According to YouTube, a doctor giving her medical opinion on transgender issues is too dangerous for anyone to watch. When the Heritage Foundation’s news outlet, The Daily Signal, published an interview with Dr. Michelle Cretella, a pediatrician and executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, YouTube censored it for “hate speech.” The social media platform singled out this particular sentence:
“See, if you want to cut off a leg or an arm, you’re mentally ill, but if you want to cut off healthy breasts or a pen*s, you’re transgender,” Cretella said.
In the video, first published in 2017, Cretella explained that if she were to walk into a doctor’s office and introduce herself as Margaret Thatcher, the physician would call her delusional and give her an antipsychotic drug. If she were to say, “Doctor, I am suicidal. I’m an amputee trapped in a normal body. Please, surgically remove my leg,” she would be diagnosed with a disease — body integrity disorder.
But if she were to introduce herself as a man and ask to have her healthy breasts removed, her physician would congratulate her and mutilate her body.
After this introduction, Cretella delivered the verboten sentence, merely to drive home the point she had already made. In the video, she went on to tell the story of a young boy who thought he was a girl. In family therapy, the therapist discovered that the boy thought his parents would only love him if he was a girl — because they had to give his sister with special needs far more attention.
This medical doctor’s opinion may be unpopular in many circles, but she backed it up with facts and sound reasoning. YouTube responded by deleting the video.
On Tuesday, the Daily Signal reported that YouTube had recently removed the video, giving this message: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech.”
“Over the past few months, The Daily Signal worked with YouTube to try to reach a resolution. Ultimately, we were told the only way we could get the video back on YouTube was to delete the previously mentioned sentence,” the Daily Signal’s Katrina Trinko reported. “In other words, we had two choices: censor the doctor’s words or have no video on the world’s biggest video platform.”
Importantly, the Heritage Foundation and the Daily Signal agree with the spirit behind YouTube’s hate speech policy. That policy states, “Hate speech is not allowed on YouTube. We remove content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on any of the following attributes” such as “Gender Identity and Expression” and “Sex/Gender.”
“We believe transgender individuals, and any individual struggling with gender identity issues, should be treated with love and respect,” Trinko wrote.
In a video statement about the ban, Heritage spokesperson Genevieve Wood added, “We agree with the spirit of the YouTube policy that every person should be treated with respect and that every conversation should be civil.”
“But here’s where we disagree: As our nation debates the whole issue of gender identity and parens consider whether to give their children hormone treatments, we need to have a robust, fact-filled serious debate,” Wood added. “Shouldn’t parents have all the information they need, especially when it comes to life-altering medical decisions for their children? And who better to have that debate than our doctors?”
Google and YouTube did not respond to PJ Media’s request for comment, but a Heritage spokeswoman said that the foundation “has been trying to resolve this directly with YouTube behind the scenes since July, including having brought it up specifically with the CEO of YouTube at a face-to-face meeting several weeks ago with Kim Holmes, our Executive VP.”
“We should do the most American thing we still have the right to do,” Rob Bluey, executive editor of the Daily Signal, said. “We should use our freedom of expression to expose companies who suppress speech and demonstrate bias against peacefully expressed ideas. After working with YouTube in good faith for months to restore the wrongly banned video, we are using the power of our voices instead of the power of the state to call on YouTube to do the right thing.”
YouTube’s censorship and the Daily Signal’s response come at a critical time for transgender issues in America. Last month, a Texas jury awarded custody of 7-year-old boy James Younger to his legal mother, who considers the boy a girl and wishes to pump him with experimental drugs to encourage a transgender identity. A judge altered that decision, but the case has brought the debate over transgender “treatments” to a national stage.
Endocrinologists have warned that “puberty blockers” actually give kids a disease. Sadly, transgender activists have subverted the American medical establishment — but many doctors are speaking out against the false narrative that men can become women and vice versa.
A court recently struck down the Obama administration’s oppressive rule forcing doctors to perform transgender surgery regardless of their scientific, moral, or religious convictions. As Democrats openly celebrate the gender confusion of children, former transgender people are uniting to comfort one another after deep regret over the irreversible mutilation of their once healthy bodies. An infamous provocateur in Canada claimed to be transgender in order to force women to wax his genitals. Meanwhile, activists are trying to teach kids the new transgender orthodoxy and parents in Ohio have already lost custody of their daughter because they disagreed with her transgender identity as a male.
YouTube isn’t the only social media platform to silence critics of transgenderism. Twitter has banned feminist journalist Meghan Murphy, the Heritage Foundation’s Greg Scott, and Ray Blanchard — a Ph.D. psychologist who served on the working group for the DSM-V, the official psychological manual on disorders, including gender dysphoria.
YouTube has also restricted conservative videos from PragerU — but it took the unusual step of actually removing Cretella’s Daily Signal video.
Cretella’s sentence was nothing close to hate speech, but it seems YouTube will brook no dissent on transgender issues.
Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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