Meghan Murphy on Third-Wave Feminism, Cancel Culture, and the Tweet That Got Her Banned
25 December 2025
With Meghan Murphy
North America
Meghan Murphy's 2018 permanent Twitter ban for stating 'men aren't women' was an early and visible instance of platform enforcement against gender-critical speech. Her California lawsuit and eventual reinstatement track a pattern of institutional censorship that European courts have since addressed directly — most notably in the UK Employment Appeal Tribunal's 2021 ruling and the Supreme Court's 2025 confirmation that gender-critical belief is legally protected. This episode traces how that suppression began inside feminist spaces years before it reached legal systems.
Meghan Murphy is a Canadian feminist writer and the founder of Feminist Current, one of the first English-language platforms to publish sustained critical analysis of gender-identity ideology. Her trajectory — from mainstream feminist media to becoming a target of institutional exclusion and platform censorship — offers a detailed first-hand account of how gender-critical perspectives were removed from public discourse long before that removal became a recognised legal and policy question. Murphy describes how she came to feminism through opposition to the pornography and prostitution industries, aligning with a tradition of radical feminism that treats both as structurally harmful to women. She traces how women's studies departments progressively reoriented around gender identity theory, sidelining material feminist analysis in favour of frameworks built on self-identification. Her exclusion from a feminist podcast collective in 2011 — for publicly questioning gender-identity ideology — prefigured the institutional dynamics that would later shape clinical guidelines, legal definitions, and employer diversity policies across the English-speaking world and much of Europe. In 2018, Twitter permanently suspended Murphy for tweets that included the statement that men are not women and for referring to a transgender activist, Jessica Yaniv, with a male pronoun. Her subsequent lawsuit against the platform, heard in California, was dismissed. The case attracted wide public attention and raised a question that courts and legislators in multiple jurisdictions were beginning to confront: whether social media platforms, by enforcing prohibitions on misgendering, were treating a contested ideological claim — that sex is self-determined — as settled and unchallengeable fact. Murphy was reinstated following Elon Musk's acquisition of the platform in 2022. The legal questions her case raised have since found direct answers in European courts. In the United Kingdom, the Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled in 2021 that gender-critical belief — including the view that biological sex is a material and immutable reality — constitutes a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom confirmed in 2025 that the word 'woman' in the Equality Act refers to biological sex. These findings did not exist when Murphy was banned. They illustrate how platforms and institutions that policed gender-critical expression were operating well ahead of, and in significant tension with, the legal consensus that has since emerged. The conversation also touches on Helen Andrews' analysis of the feminisation of workplace culture and on the question of why progressive political movements have become less tolerant of internal dissent. For those charting how gender-identity ideology moved from marginal academic theory into institutional enforcement, Murphy's account of the early years of that process — her removal from feminist spaces, her unsuccessful legal challenge, and her eventual reinstatement — provides a documented personal timeline that sits alongside the growing judicial and regulatory record now accumulating across Europe.
