Last week, controversy erupted among transgender activists when it was announced the star would be taking the lead role in Rub & Tug, a film about the real-life lesbian crime kingpin Jean Marie Gill. Gill was a woman who dressed up as a man, and it's unconfirmed whether she ever actually considered herself transgendered, yet liberals complained about the "cis"-female Johansson taking the role instead of a trans actor or actress.

Daniella Greenbaum, who joined BI earlier in 2018, wrote a July 6 op-ed pushing back against the criticism on the grounds that portraying "someone different than herself" is the essence of all acting. The piece has since been deleted but can now be read at the Weekly Standard, the Washington Free Beacon reports.

"It's hard to imagine people having the same reaction in other scenarios—a rich actor being hired to play a poor person; an actor whose real-life parents were still living being hired to play an orphan; a perfectly nice, upstanding member of society being cast as a rapist; or an actor with no scientific experience being cast as a paleontologist," Greenbaum pointed out. "Yet all of these examples (and dozens more) could also be strangely characterized as 'stealing' narratives. I'm sure there's a class on how to do just that at the Yale school of Drama."

"Johansson's identity off the screen is irrelevant to the identities she plays on the screen," the writer concluded. "That's what she's paid for." Though Greenbaum referred to Johansson's critics as "the social-justice warrior mob," her article took no position on transgenderism itself.

Even so, the Daily Beast reports that several BI employees took offense to the piece, persuading the website to replace it with a notice stating simply that, "upon further review, we decided it did not meet our editorial standards."

BI editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson subsequently sent an internal email announcing that the publication would be creating a list of employees who "volunteered to talk about culture and identity issues" with other staffers, the Beast continues, and that moving forward executive editors would review "culturally sensitive columns, analysis, and opinion pieces."

"Editors should make sure we are not publishing shallow, 'hot takes,' but instead, fully thought-out arguments that reflect and respect the opposing view," Carlson wrote, suggesting that "social justice warriors" was an example of unacceptable "partisan name-calling." He added that the mandate "does not mean our argument-writers should not take big swings, or that they must have opinions shared by everyone in our newsroom."

On Thursday, Greenbaum shared on Twitter the full text of a resignation letter she sent to Carlson, explaining her position and expressing disappointment at Business Insider's removal of her work.

"I wish I could say I am surprised," she lamented. "Unfortunately, what happened with my piece—the tarring of a commonsensical view as somehow bigoted or not thought out; the capitulation on the part of those who are supposed to be the adults to the mob—is a pattern happening all over the country within institutions that pride themselves on open-mindedness and liberalism"...

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