Meghan Murphy on Third-Wave Feminism, Cancel Culture, and the Tweet That Got Her Banned
25 December 2025
With Meghan Murphy
free-speech
Meghan Murphy's trajectory — from feminist organiser to Twitter exile to reinstated commentator — maps the ideological shifts that have reshaped how institutions treat dissent. Her story illustrates how questions about sex, identity and speech became litmus tests, and how platforms acquired the power to determine which feminist arguments could be heard at all. This episode traces the mechanisms of exclusion that have operated inside feminist organisations, legacy media and social media alike.
Meghan Murphy came to feminism through the political traditions that defined the left before identity politics displaced class and material analysis. As a writer and the founder of Feminist Current, she engaged deeply with debates about pornography and prostitution that were already exposing fault lines in feminist theory. Third-wave feminism, she argues, made a significant wrong turn in treating both as expressions of female agency rather than as industries shaped by structural inequality. That disagreement was not marginal — it anticipated the larger rupture that would eventually divide feminists over gender identity itself. The institutional drift was visible early. Women's studies departments, once grounded in sex-based analysis, gradually reoriented toward gender studies — a shift that is more than terminological. It signals a change in the underlying question being asked: from what does biology and society do to women, to what does identity mean for the individual. Murphy noticed this transformation and began tracing its consequences before it became a mainstream controversy. In 2011, when she publicly questioned gender identity ideology, she was pushed out of a feminist podcast collective. The mechanism is telling: not a public debate, not a reasoned rebuttal, but removal. This is a pattern that has repeated across institutions — universities, publishers, NGOs — wherever the logic of ideological conformity has overtaken the tolerance for contested ideas. Murphy founded Feminist Current in 2012 partly in response, building a platform that could operate outside structures that had foreclosed the conversation. Her 2018 Twitter ban made her case internationally visible. The tweets that triggered permanent suspension — stating that men are not women, and using male pronouns for a particular individual — were not abusive by any conventional measure. They were statements about biological sex and journalistic accuracy. Yet they were treated as violations serious enough to warrant exclusion. The subsequent lawsuit, which Murphy lost in California, clarified the legal reality: private platforms have wide discretion over speech, and courts will not intervene simply because the suppressed speech concerns a matter of genuine public debate. The episode also touches on the cultural conditions that made all of this possible. Helen Andrews' essay on the feminisation of the workplace provides one frame for understanding how institutional cultures shift and how those shifts affect who is heard and who is disciplined. Murphy's observation that the left has become illiberal is not a partisan point but a structural one: movements that once organised around freedom of expression have increasingly defined protection of identity as a value that overrides open inquiry. Murphy's reinstatement on Twitter after Elon Musk's 2022 acquisition, and the wider audience she reached through Joe Rogan, illustrate how speech suppressed in one institutional space can eventually find another. But the episode raises a harder question: what happens to the arguments, the evidence and the people that institutions exclude before any release valve appears? The interval between suppression and reinstatement is where ideas go unexamined, movements lose momentum and institutions entrench positions that may later prove to have been wrong.
