its over
YouTube removes 'gender identity' from hate speech policy
TariffTokers, Gen Z’s ‘it couple’, Easter potatoes, anti-MAGA hats, Zuck's D.C. mansion, Amazon's TikTok bid, Silicon Valley's cupid, and the fastest growing political channels on YouTube
www.usermag.co
YouTube removes 'gender identity' from hate speech policy
TariffTokers, Gen Z’s ‘it couple’, Easter potatoes, anti-MAGA hats, Zuck's D.C. mansion, Amazon's TikTok bid, Silicon Valley's cupid, and the fastest growing political channels on YouTube
TAYLOR LORENZ
APR 03, 2025
Sometime between January 25th and February 7th of this year, shortly after Trump took office, YouTube quietly updated its hate speech policy to remove the phrase “gender identity.”
YouTube doesn’t allow hate speech toward a number of groups. Content that promotes violence or hatred towards users over their race, nationality, religion, disability, and veteran status is explicitly barred. Hate speech against someone’s “gender identity and expression” was also once barred, but that phrase has since been removed.
The removal of the “gender identity and expression” category has caused anger in the trans and non binary communities, who see it as a direct attack on their ability to safely use the platform.
“YouTube quietly removing ‘gender identity and expression’ from its list of protected groups is a major radical shift away from best practices in the field of trust and safety and content moderation,” a spokesperson for GLAAD told me. “Like Meta’s recent dangerous rollbacks of hate speech protections for transgender and nonbinary people, the removal of these specific words appears to be a responsive alignment with the anti-LGBTQ agenda of Project 2025, which calls for targeting ‘woke culture warriors … start[ing] with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity.’”
Under the list of examples of hate speech provided on YouTube’s policy site, the line “[Protected group status] is just a form of mental illness that needs to be cured,” was also removed.
A YouTube spokesperson said that the removal of “gender identity and expression” from the hate speech policy was part of regular copy edits to the website, and that the enforcement of the policy hasn’t changed. Hate speech toward someone over their “sex, gender, or sexual orientation” is still barred, however critics say that “gender” is very different than “gender identity and expression.”
According to the World Health Organization, gender and sex are related to, but categorically different from, “gender identity.” “Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth,” the WHO reports.
“If YouTube’s hate speech policy really does still protect people from being targeted with hate on the basis of ‘gender identity,’ the public-facing policy should continue to say that,” a GLAAD person said, adding that this removal would lead an average user to believe that the policy has changed.
Last month, federal agencies flagged hundreds of words and phrases to restrict or avoid, including the phrase “gender identity.” Just a few weeks ago, the governor of Iowa specifically removed “gender identity” from the state's anti-discrimination protections, becoming the first state to make such a change.
Samantha Lux, a trans YouTube star who has been on the platform for over a decade, said that she’s seen an influx of hatred on her channel recently. “The right wing creators have gotten a lot more brave about how they talk about trans issues,” she said.
Lux also reiterated that “gender and gender identity are two different concepts.”
Gender refers broadly to discrimination based on someone being male or female, such as treating women unfairly. Gender identity specifically addresses discrimination based on someone’s expression of their gender, specifically relating to trans and non binary people.“If you say that you're protecting against gender, it's more like you can't discriminate against somebody for being a woman,” Lux said. “But gender identity really zones in on the trans aspect of it. Like, ‘I'm not discriminating against you because you're a woman,’ but they’re discriminating over the fact that we’re trans.”
In mid 2024, Google removed a slew of identity-based holidays from Google Calendar’s public calendar, including Pride Month, Black History Month, Indigenous People Month, Jewish American Heritage Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage Month.
it's time to cut this bullshyt off. enough is enough
