Meghan Murphy on Third-Wave Feminism, Cancel Culture, and the Tweet That Got Her Banned
Meghan Murphy's experience of being banned from Twitter for stating that men are not women will sound familiar to British women who have faced dismissal, deregistration or online pile-ons for saying the same thing. The Canadian feminist who built Feminist Current gives a first-hand account of how gender identity ideology captured progressive institutions — and why the left traded free inquiry for enforcement. Her story maps closely onto what has happened inside British universities, charities and the NHS.
Meghan Murphy arrived at feminism the way many women of her generation did — through a recognition that women face disadvantages rooted in their sex. What made her unusual, even in the early 2010s, was her willingness to say so plainly at a time when third-wave feminism was redefining itself around the celebration of pornography and prostitution as liberation. Murphy disagreed, and that disagreement put her on a collision course with a movement shifting rapidly beneath her feet. She was among the first Canadian feminists to publicly question gender identity ideology, doing so as early as 2011. The response was swift: she was pushed out of a feminist podcast collective. Rather than fall silent, she founded Feminist Current in 2012, which became one of the most significant platforms for gender-critical feminist writing in the English-speaking world. Her account of being expelled from progressive spaces for holding a recognisable feminist position will resonate with many British women who lived through equivalent professional and social consequences in the years that followed. The most dramatic chapter in Murphy's story came in 2018, when Twitter permanently banned her. The offending tweets included the statement that men are not women, and her use of male pronouns to refer to Jessica Yaniv, a Canadian activist pursuing legal complaints against women's beauty therapists who declined to wax male genitalia. That a woman could lose access to a global platform for a position now consistent with the UK Supreme Court's ruling on the legal definition of woman says a great deal about where online discourse had arrived. Her legal case against Twitter failed in California. She was reinstated in 2022 after Elon Musk's acquisition of the platform. For British listeners, Murphy's case is not a distant North American curiosity. The UK has produced its own roll-call of women sanctioned for gender-critical speech — from Maya Forstater, whose employment tribunal established that gender-critical belief is protected under the Equality Act, to academics, nurses and teachers who have faced disciplinary proceedings for similar statements. The same pressures Murphy describes operating inside Canadian feminist organisations were operating with equal force inside British universities, trade unions, charities and public bodies throughout the same period. The Cass Review, published in 2024, acknowledged implicitly that this culture of suppression had reached clinical settings, with NHS staff describing an atmosphere in which raising legitimate questions about paediatric gender medicine felt professionally dangerous. Murphy's first-hand account of how that atmosphere was constructed — how women's studies became gender studies, how dissent became heresy, and how institutions that once championed open debate became engines of ideological enforcement — helps explain the conditions that allowed the Tavistock to operate unchallenged for as long as it did. Understanding the intellectual history is part of understanding what went wrong.
