Kickstarter has wholeheartedly endorsed a project by Andrea James that aims to “track bias”, especially in journalism. Andrea James is best known for harassing academics, threatening their kids, and being a such a nutjob that even other trans activists have publicly denounced her and distanced themselves from her (Zinnia Jones most notably https://www.huffpost.com/entry/calpernia-addams-andrea-james_b_5146415). From the kickstarter, it’s clear that her aim is to gather up and publish a hit-list of people with “transphobic” ideas and messages.

The relevant part of the Kickstarter

>In 2003, I began developing the interactive chart above before most people knew what a social network was. It quickly helped us identify biased researchers and organizations, allowing us to focus our community’s limited resources on stopping those people.

>The end result was getting laws passed to protect trans and gender-diverse youth. We even helped shut down the worst children’s gender clinic in the world!

>The Transphobia Project will do the same thing in media, but in a more dynamic way that uses the latest technology. It will help us identify and expose bias, and maybe even get a few people fired along the way!

(emphasis added, from https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andreajames/the-transphobia-project)

The kickstarter endorsement: https://medium.com/kickstarter/this-is-what-transphobia-in-the-media-looks-like-3b9da535322e

Kickstarter tweet:

Alice Dreger, who has written a book that details anti-science activism, especially those concerning sex and gender:

For the parts concerning James, there’s https://alicedreger.com/in_fear and https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-007-9301-1

Jesse Singal, who is constantly hounded for his Atlantic article last year has two threads on it:

Benjamin Boyce, who interview a bunch of people related to this topic has also taken note:

The other thing to come out of all this is that I’m having a bit of a moral and legal crisis about these types of hitlists. On the one hand, everyone should be free to collect, organize, and publish data to make things easier for themselves and their organizations. On the other hand, publishing lists of journalists and academics can have a chilling effect on speech (which is the intended effect). Journalists and academics are the people whose speech should be MOST protected, and I’ve seen weird right-wing hitlists of marxist professors (https://www.professorwatchlist.org/), which I have thought was wrong before. So, where should the line be drawn?

Obviously I think that the government/courts should not prevent lists from being made, but what about if a professor was to hypothetically seek funding from their public university to create ideological lists for the explicit purpose of organizing protests against them and their work. If they are declined, is there a first amendment case here?

What about simply morally? Is deepfreeze.it unethical? There’s no real question that Candace Owens’ doxxing site would have been unethical. The people on KiwiFarms used to joke about starting a “deadname.us” or something like that. Is the IDW a “hitlist”? I’m also still of the opinion that Becca Lewis’s AIN has clear bias methodologically, but isn’t ultimately that wrong. “People are connected on social media” is true, doubly true for YouTubers trying to expand their audience by directing their viewers to each other, and people explore their interests in greater depth.

What about when people gather up to sign open letters? They’re voluntarily declaring themselves into a watchlist, sort of.

Anyway, people are mad. We’ll see how Kickstarter reacts, if at all. I think they should do nothing, apologize for nothing, and allow the grifter to take suckers’ money. James is nothing if not persistent and dedicated, so calling her a “grifter” is a bit of a stretch. She will undoubtedly deliver something, and people are completely free to want that thing for money.