YouTube announced last week that it will be updating its policies to deal with content about eating disorders. They promised to take a nuanced approach, acknowledging that “a video about a creator’s eating disorder recovery journey can help” others. But content that “features imitable behavior, or behavior that we worked with experts to determine can lead at-risk viewers to imitate” will be prohibited. 

Pointing out the hypocrisies in a woke worldview could fuel a small cottage industry, but this one deserves highlighting. While it is good that YouTube refuses to glorify dangerous behaviors associated with anorexia and bulimia, their attitude to promoting other harmful things is quite different. Videos of trans-identified girls rapturously revealing their freshly mangled bodies after “top surgery” are plentiful and algorithms will send them to the most vulnerable. But there seems to be no thought that this is also damaging, “imitable” behavior. 

Eating disorders and gender identity disorders are both the result of the lie that “an unhappiness..can be cured by altering the body to match the self-image.” Studies have noted that young girls are especially susceptible to gender confusion as a social contagion today, as they were to eating disorders in previous decades. 

Don’t depend on tech companies to safeguard your child’s well-being. They may be willing to shield them from one danger, all the while exposing them to another, because it comes with inclusivity credits from the spirit of the age.