The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
Those who have followed my posts for some time know that Meghan Murphy, who runs the Feminist Current web site that I frequent and has become perhaps Canada's best-known feminist, was permanently banned from Twitter last year for so rudely "misgendering" a male pedophile named Jonathan Yaniv by using male pronouns to describe him. The Vancouver Public Library has been banned from participating in today's Pride events in Canada because they (barely) allowed her, along with Lee Lakeman (who works for Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, which has now been de-funded for their longstanding policy of only hiring women and only admitting women and children) and other radical feminists to subsequently host a talk about gender identity this last January. (Every ticket sold.)
Recently, this same individual, Mr. Yaniv -- who has also filed 16 human rights lawsuits against various (mostly immigrant and religious minority) female beauticians who predominantly work out of their own homes where small children are present, for refusing to wax his genitals because he is male -- initiated a Twitter fight with free speech activist and winner of the 2018 Harry Weldon Canadian Values Award Lindsay Shepherd by attacking her reproductive capacity as an actual, biological female. This conflict resulted in her, Lindsay Shepherd, and only her, being permanently banned from Twitter because Shepherd described Yaniv as male in the course of the consequent dispute. Here is Shepherd's account of the details:
However, barely a week later, despite the officially permanent nature of her suspension, Shepherd's Twitter access was restored, with an apology from the company, following a large public backlash in a development that, as described in her follow-up video below, highlighted the arbitrary and subjective nature of the Twitter's content rules and their application. She also called the objectivity of much of the media coverage that she had initially received following her Twitter ban into question, highlighting double-standards in terms of who's contributions to the exchange in question were quoted and whose couldn't be repeated and so forth.
If there's an assertion I don't agree with in either of these descriptive videos, it's one from the first video above wherein Shepherd contends that, as far as official society is concerned, "trans people are above criticism". I believe that is a factually incorrect assessment of the situation. Had Yaniv been a trans-identified person who was biologically female and who complained about being "misgendered" by one or more men instead, it's unlikely that Twitter would have acted on those complaints. It is specifically the sex dynamics of this situation -- the fact that Yaniv is male and Shepherd is not -- that results in Yaniv receiving favorable treatment. Transgender politics simply serve to mask that reality, which is one I like to describe as male privilege.
ANYWAY, both Shepherd herself and the Post Millennial, which is a publication that Shepherd writes for from time to time, have argued that since Meghan Murphy's permanent ban from Twitter was on the same basic grounds, concerning the same person, her account should be reinstated as well (example 1, example 2). What do you think? Does Twitter apply their own rules fairly and equitably are arbitrarily? Should Meghan Murphy be un-banned, as Lindsay Shepherd was?
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