RFK Jr.'s Remarks About Transgender Teens Censored by YouTube

YouTube has removed a Jordan Peterson podcast from its site in which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that the rise in transgender youths was in part a product of exposure to chemicals.

On June 5, the Democratic presidential candidate told the controversial media commentator that he thought the "sexual dysphoria" seen in children, particularly boys, was because they were "swimming through a soup of toxic chemicals."

He was speaking in response to a question from Peterson which likened a so-called "climate apocalypse" narrative of global warming to the use of fear in imposing coronavirus lockdown measures.

Kennedy Jr., the son of the assassinated senator, has long been known as a vaccine skeptic and has previously spoken out about his opposition to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

A spokesperson for Google, YouTube's parent company, told Newsweek the 95-minute podcast was removed for violating the platform's terms of service regarding vaccine misinformation.

During the discussion, Peterson claimed that vaccine mandates had "pushed forward the use of fear" and had "demoralized young people to a degree that's almost incomprehensible." The Biden administration maintains that lockdown measures and vaccine mandates were necessary to protect public health.

The Canadian psychologist added: "I've seen the climate apocalypse [narrative] use fear to induce something approximating the same kind of level of tyranny as far as I'm concerned that characterized the vaccine lockdowns."

Asked about his thoughts on this, Kennedy Jr. said that he saw "these huge levels of depression and despair, loneliness in kids, and I don't think that there's a single cause to it. I think blaming it on depression about [the] climate is probably over-simplistic."

However, he added: "In fact, I think a lot of the problems we see in kids—and particularly boys—it's probably under-appreciated how much of that is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of the sexual dysphoria that we're seeing."

The presidential candidate said such children were "being overwhelmed by a tsunami; they're swimming through a soup of toxic chemicals today and many of those are endocrine disruptors."

Endocrine disruptors are organic or synthetic chemicals that interfere with the body's production of hormones, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences lists atrazine, a common herbicide, as one.

Kennedy Jr. said atrazine was "throughout our water supply," before claiming that if put in a tank with frogs, "it will chemically castrate and forcibly feminize every frog in there and 10 percent of the frogs—the male frogs—will turn into fully viable females able to produce viable eggs.

"If it's doing that to frogs, there's a lot of other avenues that it's doing it to humans beings as well," he speculated.

While this was confirmed by 2010 study at the University of California, Berkeley, which said that exposure was highly correlated with "low sperm count, poor semen quality, and impaired fertility" in humans, it noted that the chemical was "most potent in amphibians" as frog skin "absorbs atrazine at a much higher rate than the skin of mammals."

Its mention echoes that of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan wrote. In one widely-seen video, Jones claimed that the government was putting chemicals in the water that were "turning the freaking frogs gay."

A June 2022 study by the UCLA Williams Institute found that in the U.S., the number of transgender individuals has "remained steady over time" as a proportion of the wider population, but that a transgender individual was "more likely" to be aged 13-17 than 65 or over.

However, some academics have said using studies such as the one on atrazine's effects on frogs paints LGBTQ+ individuals as contrary to natural norms and "as deviant, impure or contaminated."

On Sunday, Kennedy Jr. told his Twitter followers that the conversation had been "deleted" by the video platform, but thanked Elon Musk, the owner of the social media site, for continuing to allow it to remain up there. He asked them: "Should social media platforms censor presidential candidates?"

He accused YouTube of "blatant interference in the electoral process" and urged his supporters to make videos on the platform voicing their anger towards the decision.

A Google spokesperson said: "We removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube's general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities."

In another recent podcast with Joe Rogan, Kennedy Jr. lamented the apparent injuries that he was anecdotally aware of that he said had been caused by the vaccine. Others have accused him of spreading disinformation about vaccines.

While anti-vaccine campaigners have pointed to cases of vaccinated people developing sudden and inexplicable illnesses, health officials say that adverse effects of coronavirus vaccines have only been found to be rare occurrences.

The World Health Organization says that vaccines are "very safe" and many of the adverse effects are minor, with the most serious events occurring in between one per thousand to one per million cases. It adds that there are "so few deaths can plausibly be attributed to vaccines that it is hard to assess the risk statistically."

It comes as the latest polls show the Democratic candidate maintaining his second-place spot, continuing to average mid-teens support among primary voters.

The latest Harris survey, conducted between June 14-15 for The Messenger, put him on 14 percent behind a strong incumbent president on 54 percent of 381 registered voters.

Kennedy Jr. is being trailed by Marianne Williamson on 5 percent, who is slightly down on recent poll showings. With Joe Biden removed, though, the Harris poll suggests Kennedy Jr. would still only attract 34 percent to Williamson's 14 percent.

Update 06/20/23, 2:40 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from a Google spokesperson.