The far-left is now going after those politically un-correct feminists who won’t toe the line on identity politics.
By Tilton Adler
Most Americans probably have never heard of the label “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” (TERF) before. Censorship, on the other hand, is a phenomenon most people are familiar with, as it has become a major issue, especially in the world of alternative news. The connection between these two, though, may surprise you.
TERF is actually a derogatory term that’s used to label certain feminists, who have the audacity to believe that biology determines gender and that the narrative constructed by far-left activists and the liberal media—that self-professed “identity” defines gender (in other words, if a man wants to be a woman, he can just decide to be one)—is not only incorrect but dangerous, especially for young people.
The irony here is that the radical feminists that fall into the so-called TERF category are generally considered to be left-leaning. Now some of these women are being censored online simply because they publicly state that, in fact, men cannot be women even if they’re on hormones and undergo radical surgeries. Clearly, censorship on the Internet is no longer picking political or ideological “sides.”
For example, Meghan Murphy, a left-leaning, feminist blogger, and activist who founded the blog “Feminist Current” and has been outspoken within the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), was permanently banned and her account removed from Twitter after she intentionally “misgendered” and “deadnamed” a transgender person. Her “crimes” consisted of referring to a transgender person by their biological pronoun rather than their assumed pronoun. Deadnaming is when someone uses the trans-individual’s previous name, such as calling them “Sam” instead of “Sally.”
Social media behemoth Twitter says these actions violate its “hateful conduct policy” and has banned individuals for the crime of calling a biologically male trans-woman a “he” instead of a “she.”
In 2018, the free website service WordPress abruptly shut down numerous feminist “blogs.” WoLF and several other well-established groups had over eight years of posts removed without warning and were told, only after the fact, that their content had been removed.
Attorneys at WoLF wrote, “No evidence has been provided that so much as a single post on any of these feminist sites contained any incitement to violence or other criminal activity, or in any way constituted speech not protected under First Amendment rights.”
Evidently, their voices were censored simply because they don’t adhere to mainstream media’s attempt to make us accept politically correct transgender policy—regardless of its inherent harm to women and girls. And it’s getting worse.
Like it or not, Americans are now living in an era in which saying there are only two genders is not only politically incorrect but in states like New York and California (as well as in Canada and the UK) it is now a punishable crime.
Bolstered by existing discrimination laws, the New York City Commission on Human Rights has stated that employers, landlords, and providers of services can be fined anywhere from $125,000 to $250,000 for calling transgender individuals by the wrong name, gender, or pronoun. Given the now lucrative result of complaining that one’s rights have been violated, what is to stop an average Joe from suing if one day he decides he’s now an average Josephine?
For those who claim these debates don’t affect anyone living in the real world, in the UK, there was a recent case where a 52-year-old biological man, who identified as a woman, was sent to a women’s prison after he was convicted of, among other things, sexually assaulting women and children. Then, as an inmate, he proceeded to rape more women. According to the UK Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, a “male-bodied prisoner who had a gender recognition certificate as female ‘had to be transferred to the female estate even though one of her index offenses was attempted rape of a woman.’”
This is exactly the type of scenario these censored liberal feminists are working to prevent—and, for that, they face derision and censorship among others on the left.
Tilton Adler is a freelance journalist based in Florida.
