Opinion

SELF-CENSORSHIP: Business Insider Pulls Column Defending Scarlett Johansson For Playing Trans Man, Citing Employee Anger

   DailyWire.com

On Tuesday, Business Insider pulled down a deeply hurtful and awful column by former Commentary assistant editor Daniella Greenbaum. What was this horrific piece of brutality? It was a piece suggesting that Scarlett Johansson shouldn’t be attacked for playing a transgender man in a new movie. The title of this stunningly insensitive piece: “Scarlett Johansson is being unfairly criticized for doing her job after being cast as a transgender man.”

Truly, Greenbaum is history’s greatest monster.

Greenbaum wrote:

She has been cast in a movie in which she will play someone different than herself. For this great crime — which seems to essentially define the career path she has chosen — she is being castigated for being insufficiently sensitive to the transgender community. … “Stealing” narratives — or, more charitably, playing parts — is precisely what actors are hired to do. But that reality seems to have been forgotten. … Johansson’s identity off the screen is irrelevant to the identities she plays on the screen. That’s what she’s paid for. And if she does her job, she’ll make everyone forget about the controversy in the first place.

Oh, the humanity!

Now, of course, Greenbaum is right. And it’s not blackface for a woman to play a transgender man, because transgender men are biological women, while white people are not biologically black. The only difference, according to the social justice warriors, between Scarlett Johannson and a transgender man is that she doesn’t consider herself a man. But she’s an actress who can put herself into a different mindset. Which is her exact job.

But Business Insider quickly pulled this monstrous piece of bigotry. Why? The Daily Beast explains:

Business Insider removed a post about portrayals of trans individuals in Hollywood after staff complained internally about the column, saying the article did not meet the publication’s standards. Several Business Insider staff told The Daily Beast that some employees were offended by the column. The publication took down the piece on Friday, and appended an editor’s note to the page on Tuesday saying that “Business Insider removed the column because, upon further review, we decided it did not meet our editorial standards.”

So, that’s the new standard at Business Insider: if employees were offended by a piece, the piece cannot run. Which is odd, since I assumed that editorial teams usually decide what pieces to run, not polls of the newsroom. I think that because I run a website with an editorial team. But hey, to each his own.

Perhaps the editors of Business Insider ought to stop acting like editors. Clearly, they’re stealing a narrative – that they’re acting like editors rather than preening hypocrites.

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