Roger Dubar, creator of Satiria, has been permanently banned from Twitter for ‘hateful conduct’. Hundreds have suffered similar fates for their views on gender.
In July 2019, I joined the hundreds of people permanently banned from Twitter for the “hateful conduct” of talking about biological sex and gender politics.
Most of these banned, alleged “haters” are women. Many are progressive feminists who are on the political left. Some, like the blogger Miranda Yardley, are trans.
How this came about is a sorry tale.
Ten years ago, if you’d told me or anyone else on the Progressive Left that simple phrases like “same-sex attraction”, “expectant mothers” and “safeguarding children” were “problematic”, you would have been considered sexist, or homophobic, or possibly quite mad. You would have been accused of scaremongering, of committing the “slippery slope” fallacy, and of seeking to incite prejudice against gender non-conforming people.
Fast forward to 2019, and all this has come to pass.
A brand-new ideological view of “gender identity” has appeared, never before seen in history. It holds that the only difference between men and women is self-declared “gender identity”. It insists, regardless of their biological sex, that gender non-conforming people are the gender they say they are. It also insists that it is hate speech to even suggest that no one ever believed these ideas before.
Of course, many cultures recognise gender non-conformity. Some recognise three or more “genders”. None have ever believed that a man who says he’s a woman is an actual woman. Why would they believe something so preposterous? In more than 99% of humans, sex is unambiguous. Intersex conditions are a separate category, unrelated to these new claims that surgery or hormones-or even more absurdly a simple self-declaration-can change one’s biological sex.
You can disagree with me on this, of course. You can believe that biological sex is no more scientific than the earth being round, climate change being real, vaccines being effective, or gravity being a property of mass.
Or you can argue that sex should be redefined to be more inclusive, so that “trans women are women” is no longer just a slogan, but instead becomes legally enforceable.
It’s what many progressive organizations are doing, including Amnesty International, Stonewall and the ACLU, and it’s what trans rights advocates plan to incorporate into national and international law.
Canadian activist Morgane Oger claims:
“Transgender women are women, like tall women or francophone women are, and everyone has the right to equal treatment under our law… These facts are binding, but they still need to be advocated for, because cultural norms have not fully adjusted.”
Morgane may believe that, but it’s wrong. Biological sex has real-world implications, in medicine, women’s sports, women’s prisons, statistical reporting, criminology, sexual attraction and in many other areas. Sex remains a protected characteristic in human rights law, despite the best efforts of some trans rights activists to change that. Expanding the definition of “women” to include men makes the word meaningless. Ironically, trans activists claiming that sex reduces womanhood to a matter of “biology” instead want to make being a woman nothing more than a personal belief.
Disagree with me? Fine. Advocate changing the meaning of words if you want. Argue that “homosexual” should be changed from meaning “attraction to the same sex” to mean “attraction to the same gender”. Say it’s offensive to talk about “expectant mothers” instead of “pregnant persons”. Call Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side” or any other past piece of gender non-conforming art “transphobic” for failing to comply with the requirements of 2019 Gender Ideology.
I think that’s nuts. I don’t think that helps trans or gender non-conforming people at all. Even more nuts is the notion that anyone who doesn’t comply with these trans activism’s new demands is a “hater”, or “fascist”, or a “transphobe”.
We cannot challenge sexism if we pretend sex does not exist any more than we can challenge racism if we pretend we can’t distinguish race.
To argue that society must deny biological sex for political or sociological reasons is to make science subject to ideology. That is ridiculous. It’s what the Soviet Union did with its disastrous adoption of Lysenkoism in from the 1920s until the 1960s.
Even worse, this denial has led to the insane situation where children are being allowed to believe that they can change their sex and that anyone with an even slightly different opinion hates them and deserves to be ostracised from society and is deserving of violence.
Open hatred of women who will not comply with the demands of trans activist gender Ideology is entering the mainstream and even being seen as “progressive”. Using the coded word “TERF”, which originally meant “trans-exclusive radical feminist” but now means anyone with a “wrong” opinion on gender, has become a licence to spew extraordinary hatred towards anyone speaking in favour of women’s rights or free speech, both of which are now declared “transphobic”.
I became interested in all this a few years back when I was describing in a Facebook thread my own experiences growing up as gender non-conforming . A trans teenager told me to go and kill myself and said they could not wait until all the “TERFs” were dead.
This level of deranged hatred from purported progressives, together with episodes like ambivalence on the Left to the murder of staff at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo (who, apparently, had it coming) led me to start the satirical account Satiria as a creative outlet.
Variously described as “mediocre”, “edgy”, “badly photoshopped”, and “very funny”, Satiria grew slowly without incident, offending the right and left with equal gusto. Islamic Fundamentalists and vegans occasionally moaned about jokes, but otherwise left me alone.
All this changed when Satiria started to mock the absurd intolerance endemic to gender ideology and its encouragement of hatred and violence that is aimed at non-compliant women. Suddenly I was being mass-reported over and over. Soon, I was on rolling 30-day bans from Facebook, sometimes for posts which were months old.
Eventually, I managed to get in touch with Facebook, and presented them with evidence that their moderation rules were being gamed to push not just me, but other satirical pages from their platform.
I did not get a formal response, but I was silently unbanned, my “hit counter” (or whatever they call it) reset to zero, and my page re-published.
This has not happened with Twitter, where Satiria still exists in a seemingly throttled form. There, discussions of biological reality have led to permanent bans for myself and many others – mostly women.
Twitter told me that:
“It is against our rules to promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.”
None of my tweets ever attacked anyone, although they did criticise the brand-new interpretation of gender ideology that believes it is tantamount to hate speech to talk about biological reality.
It’s notable that the protected characteristic of “sex” is not listed in Twitter’s Terms Of Service. Abusing women over their biology is, apparently, okay.
Twitter has taken the ideological stance that “trans women are women”, and is apparently out to enforce regardless of the implications.
This new intolerance to history, reason and debate didn’t appear from nowhere. It’s been building for some time. As Social Psychologist Dina McMillan notes, “Over the past decade… [ideological] indoctrination has become brutal. Even to question anything promoted by the Progressive Left results in vilification, bullying social shunning. By the time Trans hit the spotlight, these people had been well trained to accept literally anything”
Now anyone on the Left, even if they have a long history of LGBT activism, is dismissed as a “bigot” and as “alt-right” for simply acknowledging that humans are a sexually dimorphic species and that without dimorphism, the notion of being “trans” itself makes no rational sense.
Twitter knows what it is doing. It’s seeking to control the language of discussion, and therefore control what its users are allowed to think. As the also-banned activist Posie Parker puts it, “Only women who practice self-censorship are still on Twitter”.
Of course, It’s not only Twitter that is engaged in these attempts at Orwellian, Kafkaesque mind control. Every major political party on the left, along with organisations like Stonewall, Amnesty International, the ACLU and many other leading organizations have been taken over in an apparent ideological coup, where the ideas that women require same-sex protections, and that lesbians don’t have penises have become “offensive”. Twitter is just one example of this sexist, homophobic horrorshow.
In May 2019, the group Fair Play For Women wrote to Twitter Director, Martha Lane Fox claiming the company is allowing “a concerted attack on women’s free speech”.
The BBC reported, “Twitter said its rules are enforced equally for every user, regardless of the commentary they engage in.”
However, Twitter’s rules are not enforced equally.
Long-time Twitter user @TrustedNerd, now revealed as Jessica Yaniv, who has put several ethnic minority women out of business and is pursuing dozens more through Canada’s Human Rights Tribunal system, boasts of having had hundreds of women banned from the platform.
Jessica’s attacks on the race and gender identity of others are, apparently, fine. Anyone pointing out Jessica’s sex, however, is subject to a permanent ban from Twitter, as Canadian activist and founder of Feminist Current, Meghan Murphy found out.
Then there’s self-identified world expert on fairness in sports @RachelvMckinnon who, despite tweeting that she wanted “cis people” to “die in a grease fire”, is allowed to remain on Twitter.
In addition, Twitter allows accounts to remain which routinely question the gender identity of others. Consider this tweet exchange between the prominent transexual @BuckAngel and the still-active account @TwinkBackup:
What’s being enforced is one narrow view of what anyone, trans people included, is allowed to believe about being trans, and any insistence on dissenting views is being labelled as “hateful conduct”.
How a multi-billion dollar corporation like Twitter feels able to defame thousands of people — potentially laying itself open to millions of dollars of liability, and banking on a narrow version of Queer Theory-led gender ideology, which has never existed before in entirety of history, remains a mystery.
As my un-banning from Facebook shows, it doesn’t have to be this way. Someone at Facebook is listening. They surely realise there’s only so much they can shut down free speech, ignore biological reality and alienate their user base who by and large who by and large have never heard of any of this politically correct craziness.
Will Twitter respond? Some prominent “permanent bans” have been overturned. Most haven’t.
We remain, in 2019, facing the absurd reality that one of the greatest platforms for communication and knowledge in human history has chosen to be beholden to a fundamentalist ideology which seeks to ban trans people from acknowledging their own biological sex.
Quite what Twitter’s shareholders and insurers make of this, I do not know.
Does Twitter really want acknowledging biological reality to be against its terms of service?
As the famous documentary Jurassic Park, taught us, “Life finds a way”.
