Tech companies silence pro-child voices

Online transgender gurus get millions of views online with peppy videos instructing curious teens on cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries. But YouTube recently blocked a video featuring ex-transgender writer and speaker Walt Heyer cautioning against talking children into those experimental and irreversible procedures. The streaming video site marked the three-hour video as “hate speech.”

The recording originated from the Heritage Foundation’s Summit on Protecting Children from Sexualization, a half-day event held in October 2019. YouTube said it removed the video specifically because Heyer likened gender dysphoria to “a child development disorder” while warning against cross-dressing and cautioning adults not to push children toward transgenderism.

Internet platforms and users increasingly reject any attempts to question transgender ideology as hate speech, idiocy, or falsehood. Rather than engaging in an open debate about the downsides of transgenderism, they try to bully critics into silence.

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling felt the pressure recently after she defended biological womanhood on Twitter, where users called her transphobic and hateful and used derogatory and misogynistic slurs to describe her. A British school said it would drop her name from one of its buildings. Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who played Harry Potter in the movie adaptations, called Rowling’s views uninformed and unscientific.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, previously blocked another Heritage Foundation video featuring Dr. Michelle Cretella, executive director of the American College of Pediatricians. During a June 2017 event, Cretella criticized the practice of cutting off healthy body parts in the name of transgenderism.

YouTube said Heyer’s and Cretella’s comments violated its “hate speech policy” and rejected the Heritage Foundation’s appeals. The conservative think tank has since censored the sentences that raised YouTube’s objections. It successfully reloaded the videos onto the site.

Rob Bluey, vice president of communications for Heritage, said the removals of his organization’s videos represent “part of an alarming trend of YouTube removing or blocking content it doesn’t like.”

Amazon has jumped on the bandwagon, too. The online retail giant on June 17 suspended an ad campaign for the book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier, a writer for The Wall Street Journal. The book, set to release on Tuesday, features a vintage drawing of a young girl with a hole in her abdomen on its cover.

Amazon’s advertising support service denied Regnery Publishing’s ad for the book because “it contains elements that may not be appropriate for all audiences, which may include ad copy/book content that infers or claims to diagnose, treat, or question sexual orientation,” according to emails obtained by WORLD.

Shrier said her book has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Rather, it argues transgenderism among teen girls has become a social contagion, one that is prompting them to disfigure their bodies with hormones and surgeries.

Meanwhile, Amazon has allowed ad campaigns for a plethora of books promoting social and medical transgenderism for adolescents and how-to manuals for parents on affirming their children’s gender dysphoria and using their preferred name and pronouns.

Publishing companies like Regnery routinely buy ad space to bolster books’ visibility.

“This is the first time we’ve been told a certain perspective … is not allowed,” said Alyssa Cordova, Regnery’s vice president for marketing and publicity. “It’s clear there isn’t any kind of room for questioning the transgender narrative.”