracy theories — which is why figures like Singal increasingly spend their time railing against medical institutions that disagree with them. It’s nice that Katie Herzog’s unsubstantiated article was banned from r/med, but even so, an unsubstantiated article made it to the top of r/med. That’s not free speech. It’s medical disinformation, and just like anti-vax propaganda, it could get people killed.

It’s true that all blogging is looser and less vetted than magazine writing. (I’m blogging right now!) It’s true that all platforms have their problems. (All of these people are plenty obnoxious on Twitter.) But that’s the point: Twitter became a cesspool of harassment and a breeding ground for white nationalism precisely because it refused to crack down on bad-faith users in its early stages. Donald Trump became President on the back of poor content moderation, and he had to incite a full-on coup before he was banned.

That doesn’t have to happen again. Substack is still young enough and small enough that it could take a proactive stance on moderation. It could, at bare minimum, disable funding to newsletters that openly violate its terms of service, like the infamous Andrew Sullivan post that calls for trans segregation; if what these writers really care about is “free speech,” they can presumably speak for free. Instead, it has taken a completely hands-off approach. Bigots are able to treat spreading disinformation about trans people as a full-time job — because it is their full-time job, one that Substack makes profitable.

Transphobia must be profitable to Substack, too, at least in the short term. It doesn’t seem like something they’re willing to lose. After months of furious criticism and protests and bad PR, they threw some money at the problem, waited for the story to die down on social media, and then — just as soon as it seemed like things had blown over — they went right back to handing money to reactionaries. We know who they are, and they’re not changing. The best thing to do is to walk away.