Meghan Murphy on Third-Wave Feminism, Cancel Culture, and the Tweet That Got Her Banned

Meghan Murphy, founder of Feminist Current, was among the first voices in Canada to publicly challenge gender-identity ideology — and was permanently banned from Twitter in 2018 for stating 'men aren't women.' Her case raises questions directly relevant to Ireland, where the Hate Speech Act 2024 has prompted debate about what can lawfully be said about biological sex. This episode examines how feminist institutions were reshaped by gender-identity ideology, why factual statements about sex became bannable, and what that trajectory means for open debate here.

Meghan Murphy is a Canadian writer and the founder of Feminist Current, an online publication she launched in 2012 after being pushed out of a feminist podcast collective the previous year for publicly questioning gender-identity ideology. Her trajectory — from mainstream feminist commentator to Twitter-banned controversialist to reinstated user following a change of platform ownership — offers one of the most thoroughly documented case studies of how speech about sex and gender became policed within institutions that had once championed women's rights. Murphy's break with third-wave feminism predates the gender debate. She had already parted ways with the dominant feminist direction over its embrace of pornography and prostitution as expressions of female liberation, arguing instead that these industries harm women as a class. Her critique extended to the transformation of women's studies departments into gender studies departments, a shift she regards as erasing the material reality of female sex-based disadvantage in favour of identity-centred frameworks. By 2018 those positions had brought her into direct conflict with Twitter. The platform permanently suspended her account for tweets that included the phrase 'men aren't women' and for referring to a Canadian transgender activist known as Jessica Yaniv by male pronouns. Murphy challenged the suspension through the California courts and lost. The case attracted widespread attention after Joe Rogan discussed it on his podcast and subsequently interviewed her; she was reinstated in 2022 following Elon Musk's acquisition of the platform. The sequence — suspension, failed legal challenge, reinstatement tied to ownership change rather than policy revision — illustrates how content-moderation decisions can be arbitrary, commercially driven and largely insulated from judicial oversight under existing law. The Irish relevance is direct. Ireland's Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Act 2024 created new speech offences covering material likely to incite hatred on the grounds of gender, among other characteristics. During the bill's passage, critics including legal academics and the Bar Council raised concerns about definitional vagueness and the potential chilling effect on good-faith discussion of sex-based rights. Murphy's experience in a jurisdiction with different but comparable enforcement norms provides a reference point for what happens when the boundary between hate speech and factual statement about biological sex is drawn informally — by private companies, employers or public institutions — without settled legal tests to guide it. The episode also addresses a broader cultural question: why the political left, historically associated with free expression and dissent, has moved toward enforcing ideological conformity. Murphy and the hosts discuss Helen Andrews' essay on the feminisation of the workplace as a contributing structural factor, exploring whether institutional culture, rather than deliberate suppression, is the primary driver of shrinking space for heterodox views. For those tracking evidence-based debate in Ireland, the episode is a reminder that the speech disputes most visibly contested in North America are not remote abstractions. Irish clinicians, researchers, journalists and public servants who engage with sex-based data or sex-based safeguarding face the same underlying pressures, and the legal architecture governing what can be said — in workplaces, in courts and on platforms — is still being defined.

The dossier behind this episode

Hate speech law, free speech and the gender debate in Ireland

Ireland’s modern argument about hate speech became inseparable from the gender debate because the Government’s proposed reform would have treated “gender” as a protected characteristic in both hate-crime and hate-speech law. The proposal came at a time when public disagreement over sex, gender identity, schools, women’s services, healthcare and language had become increasingly visible.

Read the Irish dossier