In the wake of a series of severe setbacks in Europe and laws banning gender mutilation surgeries and puberty blockers in the U.S., the transgender movement is doubling down and pushing to reconsolidate their control over the narrative. That narrative – that the surgeries and “treatments” increasingly condemned as causing irreversible damage by medical experts from London to Oslo – has been under fire from unexpected sources, with even the New York Times publishing a few cautious columns covering the long-term negative effects of puberty blockers (such as osteoporosis).
In the face of a mounting body of increasingly unignorable evidence, the transgender movement is once again calling on Big Tech to censor anyone who disagrees – and they’re using celebrities to do it. This particular call for censorship comes in an open letter released by GLAAD on June 27, 2023, and addressed to Mark Zuckerberg of Meta Platforms, Neal Mohan of YouTube, Shou Zi Chew of TikTok, and Linda Yaccarino and Elon Musk of Twitter. Two-hundred fifty celebrities signed it, including Alyssa Milano, “Elliot” (Ellen) Page, Laverne Cox, Billy Eichner, Billy Porter, Gabrielle Union-Wade, Demi Lovato, Hailey Baldwin Bieber, and Jamie Lee Curtis.
Most of those names are no surprise – Page identifies as transgender, Lovato has identified with various letters in the alphabet acronym, Porter is a longtime LGBT activist, and Union-Wade and Curtis have children who identify as transgender. Hailey Baldwin Bieber, however, is a new name, and many of those who believed that she and her pop star husband were some sort of Christian are being introduced to where the real loyalties of celebrities lie. The open letter notes that:
As celebrities, influencers, and prominent public figures with significant followings on social media, we the undersigned are calling on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter to fulfill the promises you’ve made to transgender, nonbinary, gender non-conforming and all LGBTQ users in your terms of service. There has been a massive systemic failure to prohibit hate, harassment, and malicious anti-LGBTQ disinformation on your platforms and it must be addressed.
The letter asserts that allowing “hate” on social media has resulted in “an outsized role in the sharp increase in real-world anti-transgender targeting and violence” and that “this is particularly the case when it comes to the online extremists leading proactive coordinated campaigns of hate and lies about gender affirming healthcare for trans youth. Despite the fact that every leading medical and psychological association affirms the safety and necessity of gender affirming healthcare for trans people, including youth, inflammatory disinformation falsely asserting that this healthcare is dangerous is allowed to fester on your platforms because it drives clicks and profit.”
Conservatives saw Big Tech’s COVID protocols as a cautionary tale; transgender activists saw them as a trial run.
Here the letter is referring to commentators such as Matt Walsh and Christopher Rufo, who have used social media to expose the transgender industry to great effect. The letter is incredibly disingenuous – as I noted, the U.K.’s National Health Service as well as prestigious medical institutions across Europe are not only abandoning the so-called “gender affirming model,” but openly condemning it – the NHS even condemns “social” transitioning, never mind sex changes. This letter is a lie designed to get ideological opponents kicked out of the digital public square, with celebrities leveraging their influencer status and follower counts to assert that a failure to do so will result in dead transgender people – a derivative of their classic argument that failure to make so-called sex changes and cross-sex hormones available will cause suicides.
The celebrities then “call for you to meet with community leaders and creators to hear about these real world harms that result from anti-trans content on your platforms — and to create and share plans for how you will address” the banning of content on the “treatments” in question—and here, they specifically call for a new system of censorship to be implemented. Tellingly, they note: “Specific mitigations on such disinformation must be developed (for instance akin to election and COVID-19 mitigations and rules).” This underscores how correct many were to be concerned about Big Tech’s across-the-board suppression of any alternative COVID narratives – because once the digital public square was run by the state and the state was run by progressives, dissent – and in many cases, truth-telling – would become impossible. Conservatives saw Big Tech’s COVID protocols as a cautionary tale; transgender activists saw them as a trial run. Now they’re calling for the real thing.
