Katie Herzog
This content was last updated Nov. 15, 2023, 8:56 p.m. UTC
Katie Herzog is an American journalist and podcaster, a former staff writer for Seattle newspaper The Stranger and the co-host of internet drama podcast Blocked & Reported, alongside Jesse Singal. Like Singal, Herzog presents herself as skeptical of the mainstream science regarding transgender people and sympathetic to fringe theories such as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, for which no direct evidence has ever been produced.
ROGD postulates that there is a ... new, emerging population of kids who identify as trans who experience gender dysphoria later in life [who are] typically natal females who come out as trans around puberty sometimes, or later, and they are influenced by the people around them who are also coming out, as well as the online world.
Education and Work
Herzog holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
Prior to 2017, Herzog was a professional journalist featured in outlets such as BuzzFeed News, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Slate, Vox, Salon and Mother Jones. She wrote most frequently from her point of view as a gay woman, and most prolifically as a staff writer for Seattle newspaper The Stranger between 2017 and 2020.
Herzog took an indefinite furlough from The Stranger in 2020. Since then, her contribution to print journalism has been primarily for Bari Weiss’ Free Press blog.
The Detransitioners
In June of 2017, Herzog wrote The Detransitioners: They Were Transgender, Until They Weren’t for The Stranger. The article features quotes from happy transitioning adults and the parents of transgender youth, as well as mostly anonymous detransitioned women. It faced criticism from some members of the transgender community at the time, but is quite evenhanded in its treatment of its subject.
Since publication, one of the article’s key voices, Ky Schevers, identified by the pseudonym “Cass'' in Herzog’s article, has come to reject her previous views and again consider herself nonbinary. Schevers has been highly critical of the detransition movement, describing it as “cult-like” and comparing it to conversion therapy. In March of 2021, Schevers published a recanting of her statements in Herzog’s piece, expressing that she was driven to radical feminism and detransition by a traumatic housing situation, and that the quotes she gave Herzog were intentionally deceptive, failing to accurately represent her feelings about her own body and gender at the time. She describes the story she told in The Stranger as “a fabrication.”
In July of 2017, Herzog published a followup to her article in The Stranger quoting and responding to some of the people who were openly critical of the original piece, in particular defending her choice to include quotes from James Cantor, a gender critical sexologist who is known for his defenses of pedophilia.
Blocked & Reported
In March of 2020, Herzog and anti-transgender journalist Jesse Singal began co-hosting the internet drama podcast Blocked & Reported. The podcast primarily addresses cancel culture, social media incidents, and the hosts’ anti-trans views.