I have been following the developments surrounding Bill Nye The Social Justice and his television show with great interest.
Many LGBT people commented that they were turned off by the Sex Junk episode and set back the goals of the LGBT movement back 20 years. People pretending to be atheists joked that they now believe in religion because something that evil could only be satanic.
Of course, the alt-righters were noting that this was more evidence of a Weimar America and called for the rise of a new Hitler. In all seriousness it probably did turn a small percentage of the left away from having pro-LGBT views.
All in all it appears to have had the opposite effect for what it was intended which was to win people over to their side.
It was so bad that Snopes, LGBT and tech websites had to come out in defense of Bill Nye when people found his show from 1996 where chromosomes determined sex and that there were only two possibilities; a 50/50 chance to be born either a girl or a boy.
Then the 1996 show on Netflix has this part edited out
Netflix: We didn't edit that Bill Nye episodeDisney and Netflix officials said Friday they're not sure why references to chromosomes and gender were removed from a 21-year-old episode of "Bill Nye the Science Guy," which is available now for online streaming.
"It sounds like it was a business-as-usual kind of clearance issue from ten years ago," a Disney official familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner.
The official suggested the edit likely occurred about a decade ago when the company first made the kid's television program available online.
The 1996 episode, "Probability," originally featured a cast member saying, "I'm a girl. Could have just as easily been a boy, though, because the probability of becoming a girl is always 1 in 2."
"See, inside each of our cells are these things called chromosomes, and they control whether we become a boy or a girl, " she added. "See, there are only two possibilities: XX, a girl, or XY, a boy."
That segment has since been removed, and it is not available in the version that is now streaming on Netflix, the Washington Free Beacon was first to report.
A spokeswoman for the online streaming service stressed Friday that they had nothing to do with the edits.
"Netflix did not edit 'Bill Nye The Science Guy,'" Elektra Gray told the Examiner. "It was delivered to us that way by Buena Vista TV."
Buena Vista TV mostly shuttered in 2007. It is now part of the Walt Disney Company's much broader "Disney–ABC Domestic Television" group.
The Disney official told the Examiner they're still investigating the matter, and said they would likely have more information available next week.
Nye's new program, "Bill Nye Saves the World," which is exclusive to Netflix, departs from his old television show's position on gender.
"Gender is like sex, it's on the spectrum," Nye said in one of his newer episodes.
News that Nye's old television program has been edited for Netflix comes on the heels of the premiere of his new online show, which takes a very progressive approach to a number of issues, including climate change, world population and gender.
For some critics, the new Netflix show has been an unpleasant departure from Nye's old children's program, which focused exclusively on traditional and non-controversial science theories.