Meghan Murphy on Third-Wave Feminism, Cancel Culture, and the Tweet That Got Her Banned
Meghan Murphy's story of being banned from Twitter for stating that men are not women resonates powerfully in Ireland, where proposed hate speech legislation has raised alarm among women who fear that biological reality could become legally unsayable. Stella O'Malley speaks with one of the women who paid an early, heavy price for refusing to capitulate to gender identity ideology — and asks what her experience means for the future of open debate in this country.
Meghan Murphy is a Canadian writer and the founder of Feminist Current, one of the most widely-read feminist platforms of the past decade. She came to feminism through a genuine belief in women's liberation, but found herself increasingly at odds with the direction the movement was taking — particularly its embrace, in its third wave, of pornography and prostitution as expressions of female empowerment. She argued, and continues to argue, that these industries represent exploitation repackaged in the language of choice. One of the more quietly devastating observations in this conversation is Murphy's account of how women's studies departments across North America transformed into gender studies programmes. The shift was not merely cosmetic. The focus moved away from the material conditions of female life — economic, social and physical — and towards identity and subjectivity. Women as a class were gradually erased from their own academic field. The same pattern is visible in Ireland, where institutional and educational discussions of sex-based rights are increasingly displaced by the language of gender identity. Murphy was one of the first voices in Canadian feminism to publicly question gender identity ideology, doing so as early as 2011. The response was swift: she was pushed out of a feminist podcast collective. Undeterred, she founded Feminist Current in 2012, and spent the following years building a platform that refused to treat sex as a social construct or women's spaces as negotiable. For Irish women who have watched similar dynamics play out in their own organisations — where raising a question about single-sex spaces can end a career or a friendship — her trajectory will feel familiar. The moment that brought Murphy to international attention came in 2018, when Twitter permanently banned her account. The offending tweets included the phrase "men aren't women" and a reference to a biological male named Jessica Yaniv using male pronouns. Both statements are factually accurate. Both were judged to be hateful. Murphy sued Twitter in California and lost. Her case was later taken up by Joe Rogan, and she was reinstated to the platform in 2022 following the Musk acquisition. The question this raises is directly relevant to Ireland: if hate speech legislation were in force, would women here face legal exposure for saying the same words? The conversation also touches on Helen Andrews' essay about the feminisation of the workplace, and on the broader question of why the political left, which once championed dissent and free inquiry, has grown so hostile to both. For Irish listeners, this is not an abstract transatlantic debate. Ireland has lived through a remarkable ideological acceleration. In a country that spent decades silencing women through conservative religious doctrine, there is a bitter irony in watching a new orthodoxy demand the same silence — this time in the name of progress. Stella O'Malley, as an Irish psychotherapist who has herself navigated the pressures of speaking plainly about sex and gender, understands precisely what is at stake.
