Meghan Murphy on Third-Wave Feminism, Cancel Culture, and the Tweet That Got Her Banned
Meghan Murphy spent a decade building the argument that mainstream feminism had lost its way — first inside a podcast collective that eventually pushed her out, then through Feminist Current, the publication she founded in 2012. She joins Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr. Bret Alderman to talk about those years, the Twitter ban that followed, and what it tells us about the left's relationship with dissent.
Meghan Murphy came to feminism the way many women do — through a growing awareness of how the world is structured around male interests. What set her apart was what happened next. Where mainstream feminism was drifting toward a third-wave accommodation of pornography and prostitution, Murphy found herself unable to follow. She started writing about it, and then she started a publication — Feminist Current — to create a space where those arguments could be made properly. That was 2012. A year earlier, she had already been pushed out of a feminist podcast collective for raising questions about gender identity ideology. Murphy was among the first feminists in Canada to do so publicly, at a moment when the cultural consensus was hardening fast. The cost of that early dissent was social and professional, the kind of quiet excommunication that tends to precede the noisier kind. The noisier kind came in 2018, when Twitter permanently banned her account. The tweets in question included the phrase "men aren't women" and the use of a male pronoun to refer to Jessica Yaniv, a Canadian activist whose human rights complaints against female beauticians had become a national flashpoint. Murphy sued Twitter in California and lost. Joe Rogan took the case seriously enough to cover it and invite her on his show. She was reinstated in 2022 after the platform changed hands. What the episode draws out is how the mechanics of that process worked — who decides, on what basis, and what the decision signals to everyone else watching. In conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr. Bret Alderman, Murphy traces a longer arc: how women's studies became gender studies, how a movement that once organised around female experience came to penalise women who insisted on the category. The discussion also takes in Helen Andrews' essay on the feminisation of the workplace and the broader puzzle of why the left — once defined by its appetite for heresy and its defence of free expression — has become so hostile to both. This is an episode about what happens to people who say the obvious thing at the wrong cultural moment. Murphy is not a cautionary tale — she kept writing, kept arguing, eventually left Vancouver for Mexico and kept going from there. But the shape of her career maps the shape of a particular kind of pressure: the slow narrowing of what can be said inside institutions, inside movements, inside platforms, until the only option is to say it outside them. That is precisely the territory Beyond Gender exists to explore — not just the clinical and medical questions, but the intellectual and personal cost of holding a line.
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