Google Censors are Still Waging the Transgender Culture War

Search engine censorship targets HWFO

Hark, Oh Ye Reader, for unto your weary eyes from screens ephemeral come Facts Unspoken, Unacknowledged Realities, Dark Occult Truths only bypassing the oppressive expurgation regimes of Big Alphabet because Substack is first and foremost an email mailing list.

Bullshit aside, I recently became aware that at least one HWFO article was being specifically blacklisted, or “delisted,” by Google. It got delisted because a culture warrior flagged it, and a Google employee reviewed it and decided it disagreed with a “medical consensus” that never existed. And in so doing, these two actors leveraged the monopoly power of Google in the global transgender culture war. This is a single anecdote, only one webpage, but the anecdote scales and is important to understand in the 21st century culture war virtual battleground.

Let’s start today’s effort by providing background on the article in question, providing a brief summary of the “U.S. vs Skrmetti” Supreme Court case last week, highlighting some of the media discussions about it, and then drilling specifically into how Google corporate safety policy is being leveraged by culture warriors within the transgender culture war.

Trans Kids TERF War Background

There have always been transgender folks in the United States, and some of the ones who undergo hormone treatment and surgery wish they’d undergone it sooner so the gender expression changes would work better. From their point of view, not being able to transition early is a harm. But the fundamental discussion regarding youth transgender medical interventions is about weighing harms against other harms.

Sometimes when kids undergo transgender hormone replacement and teen or preteen gender surgeries, they regret it because they were making the sort of hasty decision a kid can’t really be expected to make, and in those cases the medical intervention itself is a harm. And inside a “woke” moral framework where more virtue is granted to the more marginalized, some number of imprudent kids choose transgender due to either peer pressure, or virtue climbing, or social contagion, leading them to harmful life decisions they may not have otherwise made. Sometimes these decisions have additional parental support because the parents also accrue woke virtue from their peer group for having a trans kid.

The fundamental argument is about how to weigh those harms. And to my knowledge, only one person has ever attempted to quantify those harms numerically and weigh them against each other in an apolitical way that’s sensitive to all points of view in an article vetted by several transgender people before publication.

Me.

Here, in 2022:

Are there others attempting to do the same thing? If so, I certainly won’t find out about them via Google. And I don’t know if my blacklisting was in response to U.S. vs Skrmetti or it happened before.

U.S. vs Skrmetti

On June 18, 2025, the United States Supreme Court decided that Tennessee’s “SB1” bill, which prohibited healthcare providers from giving puberty blockers or hormones to minors for the purpose of enabling them to identify as the opposite gender to their birth sex, didn’t violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States.

The plaintiffs argued that allowing these treatments for other medical reasons such as precocious puberty or disease, but prohibiting them from being used for gender dysphoria, was sex based discrimination. The Supreme Court ruled “no it’s not,” and a good summary of the argument on both sides can be found in a dialogue between Jesse Singal and Slate’s Mark Joseph here:

Here’s My Exchange With Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern About ‘United States v. Skrmetti’

For the record, this discussion is easily discoverable on Google with very simple search terms that can be found in the article title:

One interesting thing to shake out of the court proceedings, is the left slowly admitting that much of the argument for youth transgender medicine was founded on a universally accepted falsehood that went viral in their social media echo chamber. HWFO talks about social media echo chambers quite a bit, so it was surprising to see Helen Lewis point this one out in The Atlantic of all places.

Allow children to transition, or they will kill themselves. For more than a decade, this has been the strongest argument in favor of youth gender medicine—a scenario so awful that it stifled any doubts or questions about puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

[…]

But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.

[…]

Here was the trans-rights movement’s greatest legal brain, speaking in front of the nation’s highest court. And what he was saying was that the strongest argument for a hotly debated treatment was, in fact, not supported by the evidence.

Every progressive liberal I know firmly believes that medical gender transitions are a life saving procedure that reduce or eliminate future suicides. This universally held belief is entirely foundationless, concocted from thin air. But it spread because of how useful it is to shut down discussion on social media. The Atlantic article goes into more details, but if you’re a long-time HWFO reader you’ve been able to identify this sort of media behavior since at least 2018. Bad outcomes from media echo chamber behavior is mostly what HWFO is about.

What’s interesting about the admission above is not the admission itself, because people outside the progressive bubble have been screaming it for decades. What’s interesting is it’s in The Atlantic, a very liberal rag which makes its money playing to the progressive echo chamber. This means the misinformation wall around the progressive transgender social club has finally started to crack.

For the record, The Atlantic’s article is also easily searchable on Google:

Google’s Thumb

Usually when I write articles, the good ones anyway, I’m trying to get a fully formed idea inked and archived so I can pull it up later in discussion. It’s my entire raison d’etre as a writer. When my “Unnecessary Mastectomy Math” article referenced above came up in Skrmetti conversation this week I hopped over to Google to find a link to it, and discovered to my surprise that doing so was impossible. Google pretended they'd never heard of it.

I have searched this article before on Google and it has appeared. It was written in 2022 well after the Cancel Culture wokeness peak, and not too far before Elon bought Twitter and cracked their censorship engine. And yet, it’s not searchable. Try it yourself.

Maybe Google can be forgiven so far because it’s confused HWFO for some medical search term and the AI is getting in the way.

Here the search finds four articles on the Substack you’re reading now, so it’s not like it’s never heard of HWFO. Those four articles link the article we’re looking for, and the AI even tries to speculate what’s in the article based on the context around the links, but the article itself doesn’t appear in the search.

If I search for a specific text string in other HWFO articles Google works fine:

But if I do the same thing with a text string from the target article, Google is completely blank:

The simplest Bing search returns it as the top hit:

As does DuckDuckGo:

We know the entire HWFO publication is not banned from Google. We know that the text strings related to trans medicine aren’t banned from Google. We know that the article is not banned from any other search engine. And we know that the article does not, in any way whatsoever, appear in Google searches, which must mean Google specifically targeted that article to be “forbidden knowledge” and therefore delisted.

How does that work?

Google doesn’t delist articles lightly. It usually happens because someone is sharing plans to make terrorist bombs or doxxing politicians or peddling child porn or, the worst offense of all, doing SEO the wrong way.

But it turns out anyone can flag a webpage as being abusive, and make a claim, and after a human review they might delist it. Here’s the button:

And then this:

And then this:

Somewhere buried deep in a dusty three ring binder of policy decisions, Google has made the corporate decision to delist anything that “contradicts or runs contrary to scientific or medical consensus and evidence-based best practices in medical topics.”

So when an angry neo-progressive Tumblr queen read my article, and clicked “feedback,” the article fell onto the desk of an angry neo-progressive furry at Google. They in turn decided the article ran contrary to the false medical consensus discussed above, and then Google delisted HWFO’s article on the topic.

That’s the mechanic.

Is the Google organization some towering avatar of wokeness hell bent on scrubbing the internet of wrongthink? I suppose that’s possible, but the case of my censorship doesn’t confirm it. My censorship does confirm, however, that the tools Google uses to “make people safe” are used by culture warriors to war, because to a culture warrior, no culture except their own is safe.