Following a report in The Daily Signal, the video platform Vimeo quietly restored the account hosting the documentary “Affirmation Generation,” a film exposing the medical scandal of experimental transgender interventions.
“Vimeo quietly—without an email reply to my appeal as of Thursday a.m.—has reinstated our film on the original link,” Vera Lindner, the film’s producer, told The Daily Signal on Thursday.
Lindner also shared a photo of Vimeo’s announcement that “upon a secondary review,” the company had “determined that the video is within our Acceptable Use Policy and has been reinstated to be available on Vimeo.” (The video is available at this link.)
Vimeo confirmed the news in a written statement to The Daily Signal.
“Vimeo maintains an Acceptable Use Policy to moderate our platform,” a company spokesperson said. “In the event we determine that an account has uploaded content that violates our terms, we will take appropriate action including content removal and, potentially, account termination. Vimeo users may challenge our decision and we may conduct a secondary review.”
“Upon a secondary review of the video ‘Affirmation Generation,’ we have determined that the video is within our acceptable use policy and has been reinstated to be available on Vimeo,” the spokesperson added.
The Daily Signal reported Wednesday on the documentary’s removal from Vimeo. The documentary’s title also had trended on Twitter after news of the Vimeo suspension broke.
“The buzz on Twitter and social media by parents and concerned citizens made this possible,” Lindner, the film’s producer, told The Daily Signal.
She said Twitter users tagged Vimeo in their tweets, asking why a “mild-mannered” and “deeply researched” film on “medical ethics” got banned.
“The definition of democracy is that the voice of the people is being heard,” Lindner said.
“I couldn’t be happier about it,” Joey Brite, the film’s executive producer, told The Daily Signal regarding Vimeo’s restoration of the documentary. “This is a big win.”
“I’m surprised and I’m hoping this just shows the pressure of the public and the great interest and hunger that exists among parents, among detransitioners, among the LGBs that do not believe in this, and everybody from across political and religious lines is sending emails of thankfulness about the movie being made,” she added.
Brite also announced that the film is being translated into Spanish, with more foreign language translations to come.
Lindner had sent The Daily Signal a photo of Vimeo’s announcement that the documentary’s account “has been disabled due to a violation of Vimeo’s Terms of Service and/or Guidelines.”
The film about medical interventions had been up for three days, racking up 19,000 views in that time, Brite told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday.
“Our film represents that which is currently being silenced because it’s unpopular with the tenets of the mainstream media,” the executive producer said. “First, it was the author J.K. Rowling followed by comedian Dave Chappelle. Vimeo and other platforms have banned many such projects as ours based on newly constructed, hateful narratives that cast truth, science, and common sense as enemies of the state. We need to move towards conversation and stop fomenting the conflict.”
“The filmmakers of ‘Affirmation Generation’—all lifelong West Coast liberal Democrats, parents and community leaders—made an extraordinary effort to cite peer-reviewed medical research and evidence, to present the issue with deep compassion toward the gender-dysphoric youth, and to back up every argument in the film with science,” the filmmakers said in a prepared statement.
Brite told The Daily Signal that the filmmakers “expected to get kicked off of Vimeo because of what happened to ‘Dead Name,'” a documentary about parents who struggle when school staff and doctors push experimental medical transitions for their children. “Dead Name” has not been restored to the platform.
Brite also said she posted videos of a large conference she hosted in August 2020 that was critical of gender ideology, and Vimeo removed those videos five months after she posted them.
Brite, a lesbian, said she first witnessed people offering testosterone near lesbian bars in California in the 1990s. She said the “T” in the LGBT acronym “was a Trojan horse.”
“This is all about money, Big Pharma,” she said. “This is just like the opioid crisis except that it is global, and embedded in governments, education, law.”
Brite said the film features the stories of six detransitioners, interviews with 12 experts, including clinicians, and the findings of over 45 peer-reviewed scientific studies and journal articles to expose the medical scandal of transgender interventions.
Brite criticized the suggestion that transgender identify affirms a person’s “authentic self.”
“Your ‘authentic self’ is now happening through drugs, sterilization, possible surgeries that are all experimental, all [aimed at] changing to this amorphous thing called gender, which is a social construct, not biology,” she said.
Lindner, the producer, told The Daily Signal that she hopes Vimeo’s ban will have the “Streisand Effect,” the phenomenon whereby banning something actually draws more attention to it. She said the filmmakers are aiming to get the movie distributed more widely.
“Currently we are contacting big distributors for worldwide distribution,” Lindner said. “For this reason, we will not put the film on alternate platforms, as that would preclude distributors from wanting to pick it up. Instead, we will continue to email it to our focus groups (parents, doctors, gay/lesbian advocates).”
“If fans post it on alternate platforms, these would be bootlegged versions,” she added. “I hope they would not preclude distributors from considering our film. The social media accounts for ‘Affirmation Generation’ will always have a link where people can see it.”
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