Meghan Murphy and Trans Mania

Toronto's Meghan Murphy Meltdown: A Case Study in Media-Driven Social Panic

"According to CBC radio host Carol Off, Murphy is someone whose extremism summons to mind comparisons with “a Holocaust denier or a white supremacist.” A Globe & Mail writer dedicated a column to branding Murphy an agent of “fear and meanness.” Toronto Mayor John Tory was so concerned by Murphy’s apparently horrifying message that he publicly called out his city’s chief librarian for permitting Murphy to deliver a speech on library premises. Hundreds of angry Torontonians gathered to protest that speech on Tuesday, telling at least one Murphy supporter to “go kill yourself, go bleed out and die.” The next day, Toronto’s governing council voted to review library policies, with a view toward ensuring that such a shocking spectacle would never again blacken the city’s reputation. For good measure, a pair of drag queens named Fay and Fluffy announced they would no longer come to the library to read books to children.

Is Murphy a Nazi? A war criminal? Perhaps a hooded KKK leader who appeared at the podium under a burning cross? Well, not quite. Meghan Murphy is a young Vancouver-based feminist activist and writer who says out loud what most Canadians think: that the rights of trans women must be balanced against the rights of girls and women as a whole, and that the admission of male-bodied individuals into spaces where women are vulnerable is an issue that can’t be resolved by screaming slogans or Tweeting emojis. As National Post columnist Chris Selley wrote after he attended Murphy’s Toronto event, the substance of her speech wasn’t even that controversial. The true scandal was out on the street, where progressive hypocrites yelled at Murphy’s feminist supporters in the way that Westboro Baptist Church members berate women entering an abortion clinic...

The notion that only one side of this argument has legitimate points to make is unsustainable, which is why a full-fledged schism now is developing within the wider LGBT movement.

In fact, it is this development that so alarms ideological enforcers within orthodox gender circles, as they (rightly) fear that they are losing their monopoly position. This, in turn, helps explain their fanatical desire to shut Murphy down—since the spectacle of her speaking common sense may invite other people to imagine that they can do the same without suffering punishment. And then, eventually, as with all cultish movements that rule by fear instead of persuasion, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.

As a man, I have no personal stake in this battle—because the entire weight of gender-ideology extremism is borne by girls and women. (There are no women demanding access to my health-club locker room, or making a mockery of male athletic competitions.) But I do have a stake as a journalist. For I know of no other issue that has had such a mind-warping effect on the work of otherwise intelligent writers and broadcasters.

Not only is it now considered perfectly normal (even admirable) for state-funded journalists to compare gender-crits to Holocaust deniers. One also sees the opposite phenomenon at work: Male-bodied individuals are praised as “shining examples of what humans can accomplish with training and effort” when they take medals away from biological women. In some cases, genuine sociopaths from among this group are even lauded by the media for their “courage.” This includes Rachel McKinnon, a cycling “champion” who dominates much smaller (female) competitors, told critics to “die in a grease fire,” and recently celebrated the death of a 36-year-old feminist from brain cancer. Throwing people into grease fires seems a lot closer to Nazi talk than anything Meghan Murphy ever said. And yet this would be the very same Rachel McKinnon who is regularly celebrated on the CBC in sunny features with titles such as We Have to Promote Inclusive Sport.

To any normal observer, it must seem like the media has lost its collective mind. The question is: Why?

When conservatives try to provide an answer, the focus often centers on the ideological distortions contained within orthodox gender studies. But that explanation doesn’t satisfy, because campus cults exist in all corners of academia, often without their dogmas metastasizing into mainstream culture and politics. What’s unusual about radicalized gender activism is that it has imposed itself not only on policy-making, but also on the way that policy-making is debated and critiqued in the media. And so even as some measure of sanity seems to be returning to this issue, it’s worth taking the opportunity to understand how mainstream journalists turned themselves into cheerleaders for dogmas that few people actually believe...

The whole arc of left-wing activism over the last century has created a spirit of triumphalism in regard to every cause premised on an expansion of asserted rights—including anti-sexism, anti-racism and anti-homophobia... There is no acknowledgment that social-justice campaigners now have scraped up against the bare-metal limits of the rights that can be vindicated by society without biting into other, older rights won by previous activist cohorts.

A third factor is the role of social media, including within the LGBT community, where a healthy debate might once have occurred. In the pre-Twitter past, different factions of the queer movement often were able to assert themselves within a patchwork of different media. But Twitter now allows the angriest and shrillest voices to coalesce into a de facto ideological inquisition. Britain’s PinkNews, in particular, has become a notorious enforcer (and is now dismissively referred to as Penis News by exasperated lesbian critics). Canada’s Xtra is moving in the same direction...

As early as 2011, Toronto’s Star newspaper showed you could set the internet on fire with this sort of article [on "trans" kids]. And the established form of writing these pieces is such that they are presented more as celebrations than actual profiles. Crucially, stories about detransition are effectively taboo—because even acknowledging the existence of de-transitioned youth serves to impugn the media’s own sunny approach to the issue (which is why detransitioned youth increasingly are bypassing the mainstream media and setting up their own web channels). All told, the media has a natural incentive to act as a one-way filter in regard to news about trans issues.

A fourth factor is the economic decline of traditional journalism as a whole, which has affected the way newsrooms now are run and staffed.

As recently as the late 1990s, which is when I began my career in journalism, media organizations were able to insulate themselves against social panics and fads through the employment of a large corps of experienced, risk-averse, highly professional desk editors and middle managers. They supplied a sort of ideological ballast, so that a small number of activist journalists within the organization couldn’t exert veto power on controversial issues. Over the last 20 years, that entire stratum of professionals has been packaged out, and the editorial staffing in these organizations generally consists of just two groups: (a) a small corps of managing journalists in their 50s and 60s who are desperately trying to make it to retirement; and (b) a larger corps of poorly paid 20-somethings. Because members of this latter high-turnover group (rightly) feel have little expectation of long-term employment, their primary ideological loyalties are to social media, not to their nominal bosses.

In some cases, media bosses no longer even pretend that their staffers are anything but in-house social-justice activists...

Fifth and finally, there is the extraordinary classism that infects the woke media"


Canadian literary editor fired after supporting free speech - The Post Millennial - "Will Johnson, a Canadian literary editor, was fired from his position at the Humber Literary Review for supporting Meghan Murphy’s right to freedom of speech... “I didn’t know what the word TERF meant. All I saw was internet trolls screaming at feminists.” Johnson said, noting that he did consider himself a feminist—especially on the issue of sexual violence, one of the main themes of his upcoming memoir... “I posted that I love trans people, but I find the activists who claim to be representing them to be petulant, small-minded shitheads. That tweet went a little bit viral, inspiring a cavalcade of conversation on both sides”... Johnson notes the irony in that he has an extensive history of pro-LGBT editing. As far back as 2017, Johnson was interviewing a non-binary man for the Nelson Star, featuring his narrative on parenting as part of an exclusive."