Meghan Murphy on Third-Wave Feminism, Cancel Culture, and the Tweet That Got Her Banned
Meghan Murphy's account of being silenced for stating biological facts resonates deeply across Europe, where similar mechanisms — academic gatekeeping, platform censorship, and hate-speech legislation — operate with even sharper legal teeth. Her story of watching women's studies dissolve into gender studies, and of paying a professional price for dissent years before most people knew there was anything to dissent from, gives European gender-critical feminists both a timeline and a mirror.
Meghan Murphy is a Canadian journalist and the founder of Feminist Current, one of the most widely read gender-critical publications in the English-speaking world. In this Christmas Day conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman, she traces her path into feminism and the growing unease she felt as the movement shifted its ground — embracing pornography and commercial sex work under the banner of empowerment, and gradually subordinating questions of sex-based oppression to the demands of gender identity theory. The transformation of women's studies into gender studies, which Murphy describes as something she watched happen in real time, is not a North American peculiarity. Across European universities — from Utrecht to Uppsala, from Berlin to Bordeaux — the same disciplinary migration occurred over roughly the same decade. The effect was consistent: the material reality of being female became secondary to questions of identity, and scholars who insisted otherwise found themselves increasingly isolated within institutions that had once been their professional home. Murphy was among the first feminists in Canada to challenge gender identity ideology publicly, doing so as early as 2011, when it cost her a place in a feminist podcast collective. She founded Feminist Current the following year. Her account of that early period — the social penalties, the accusations, the slow recognition that she was not alone — will sound familiar to European gender-critical feminists who went through comparable experiences somewhat later, often facing the additional pressure of hate-speech legislation that creates legal exposure for statements that are simply lawful in Canada. The episode covers Murphy's 2018 permanent suspension from Twitter, which followed tweets asserting that men are not women and referring to a male-bodied activist by a male pronoun. Her subsequent legal challenge in California failed. The case became a reference point in debates about platform censorship and biological truth — debates that are, if anything, more complicated in Europe, where the Digital Services Act and national hate-speech frameworks create extra layers of institutional risk for anyone making the same factual claims. The conversation also touches on Helen Andrews' essay on the feminisation of the workplace and the broader question of why progressive movements on both sides of the Atlantic have moved toward enforced consensus rather than open argument. Murphy's account of eventual reinstatement after the 2022 ownership change at Twitter offers a partial data point, though European listeners will note that platform policy shifts do nothing to alter the domestic legal environment. For those watching broadcasters, universities, and political parties in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries apply comparable pressure to gender-critical voices, Murphy's longer trajectory — the cost, the persistence, the gradual shift in public conversation — offers a usable frame for understanding how dissent gets marginalised and how it eventually forces its way back.
