Twitter's authoritarianism
August 22, 2022
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Strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom, indeed.
I know so many people who have been suspended or permanently banned from Twitter for the offense of standing up for women’s sex-based rights and against the abolition of sex. U.K. women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen (she was tweeting under the name Posie Parker at the time), Canadian journalist Meghan Murphy, and Irish comedian Graham Linehan come to mind. I know countless less well known people who have been treated similarly. The reason that Twitter gives for suspending or banning people is that one tweet or another has violated its rules regarding “hateful conduct.” I don’t remember what got Graham or Posie banned. I do remember that Meghan’s “hateful conduct” offense was referring to a man in the third person as “him.”
The latest casualty of Twitter’s assault on rationality is evolutionary biologist Colin Wright. On Sunday, I received word that he had been suspended because of a cartoon. I was not particularly surprised. People like Meghan have been banned for lesser offenses. To be honest, I am surprised that I haven’t faced repercussions for tweets like this:
This is journalist Christina Buttons’s tweet about Colin’s suspension:
What stands out the most to me about all of that is this: “By clicking Delete, you acknowledge that your Tweet violated the Twitter rules.”
That’s right. He can be reinstated by deleting the cartoon, but deleting the cartoon will not only result in reinstatement, it will also be an acknowledgement of guilt. This the height of authoritarianism. Not only must you take steps to rectify the situation, the rectification will automatically be registered as an acknowledgement of wrong-doing, even if you don’t think that what you did was wrong, or you will be shut out of discourse permanently.
Here is the cartoon that Twitter deems to be hateful conduct:
Colin and I have had disagreements in the past. I don’t always agree with his language (and I’m guessing he doesn’t always agree with mine). For example, I would not use the phrase “people with gender dysphoria” because I don’t think that phrase accurately describes people who sincerely struggle with biological sex, though I understand why people use it because it’s in the DSM. Regardless, I have tremendous respect for Colin’s intellect and his integrity. So, while I’m not even a little bit surprised that Twitter has suspended him, I am extremely annoyed on his behalf.
Another interesting aspect of all of this is that, in the aftermath of his suspension, numerous people have tweeted that very same cartoon, with no repercussions. One aspect of authoritarianism is its arbitrariness. No one, including me, knows when we’re going to get the Twitter boot, or for what.
In 2020, Colin tweeted this:
I will always be grateful to him for that. I can’t think of many other statements that so clearly, accurately, and concisely capture the seriousness of what we’re dealing with here. This is reality’s last stand, we are becoming hostages to chaos, and we are losing our collective tether to reality.
We can stop it by collectively standing firm on the importance of the material reality of biological sex.
Colin blogs on Substack at Reality’s Last Stand. You can check it out here. Another great resource for understanding what is at stake in all of this is the 11th Hour Blog.
Also of note, #TERFs has been trending on Twitter for days now.
So has this:
There’s a reason that most mainstream media outlets don’t want the world to know who we are or what we stand for.
The New York Times finally managed to mention a handful of U.K. TERFs in this piece, which is good. They ignored the Letter to the Editor that I submitted, thanking them for publishing it (just as they have ignored the countless Letters to the Editor and Opinion articles that TERFs have submitted over the years). A friend recently asked me if I have considered writing an opinion piece for the Washington Post on this topic. Of course I have. Several. They continue to go ignored. I did my best to explain our political movement here.
If you haven’t, please consider signing the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights. You can find the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International here.
Check out my book The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls, also available on Audible.