I Completely Disagree With Ken Jennings About Experts

On a popular but very myopic worldview

I’m late to this, but when the host of Jeopardy! name-checks you, how can you not write about it?

It was a negative name-check, to be clear. In March, Jennings wrote on Bluesky, “Jesse Singal: ‘I don’t understand why all these experts with degrees keep disagreeing with me. So demoralizing. What could the explanation be??’ ”

I need to engage in an annoying bit of pre-explaining (presplaining), because I deleted the tweet that precipitated all of this. I’ll relegate a fuller explanation to a footnote, but the short version is I did not mean to imply I favored the Ken Paxton policy in question. Rather, my post was a response to Jack Turban’s claim that there is a clear scientific consensus on the subject of youth gender transition — a claim he was not making for the first time.¹

Jennings, of course, got famous as a wildly successful contestant on, and then as the host of, a game show where almost every question has a single correct answer. (Well, it’s Jeopardy!, so technically every answer has a single correct question.)

Unfortunately, a sizable subset of the progressive world, in my experience, believes that extremely complex scientific disputes are more or less like Jeopardy! What’s the answer to a question? If there’s any ambiguity you consult a panel of judges — The Experts. Whatever The Experts say is the truth of the matter, and you can win an argument by citing the existence of an expert, or experts, who agree with whatever claim you’re promoting.

Does youth gender medicine work? Yes. What’s the detransition rate? Extremely low — like, wildly so. Are teenagers’ views of their gender identity influenced by social and cultural factors? Of course not. How do we know all of this? Because “the leading experts” agree. And you can, of course, find experts who will make these claims. In Jennings’ view, if you disagree with the experts, that is prima facie evidence something is wrong with your position, because experts are generally not to be questioned.

This conflation of “expert view” and “correct view” is common in progressive circles. The experts are basically the oracles: You go to them for the truth of the matter, as spoken directly by the science gods. There was a certain brilliance to the trans activist talking point that “the experts all agree” that youth gender medicine works, because respect for and deference to mainstream experts is burned into the modern progressive soul. Overwhelmingly, we’re the ones who both populate the nation’s sensemaking institutions and consume their output: We’re far more likely, compared to conservatives, to become university professors and journalists and public-health officials and to read scientific papers and pop-science treatments of controversial disputes. It’s one of the key ways we differentiate ourselves, whether the subject at hand is evolution, anthropogenic climate change, or youth gender medicine. We trust the experts; they do not.

To be sure, “trust the experts” works in some situations. We trust engineers to build bridges since the vast majority of the time, bridges don’t collapse. The development of the smallpox vaccine really did allow us to completely eliminate smallpox from the wild. I trust a trained engineer over some random guy to build a bridge, and I would not trust anyone who claimed the smallpox vaccine didn’t do what the experts claim it does. More generally, certain scientific debates do basically have two sides, with one being right and the other wrong. The small numbers of people who continue to believe in young-earth creationism or to not believe that humans cause climate change are wrong about the facts of the matter.

But these sorts of right-and-wrong science disputes generally center on very well-understood natural processes, very well-researched diseases and vaccines, and so on. Most matters of genuine, ongoing public scientific controversy are significantly more complex than that. Sometimes the science itself is unclear, sometimes the attendant questions of values and trade-offs are fiendishly difficult, and sometimes both. (There is no “right” or “wrong” answer to how long schools should have remained closed after the peak of the pandemic, for example.)

The contemporary progressive view of science, as reflected by Jennings, sweeps a huge amount of genuine complexity and controversy under the rug. Its adherents vastly overestimate the number of genuinely settled scientific controversies as well as the ability of scientific findings alone to resolve complex policy disputes in the first place. In doing so, they give “experts” far too much credit, and they give the average educated person far too little credit for their ability to challenge experts. On the whole, this understanding of science is profoundly elitist and disconnected from the messy realities of how research is practiced, and who is treated as an “expert” in the first place.

It’s Not Only Okay to Question Experts — It’s Necessary for a Healthy Public Science

Let’s take Jack Turban as an example, since it was his name that sparked this whole thing. Turban is impeccably credentialed: He’s a psychiatrist and professor at the UCSF School of Medicine, he has degrees from Harvard and Yale, he did his residency at Stanford, and he is regularly cited in major media outlets as an expert on youth gender medicine. As his bio page notes, he has won awards like the Excellence in Public Health Award from the U.S. Preventative Health Service, and he was named a Pride 30 Innovator by NBC.

In Jennings’ view, this is the platonic ideal of the trustworthy expert. Who would disagree with someone like that?

I think this is silly, elitist (I’m going to keep using that word because that’s really what this comes down to, more than anything), and wrongheaded. I think the average educated person can be trained to understand enough about the underlying concepts to either judge for themselves whether Jack Turban is trustworthy, or to be able to do a reasonable job interpreting public criticisms of Turban. (In some fields, that wouldn’t be the case. I don’t think the average educated person can understand complex disputes about quantum mechanics. That’s not what this is, though.)

Of course, it would be nice if this were unnecessary. It would be nice if, during a given dispute between multiple parties, we could apply some sort of mathematical formula that adds up everyone’s degrees, weighs for prestigiousness, and tells us who to trust. If that were the case, surely Jack Turban would win by sheer dint of the number of illustrious institutions he is affiliated with. But this would be very unwise.

To see why, let’s start with an extreme example: Just Some Blogger. If there’s anyone you shouldn’t trust on matters of science, in the Jennings/Bluesky world, it’s Just Some Blogger, right? Just Some Blogger is their bête noire, and for often solid reasons: When it comes to issues of genuine scientific misunderstanding, like the debunked link between vaccines and autism, who has done more damage than Just Some Blogger? Worse still are Just Some Blogger’s descendants, Just Some YouTuber and (ew) Just Some Substacker.

Except: You can’t always trust the impeccably credentialed expert over Just Some Blogger!

In 2021, as Turban was becoming an increasingly well-known name among those familiar with the youth gender medicine controversy, someone named JL Cederblom published a post to Medium titled “The Lukewarm Perjury of Jack Turban,” which is a deep dive into a single sworn statement Turban published as an expert witness in one of the legal cases surrounding a youth gender medicine ban. JL Cederblom is classic JSB — the name is a pseudonym, and we, the reader, have no idea what his or her credentials are. Why would you possibly trust “JL Cederblom,” Just Some Blogger of unknown provenance, over Jack Turban, MD, he of Yale and Harvard and Stanford?

Because, if you read their post, you will see that JL Cederblom is clearly in the right here: They are correct that Turban routinely bungles and/or misrepresents fairly basic facts in this particular document. I’m not saying I agree with every single claim in this long, bloggy takedown, but on the whole, you really can read Turban’s claims, Cederblom’s responses, the source material (usually studies from the literature), and recognize that Turban’s sworn declaration puts a thumb — maybe several thumbs — on the scale.

Or you can do what I did a while ago: Listen to Turban’s interview on Science Vs where he touted the strong evidence base for these studies, track down the studies he and the show referenced, and read what they actually say. If you do, you’ll find that Turban is, again, presenting an exceptionally rosy view of the literature.

Or — and I’m giving you multiple options here, to demonstrate that none of this requires a PhD in statistics — you can look up other sworn statements Turban has made on this subject and see how they hold up. For example, much of this debate comes down to the question of study quality, to the differences between strong studies and weak ones. This is an area known as evidence-based medicine, or EBM.

Leor Sapir, a Manhattan Institute critic of youth gender medicine who led the and the lead author on the Health and Human Services report about it, published a piece in 2023 arguing that Turban appears unfamiliar with basic EBM terms, including an absolutely vital one: systematic reviews. I can imagine Jennings saying: “What! Outrageous!” Sapir has a PhD, sure, but in political science. He isn’t a medical doctor like Jack Turban is and he definitely lacks Turban’s esteemed pedigree and history of expertise on this subject. Who the hell is he to claim that the good doctor lacks such basic knowledge? (Correction: Sapir emailed me to say he isn’t considered the lead author of the project. It’s a subtle but meaningful-enough-to-correct difference.)

But again, we have a choice here: We can do what Jennings implied as the correct course of action in his post about me — defer to whomever seems like the “expert” — or we can try to actually evaluate the disagreement and see who is correct. I have read the deposition in question, and Turban, answering questions posted by a legal adversary, under oath, really doesn’t seem to understand what a systematic review is.

On the one hand, it’s shocking, given Turban’s lofty perch as a Leading Expert who makes hundreds of dollars an hour producing sworn declarations and sitting for sworn depositions on this subject, that he doesn’t really know what a systematic review is (or didn’t, at least, at the time of the deposition in question). On the other hand, to be honest, I wasn’t that surprised, because it’s been clear to me that Turban shoots from the hip in a sloppy way since at least 2019. In November of that year, Turban and his frequent co-author Alex Keroughlian published a Psychology Today article that claimed “As recently as 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM] referred to being transgender as a ‘gender identity disorder.’ ” This is a completely false claim, albeit (for very in-the-weeds reasons) a frequently made one. The day after his piece went up, I pointed out to him on Twitter that there was no textual support for how he was describing this debate (I think my quote here is from his now-deleted tweet):

It only took Turban and Keroughlian and/or Psychology Today a year, but they eventually corrected the false claim from their piece:

It’s fairly wild that a public-intellectual psychiatrist, who should be more acquainted with the DSM than anyone else, would make such an obviously wrong argument about it. But before Turban and Keroughlian relented and made this correction, you could have played the same elitist game Jennings wants you to play: Why should you trust some sleazy, just-asking-questions journalist over two clinician-researchers as stuffed to the gills with Credibility and Expertise as Turban and Keroughlian? Maybe because sometimes people are treated as experts despite not exhibiting the competence of experts? Because sometimes people are elevated to the status of “expert” because they make politically expedient claims that fit certain cultural grooves, not for reasons of pure merit?² Because we don’t have a formal state priesthood?

Again: Jack Turban is not a quantum physicist wowing his audience with astonishing strings of mathematical notation. He is a doctor making pretty straightforward, pretty specific claims about what various documents and studies do or don’t say. Some of these documents and studies require some training to be able to understand, but for the most part this debate is not, contra what Ken Jennings would have you believe, so far out of reach of the average educated reader that we have no choice but to mindlessly defer to experts.

Maybe on its own we could just call the DSM blunder a random slip-up on Turban’s part, the sort of brain fart we all experience from time to time. But you combine that with his under-oath misunderstanding about systematic reviews, and the issues highlighted by JL Cederblom, and so much other stuff that I don’t even have the time to get into here. . . I think Ken Jennings is way off base in instructing me — and, more importantly, his huge, fawning audience — to automatically view it as suspect if an “expert” like Jack Turban disagrees with me.

These Guys Don’t Actually Trust Experts Anyway

In a sense I’m giving Jennings and his Bluesky audience too much credit, because they don’t actually trust experts in the sense of automatically deferring to them on the basis of their credentials. Rather, Jennings and his audience first decide what the “correct” view is on a given subject, then they search out the experts who support that view, then they pretend those are the only “experts” in the room.

Jennings has only fleetingly chimed in on youth gender medicine, but he clearly views any skepticism of it as beyond the pale. In fact, after California governor Gavin Newsom said in an interview he was torn on youth gender medicine — not that he was against it, but that he was torn — Jennings agreed with a trans activist who said she would never support Newsom because of that stance. “Any candidate cynically ‘triangulating’ on trans kids is a non-starter,” wrote Jennings, “and now is the time to say so. There’s still so much time to advance candidates that DON’T suck.”

Jennings has decided, then, that any skepticism about youth gender medicine constitutes immoral “triangulating” on what he clearly views as a civil rights of such exigence that it rises to single-issue-voting status for him: allowing minors access to puberty blockers, hormones, and double mastectomies.

Jenning did not adopt these beliefs because he reviewed the scientific evidence and found it so compelling. Rather, he adopted this belief for the same reason most of us adopt our beliefs — matters of tribal affiliation, peer pressure, and so on — and then he reverse-engineered his way into his belief that “the science is settled” or whatever. Of course, there are now many experts who feel differently, who have decided that the science is very unsettled, because the systematic reviews that have been conducted tell such a clear story to that effect. In my experience, youth gender medicine advocates reach into a bottomless sack of excuses and smears to explain away these experts — anyone who disagrees is a bigot, made howlingly obvious scientific errors, and on and on. In the worst cases, massively credentialed, super-respected “experts” have simply lied — there’s no other word to describe what they did — to denigrate their perceived opponents. Jack Turban himself, for example, put his name on this. That’s who Ken Jennings wants me to defer to, like some sort of robot — a guy who will sign his name to lies without a trace of discernible shame.

So in one sense this entire exercise is bad faith — Jennings only trusts the experts only to the extent the experts reflect his own beliefs back at him. But since he’s such a famous and well-respected guy, I wish he wouldn’t promote such silly, superficial, and elitist ideas about the relationship between the average citizen and scientific “experts.”

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Questions? Comments? Online petitions to get me on Jeopardy! so I can hash this out face-to-face with Jennings during what would be the most unwatchable TV segment ever broadcast? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com. Image: BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA - MAY 02: Ken Jennings attends UCLA Jonsson Cancer Center Foundation's 28th Annual Taste For A Cure at Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel on May 02, 2025 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Robin L Marshall/Getty Images)

1. The slightly longer version: In March, the trans activist Erin Reed posted an article headlined “Texas AG Paxton Declares Therapists Affirming Trans Youth To Be Illegal And Child Abuse,” referencing guidance Paxton had published about how a Texas law banning youth transition should be interpreted. Paxton’s guidance, which as Reed noted is not legally binding, sought to establish or clarify (depending on how you look at it) that therapists were included in the body of professionals affected by that law.

Turban, responding to Reed’s post, responded, “This of course runs counter to the recommendations of all major medical and mental health organizations, as well as all existing research and data in this field.” Turban has a long history of exaggerating the evidence for youth transition — I’ll discuss him further in the rest of this post — and he often does it in exactly this manner: by pretending the science on this subject is some sort of done deal, that we have so much evidence backing it that only an ignoramus could argue otherwise. This just isn’t the case, and I think he often cuts corners and exaggerates in trying to claim otherwise.

I was frustrated to see him do this again, so I responded, “The level of misinformation spread by proponents of youth gender medicine, many of whom have a professional stake in it and many of whom have fancy letters and affiliations affixed to their names, is really demoralizing.” This was quickly taken by some as an endorsement of Paxton’s policy. Reed, for example, wrote, “Jesse Singal now appears to be siding with Ken Paxton on forced mental health conversion therapy for trans youth.” This is false, as anyone familiar with my writing would know. But I can’t really blame Reed — if you are opining on social media about a controversial subject, any bit of ambiguity you introduce will be weaponized by demagogues. Reed was being Reed, because I introduced ambiguity: Since Turban was responding to Paxton, people took my criticism of Turban as an endorsement of Paxton. I think there are a host of reasons, many of them rather obvious, to oppose policies as draconian as Paxton’s. It can both be true that there are major problems with the case for youth gender medicine, and that many of the proposed “solutions” to those problems severely overshoot the mark.

2. This is not a new argument coming from me, and it significantly predates my work on youth gender medicine.