Joe Rogan, the podcaster and UFC commentator, believes that reports suggesting a group of Spotify employees will strike if they don’t get editorial control over his show might have something to do with his opinions about transgender people.
Speaking with comedian Tim Dillon on his podcast last week, Rogan said that although Spotify, which recently acquired his show, has yet to reach out to him about censoring. He believes some employees might be frustrated with his discussions about transgender people and culture in the past.
“If you’re talking at all about trans people, you have to be 100% supportive,” Rogan said. “You can never question whether or not children should be allowed to transition, babies, hormone blockers for prepubescent children. All this is madness.”
Rogan added that “there’s a thought process now” which demands complete uniformity of thought when discussing transgender people and the normalization of children transitioning genders.
Rogan, who has been accused of holding bigoted ideas about transgender people in the past, rejected such accusations, saying that he is “100% for people being able to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t harm other people.”
“I don’t know what the actual conversation has been from Spotify talking to these employees. But if these employees are listening, I would tell you, emphatically, I am not in any way anti-trans,” Rogan said.
The former Fear Factor host said it’s likely that some employees at the tech giant are unhappy with his episode featuring Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.
“Is there someone at Spotify that’s complaining about the Abigail Shrier episode?” Rogan said. “I’m sure there’s someone who’s complaining about it. Is it a transphobic episode? It’s not. They’re wrong. It’s nothing to do with that. It has to do with the fact that human beings are actually malleable. We all know that. That’s why cults exist.”
In May, Spotify agreed to pay Rogan $100 million for the distribution rights of his podcast which had been uploaded free to his YouTube channel since 2009.
