By Mona Charen
Thursday, February 14, 2019
She tweeted that “men are not women,” and for that,
Meghan Murphy, feminist journalist, was banned from Twitter. An anodyne
statement of biological reality qualifies as “hate speech” for some of the
gnomes at Twitter HQ. Murphy received a rote notification that “you may not
promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of
race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity,
religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
Excuse me, but that sound you heard was me spitting my
coffee across the desk. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been harassed
on Twitter on some of the above grounds. Twitter has benefits, but let’s face
it, threats, vile abuse, and harassment have become a key part of Twitter’s
brand. Louis Farrakhan has an account. Terrorists romp through its pixels with
ease, and the Russians deploy bots like biological agents. Only a select few
offenders are punished or banned.
When founder Jack Dorsey was asked on Sam Harris’s
podcast why suspensions and other disciplinary actions always seem to go in a
PC direction, Dorsey was phlegmatic, “I don’t believe we should optimize for
neutrality.” That was Silicon Valley–speak for “We are not fair.”
That is his right. It’s a free country, and, though
hailed as the national cyber townhall, Twitter is a private company. It has
declined to engage Murphy directly (Dorsey: “We don’t have a robust appeals
process”) but has churned out agitprop about “hateful conduct” with metronomic
regularity. This is not to say that Twitter applies even its own vague and
shifting standards evenly. I and others have tweeted concerns about the trans
movement — particularly with regard to children — without repercussions. But
that must have been sheer luck. In Murphy’s case, the company targeted her for
violating a policy that it had changed without any public notice. This is the
new ban on so-called “deadnaming” — using the former name of a person who
transitioned to the other sex. If Murphy’s lawsuit gains any traction, the
company may have to explain itself. Until then, we are left to consider the
Orwellian dystopia that travels under the name progressivism.
One of Meghan Murphy’s thoughtcrimes consisted of asking,
in response to someone else, “How are transwomen not men? What is the
difference between a man and a transwoman?” That is what is known as a
challenge, not an epithet. It earned her a warning. She also referred to a trans-identified
male as “he” — that is the forbidden practice of “misgendering.”
Murphy, along with many feminists and some conservatives,
resists the trans movement’s efforts to permit people who are born male to
enter women’s restrooms, locker rooms, prisons, and other environments where,
as Murphy puts it, “women feel uncomfortable seeing a penis.” This is a live
issue. In Washington D.C., women at a downtown health club have retreated to
toilet stalls to change clothes, since the club now refrains from stopping men
who enter the women’s changing room. Who’s to say who belongs where? Wouldn’t
want to put a foot wrong in the new gender-neutral utopia. The person Murphy
identified with a male pronoun was seeking to counsel women at a rape crisis
center in Vancouver, though the center hires only women.
Murphy’s website, Feminist
Current, has questioned the science and ideology behind transgenderism, and
Murphy is indignant that people with XY chromosomes can compete in women’s
sports. Personally, I might have taken a softer tone, adding some
acknowledgement that people with gender dysphoria deserve compassion. But
Murphy is expressing a point of view, dammit, and way too many opinion arbiters
here in Oceania won’t have it.
Twitter is hardly alone. Many a mandatory diversity
workshop, college orientation, and hotel policy does the same. Three female
undergraduates are suing Yale for a fraternity culture that they say enables
harassment. Fraternity parties, they claim, place men in positions of power.
Ok, but notice the language in the lawsuit: “Simply put, fraternities elevate
men to social gatekeepers and relegate women and non-binary students to sexual
objects.” Non-binary students?
Murphy’s objection is that this sudden reimagining of
what it means to be human has been imposed, not agreed upon, and certainly not
discovered by science. Many women, concerned about hurting someone’s feelings,
especially — as Murphy phrases it, someone from “a marginalized group” — are
shy about standing up for themselves and their own comfort. Above all, these
matters need frank discussion, not authoritarian diktats issuing from our
Twitter overlords.
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