Meghan Murphy
Feminist writer and founder of Feminist Current
Meghan Murphy was among the first prominent feminists to be deplatformed by a major social media company for stating that men are not women — a line that has since cost British women jobs, nursing registrations and academic careers. The Canadian founder of Feminist Current brings a decade of front-line experience of how gender identity ideology captured the progressive left.
In 2018, Twitter permanently suspended Meghan Murphy for tweeting that "men aren't women" — a moment that proved prophetic for feminist campaigners across the English-speaking world. In Britain, nurses have been referred to the Nursing and Midwifery Council, academics have faced disciplinary proceedings, and women have been arrested under hate-crime powers for saying words no less plain. Murphy's experience, explored in the Beyond Gender episode Meghan Murphy on Third-Wave Feminism, Cancel Culture, and the Tweet That Got Her Banned, illuminates how an institutional infrastructure for silencing sex-realist women was assembled before most people noticed it was happening.
Murphy founded Feminist Current in 2012 as a platform for radical feminist analysis of pornography, prostitution and — eventually — gender identity ideology. Her critique of the third wave carries direct relevance to the British picture: she argues that a feminism preoccupied with personal identity and individual expression was poorly equipped to resist an ideology that reframed the category of "woman" as a feeling rather than a biological reality. The Cass Review's finding that gender services for children were built on ideological capture rather than rigorous evidence maps closely onto the institutional drift Murphy was documenting in North America years earlier.
Her account of cancel culture carries particular weight for listeners familiar with the cases of Kathleen Stock, Maya Forstater and the many less prominent women who lost livelihoods for holding identical views. Murphy was cancelled before cancellation had a name, and she has spent the years since charting how progressive media, academia and social platforms constructed the architecture of that silencing.
In conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman, she reflects on what the left abandoned when it traded free inquiry for ideological conformity — and what reclaiming it will require.
