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Canadian feminist writer, Meghan Murphy, who was permanently suspended from Twitter last November, is suing the social media site for deceptive trade practices and breach of contract. ‘Twitter would never have attracted the hundreds of millions of users it boasts today had Twitter let it be known that it would arbitrarily ban users who did not agree with the political and social views of its management or impose sweeping new policies banning the expression of widely-held viewpoints and perspectives on public issues,’ Murphy’s lawyers submitted. Good for her!
As I wrote at the time of her ban, Murphy, who, like me, is constantly de-platformed, attacked and vilified for daring to question the Orwellian madness of the transgender Taliban, is a target of vicious trans activists. Murphy had the gall to tweet about Jonathan Yaniv, who had demanded large payoffs from several female beauticians because they had refused to wax his scrotum. Yaniv, who claims to be female, had booked in for a Brazilian wax, a process done on women who wish to wear extremely skimpy bikini bottoms and not flash any pubic hair. Murphy’s crime? She referred to Yaniv as, ahem, a man.
The lifetime ban from Twitter has come as a significant blow to Murphy. The freelancer relied on Twitter as a platform to promote her writing and online magazine, Feminist Current, and had painstakingly built up close to 25,000 followers, so the ban has affected her income, as well as her reputation – after all – naive people still exist that assume a lifetime ban is for spreading hate and threats of violence, and not for telling the truth.
I have also been a victim of Twitter madness. Last year I received a visit from two local police officers who had come to issue me a warning about an alleged ‘hate crime’ I had committed. Apparently, I had tweeted something about how men with beards, penises, Adam’s apples, who wear traditional male apparel, should not scream at and threaten feminists who refuse to accept them as women. I had been reported by a trans activist, who wanted me to be charged with a crime. I refused to accept the warning, and showed the officers my Twitter timeline, containing a number of suggestions that I should be tortured, raped and murdered several times over because of my crimes of high TERFery. Although I sent the police packing, I was handed down a 24-hour ban for my tweet.
‘That in 2019, women are being still being bullied and intimidated into silence should shock and anger us all,’ Murphy tells me. ‘This is not an issue of disrespecting or criticizing trans-identified people, it is about preserving women’s sex-based rights and spaces, and it is about our ability to speak the truth.’
This silencing of feminists like Murphy is particularly egregious, as it is clearly an attempt by a multi-billion-dollar company to muzzle a writer and journalist who refuses to get in line. What it represents is an attempt silence all those who not only refuse to ignore material reality, but who continue to ask questions about legislation and public policy that threatens to destroy women’s hard fought for rights. Twitter is not protecting marginalized people, or they would be protecting feminists from death threats online and banning trans activists for telling us to ‘die cis scum’. They are brazenly choosing to protect predatory men over the women who attempt to hold those men to account, and silencing women whose voices are already marginalized in the gender identity debate — women who are already facing threats of violence, harassment, attacks on their jobs and ability to make a living, and no-platforming in all other arenas.
‘We lose so much when we don’t stand up to this kind of thing,’ says Murphy. ‘We cannot allow a multi-billion-dollar company to be the arbiter of truth, and to dictate our free speech.’ Never a truer word spoken
