War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength — and men are women. Unlike the first three, the last comment wasn’t an example of doublethink from Orwell’s 1984, but one from America 2018. In fact, tweeting the opposite, that “men aren’t women,” actually got a radical feminist banned from Twitter.
While it’s usually conservatives in the crosshairs of social-media censorship, one of its latest victims is Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy, a self-described socialist and founder of the website and podcast called Feminist Current. Yet her views on “transgenderism” weren’t current enough for Twitter. Heavy provides some background:
It all started back in August, when she wrote and tweeted about a transgender activist named Lisa Kreut. Lisa Kreut is also a dominatrix who uses the name Hailey Heartless.
Hailey Heartless was asked to be a speaker at the annual Women’s March in Vancouver. Murphy and others were upset by the decision. This was partly because they disagreed [with] what they perceived to be Heartless’s views on violent sex and legal prostitution. They were also upset because, Murphy said, “this was, after all, a march for women.” And in their view, Hailey Heartless is a man [in their view?!].
Murphy’s Twitter account was first suspended in August after she criticized Kreut for allegedly having targeted “‘Feminist Current’s ad revenue and [leading] efforts to have Vancouver Rape Relief blacklisted at the 2016 BCFED Convention,’” reports Daily Wire. The site continues:
In order to regain full access after having violated Twitter’s rules regarding “hateful conduct,” Murphy deleted the tweets. She then complained publicly to Twitter, asking if she was “no longer permitted to report facts” on the social media platform. For this, Murphy claims that she was suspended for half a day, and told by Twitter to delete her public complaint.
In October, Murphy sent out a pair of tweets in which she questioned the transgender movement, writing, “Men aren’t women,” and asking, “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between men and transwomen?”
Murphy was notified by Twitter on November 15 that her tweets had once again violated the company’s “hateful conduct” rules.
In fact, she has now been “permanently banned” from Twitter, according to Spectator USA, and her Twitter page is inaccessible.
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Strikingly, also banned according to the Spectator is referencing a person with the correct pronouns (e.g., calling a man masquerading as a woman “he”). So is “so-called ‘deadnaming’ — referring to a previous name of a trans person,” the Spectator writes.
What should scare you is why my earlier 1984 reference is apropos here: This is an attack on objective reality itself. Murphy alluded to this in a complaint to Twitter, too, saying, Daily Wire relates:
I’m not allowed to say that men aren’t women or ask questions about the notion of transgenderism at all anymore? That a multi billion dollar company is censoring BASIC FACTS and silencing people who ask questions about this dogma is INSANE.
What ARE we allowed to say here??? How tf is simply saying ‘men aren’t women’ hateful??? I am losing my g[**]d[****]d mind over this. Enjoy your brave new world, sjws. Here’s your f***ing social justice … I’m assuming my account is going to get locked again simply for speaking about this.
Of course, censoring people under the “hateful conduct” pretext is also a denial of reality, since the yardstick used isn’t “hatefulness” (a hard quality to measure unless a mind-reader) but ideological conformity.
In fact, “transgender” activists are an intensely angry bunch whose efforts to destroy others are generally driven by hate, yet they’re not censored by social media. In contrast, while there are exceptions, I and many others opposing them mount deeply intellectual arguments that, simply for being unfashionable, are labeled “hateful.”
Many are found here, for example, in an essay in which I explain why there’s no good science whatsoever behind “transgenderism.” Moreover, here I examine the importance of controlling language and explain why I won’t — and don’t — adhere to the politically correct “transgender”-pronoun model. You tell me: Are these arguments “hateful”?
(Regardless, since I do what Murphy does, only more unabashedly and consistently, it should be only a matter of time before Twitter bans me, too.)
What’s hateful, of Truth and the imperative of allowing the vibrant intellectual debate necessary to reveal it, is social media’s censorship. How can people discern reality if they’re not even allowed to discuss it?
As for Murphy, her Twitter trials have inspired her to widen her discussion. In fact, before being completely banned, she tweeted that she’d changed her mind about some matters and was tired of the “‘right=bad/left=good’ dichotomy,” as she put it, as it wasn’t good to “limit ourselves to engaging only with those we already agree with.”
Furthermore, she said that right-wing “media has been the only media to cover Twitter’s attempts to silence me, and has been the only media to reach out to me.” In contrast, liberal media refuses “to even acknowledge that feminists have a critique of transgender ideology.”
Murphy also complained that, in Canada, at least, the media and Left in general refuse to utter a word about “transgender” bullying of and threats against feminists. She concluded by saying that while the right was willing to engage “with those they may disagree with,” the Left “wants an echo chamber.”
Of course, this is nothing new. Whether it was the French revolutionaries, the Soviets, the Chinese Red Guards, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or their other philosophical soulmates, the Left has never brooked dissent and always ends up eating its own.
Yet also true is that, in a way, feminism is responsible for eating itself here — because it paved the way for “transgenderism.”
How? Well, note that feminists used to espouse so-called gender neutrality theory, which taught that “gender” (a term previously reserved almost exclusively to grammar) was just a “social construct”; consequently, the theory also held that if you raised the sexes identically, they’d be identical beneath the surface. I was inundated with this growing up.
Now let’s tie this together. Feminists insisted that “the sexes are the same except for the superficial physical differences.” Now the male-claiming-female status crowd insists that if they change the superficial physical differences (i.e., external genitalia, facial hair), they can be the “other sex” — though, of course, they call it “gender.” A straight line absolutely can be drawn between the two claims.
So it’s ironic: The feminists peddled the “sameness” lie to gain entry into what had been men’s realm. Now men are using it to gain entry into women’s sports, women’s marches, and women’s bathrooms. I guess that’s equality.
