Meghan Murphy and the silencing of women
by Ella Whelan, spiked:
The unholy alliance of trans activists and social-media censors is a threat to women’s freedom.
Twitter, despite its claims to the contrary, has never been a particularly friendly environment for freedom of speech. Over the past few years the social-media platform has expanded its ‘hate conduct policy’, banned controversial public figures from using its platform and has instituted a ‘sensitive media’ prompt, which asks tweeters to opt in to view content it deems questionable. But a recent change in its conduct policy has arguably turned Twitter’s hostility to open debate into an all-out war on freedom of expression.
Twitter now prohibits ‘targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals’. For anyone who doesn’t know what ‘deadnaming’ means, it entails calling an individual who has transitioned by their original name, rather than the one they have chosen. So if you refuse to call Jack ‘Jill’, you could be in violation of Twitter’s new rules. The same goes for misgendering, such as calling someone a he, when they want to be known as she.
Twitter is clearly serious about enforcing its new policy. Meghan Murphy – a Canadian freelance journalist and editor of the popular Canadian website, ‘Feminist Current’ – has been permanently banned for allegedly ‘deadnaming’ a trans person. When discussing a story of a trans woman who was taking a bunch of beauticians to court for refusing to wax his balls, Murphy used the phrase ‘yeah it’s him’. This, Twitter argues, was the straw that broke the camel’s back: Murphy had previously been warned and temporarily suspended for saying such inflammatory things as ‘males can’t become female’.
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