Founder of gender-critical news site Reduxx found it acceptable to publish op-ed by neo-Nazi

The founder of the site that helped drive controversy over a supposed trans volleyball player has a huge ethical skeleton in her closet.

Blaire Fleming, the center of the latest furor over trans athletes (screenshot courtesy Fox News)

For the better part of 2024, San Jose State University’s volleyball team drew considerable attention over the presence of a woman on the roster suspected of being trans. Namely, senior Blaire Fleming. After gender-critical site Reduxx posted an article that purported to out Fleming in April, several teams inside and outside the Mountain West Conference forfeited their matches against the Spartans.

It was generally believed that the forfeits came because of opposition to Fleming’s presence on the Spartans’ roster, though only two opponents—Boise State and Nevada—explicitly said so. The forfeits came to the open cheers of many on the right, led by Riley Gaines of OutKick. Gaines spearheaded a class action Title IX lawsuit against the NCAA seeking to have Fleming declared ineligible—a lawsuit joined by two of Fleming’s teammates.

Those objecting to Fleming being on the team cite safety concerns about playing against a trans woman. But unless I missed something, no one has asked why anyone even attempted to out Fleming in the first place. The general consensus is that it is almost never acceptable to out someone who doesn’t want to be out—which is why I’m not linking to the Reduxx piece. Some have argued that virtually the only exception is if someone is actively harming the LGBTQ community, but even that argument can be highly fraught.

Now who would think it would be at all acceptable to attempt to out Fleming as trans? Well, a closer look into the background of one of Reduxx’s co-founders, Anna Slatz, the author of the piece purporting to out Fleming, reveals one possible answer.

According to Slatz’s biography on Wikipedia, the Canadian native first gained attention in January 2018, when she was attending the University of New Brunswick Saint John in Canada under the name Anna De Luca. In 2018, while she was editor-in-chief of UNBSJ’s student newspaper, The Baron, she published an unedited op-ed from Michael Thurlow, leader of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Canadian Labour Revival Party. She also published an interview she’d conducted with Thurlow. Both pieces were chock full of racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, along with paeans to Hitler. As disturbing as that was by itself, Thurlow and his minions had recently plastered UNB’s main campus in Fredericton with racist posters.

The criticism came in fast and hard. At least three of De Luca’s colleagues resigned in protest. One of them, Kenya Plut, told Canadaland soon after the pieces dropped that The Baron was the first thing to come up when anyone Googled her, and she was afraid of being associated with an outlet that gave a platform to hate speech. Former copy editor Jessica Raven, who left the paper well before the Thurlow pieces ran, argued that “true non-bias” didn’t allow Thurlow’s bile to run on its own.

De Luca—who began calling herself Anna Slatz around the time this blew—scoffed at such criticism. In an op-ed responding to the criticism, she claimed she wanted to use the paper as a platform to “allow people to speak their truth, whatever that truth may be.” She also said that fulfilling that promise meant that she would “never censor, never correct or challenge.” Indeed, the op-ed was presented as “unedited and uncensored commentary.” She doubled down in an email to BuzzFeed, saying that she was upholding “journalistic neutrality.”

Apparently Slatz didn’t know or understand that responsible journalists don’t give unfettered platforms to anyone, and certainly not to those spreading hate. This was an egregious lapse of judgment, made even more so by the posters in Fredericton. Imagine if a newspaper published an unedited commentary by the man who killed UnitedHealth Care CEO Brian Thompson and tried to present it as an attempt to allow the killer to “speak their truth.” It would rightly be condemned as a middle finger to Thompson and an attempt to glorify violence. What Slatz did here is no different.

Leah Scheitel, a columnist for the Capilano Courier, the student newspaper for Capilano University in British Columbia, said it best.

Journalists and reporters are meant to ask, challenge and clarify the stories, not to muddle it by allowing everyone to “speak their truths”, however fucked up those truths are.

Fortunately, saner heads prevailed. By the end of the month, The Baron’s board of directors had renounced the Thurlow pieces and apologized for the “negligence and oversight” in allowing them to run. It also dumped Slatz as editor-in-chief.

I’d wondered who would find it acceptable to out someone long after it was clear that outing was unacceptable. Now I have my answer. The woman who tried to out Fleming is the same woman who, six years earlier, saw fit to give an unfettered platform to one of the worst people in the world.

As near as I can determine, the only people to have made the connection between Reduxx and Slatz’s egregious lapse of judgment as a student are a few sporadic posters on Twitter. That’s a shame, especially given that Slatz’s tactics set off all kinds of ethical alarm bells.

Slatz and others seem to think that trans women playing women’s sports pose such an existential threat to women’s sports that it justifies outing them. Do we really want to go down this road? It’s a open invitation to harassment that could potentially put the athlete and those around her in harm’s way. That’s not just in the abstract. After Slatz ran her article, Fleming was the target of vicious harassment and abuse, and was even mentioned by Donald Trump on the campaign trail.

And of course, we’re ignoring the 500-pound gorilla in the room. What if Slatz is wrong and Fleming isn’t trans? She would potentially have grounds for one whopper of a libel and defamation suit—and seeing that she is a private person, she could really draw blood. But then again, we’re talking about a woman who found it acceptable to give an unfettered platform to a Nazi.

The bottom line? There was no defensible reason whatsoever for Slatz to try to out Fleming. At best, it’s a gross invasion of privacy that put Fleming and innocent third parties at undue risk of harm. At best, it’s libel and defamation of the worst type. But then again, we’re talking about a woman who found it acceptable to give an unfettered platform to a Nazi.