Meghan Murphy on Third-Wave Feminism, Cancel Culture, and the Tweet That Got Her Banned
25 December 2025
With Meghan Murphy
North America
Meghan Murphy, founder of Feminist Current, was among the earliest public voices to challenge gender-identity ideology from within feminism. Her 2018 Twitter ban—for tweets asserting that men are not women—became a landmark case in the broader free-speech debate now unfolding in the UK. This episode traces how progressive institutions, from podcast collectives to social-media platforms, replaced biological sex with gender identity as the organising principle, and asks what that shift has cost both feminism and open public discourse.
Meghan Murphy is a Canadian journalist and the founder of Feminist Current, an independent platform she launched in 2012 after growing tension with the feminist mainstream. Her background is in second-wave feminism, and her disagreements with the third wave centred on its accommodation of pornography and commercial sexual exploitation—positions that placed her outside the progressive consensus long before the question of gender identity arose. The episode traces how the intellectual climate within feminism changed across the 2000s. Women's studies departments and feminist organisations gradually reoriented around gender identity as the governing concept. Murphy describes being one of the first feminists in Canada to raise public objections to this shift, which cost her membership of a feminist podcast collective as early as 2011. The pattern—exclusion through social rather than intellectual pressure—will be familiar to UK observers who have followed the treatment of gender-critical academics, lawyers and healthcare workers over the same period. The free-speech dimension of Murphy's story crystallised in 2018, when Twitter permanently suspended her account. The grounds included tweets such as "men aren't women" and her use of male pronouns when writing about Jessica Yaniv, a biological male who brought legal complaints against female beauty therapists in British Columbia. Murphy brought a legal action against Twitter in California and lost. Her case drew wide international attention, including coverage by Joe Rogan, and she was reinstated following Elon Musk's acquisition of the platform in 2022. The sequence—statement of biological fact, platform removal, failed legal remedy—maps directly onto debates in the UK about whether existing law adequately protects sex-realist speech. In the United Kingdom, those questions have since moved through the courts and Parliament. The Supreme Court's ruling in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers confirmed that "woman" in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex, a determination that had been resisted by numerous public bodies for years. That institutional resistance, and the professional consequences faced by those who held the same position Murphy articulated long before it became legally settled, form the domestic context against which her account is most instructive. The episode also addresses why institutions that once prized open inquiry—universities, media organisations, professional associations—became so intolerant of challenge on this particular subject. Murphy discusses Helen Andrews' analysis of certain features of institutional culture, and the conversation raises questions that resonate with the Cass Review's observation that clinicians in the UK felt unable to voice concerns about affirmative-only approaches without professional risk. Murphy left Vancouver for Mexico in 2021, but the dynamics she witnessed and experienced remain directly relevant to the British reckoning with how gender-identity ideology came to occupy the institutional space it did, and at what cost to women, to feminism, and to honest public debate.
