Heather Brunskell-Evans from FiLiA meets: Meghan Murphy

Heather:  I am talking to Meghan Murphy and very honoured and privileged to be talking to Meghan. I'm talking to you as the spokeswoman for FiLiA, which is a charity that you know about.

There are three aims of FiLiA. I'm just going to tell you this, because I think you fit into this very nicely, the three aims of FiLiA are:

Building sisterhood and solidarity. And I think you've done that hugely and we're all very grateful for you to have done that. 

The second is amplifying the voices of women, particularly those less often heard or purposefully silenced. Now, I think in terms of your own work, you have been heard a lot and you've made yourself, and amplified the voices of many, many women, which has been fantastic. But interestingly and bizarrely, you are one of the purposefully silenced at the moment. So I'd like to come back and talk to you about that.

The third aim of FiLiA is defending women's human rights, which you have an honourable history of doing. So if we could just come back to the second point. Which is the purposefully silenced.

 I wonder whether you could let us all know how you've been purposefully silenced and what the impact on you has been. 

Meghan Murphy: Yeah. I mean, it is odd because it's not as though my voice isn't being heard and I've obviously I've published work and lots of publications all around the world. At the same time, I'm one of the people who is censored and silenced and no-platformed a lot, or they attempt to, in any case. I mean, here in Canada the media has made it really difficult for me to get my voice out there in the Canadian media especially since I've started talking and writing about this gender identity issue, because the Canadian media won't even address or acknowledge the fact that there is a feminist analysis or feminist critique of the gender identity issue.

They sort of pretend as though there’s two sides to the story. So there's, you know, right-wingers and the progressive position and, and everyone else's concerns are left out. 

At the same time, because I started Feminist Current back in 2012, it's been impossible for them to really silence me and to silence the voices of all the other women.

There's so many women that have published work at Feminist Current from around the world, you know, from the US, from Canada, from the UK, from Australia, from Sweden and that's one thing that the media can't control and all the bullies and the, the would be sensors can't control. So I feel really grateful to, to have that outlet and to have so much support from women for that outlet also.

We survive solely on donations. So the only reason we exist is because we have support from people all around the world. 

Heather: So have you felt the lack of your voice firstly on Twitter and secondly, I think you have a book and a proposal which was withdrawn? 

Meghan Murphy: The Twitter thing, that's had a huge impact because I'm an independent writer and a journalist. I mean, Twitter is a way that I get work, I've been commissioned to write articles based on discussions that I've been having on Twitter and from having a profile there, I've been quoted in the media, in the New York Times and stuff like that via Twitter.

So it's not just an attempt to censor me and to silence my voice, but it's attempt to not allow me to work and to make a living. It has an impact on my ability to promote my work and to promote the work of other women, to defend other women, to defend myself.

The amount of libel that I see about me on Twitter is insane. I see people saying the craziest things about me that aren't true at all. And, and I have no means to defend myself. I've not been able to promote our events on Twitter. We've been holding some events here in Vancouver, specifically about the gender identity issue, and it's really difficult to promote those events and sell tickets for those events, without access to Twitter.

And beyond that, I mean, it's insane. It's insane that this multi-billion-dollar corporation is being allowed to dictate women's speech. I mean, I find it really scary beyond the impacts to my work and my career. I think it's quite terrifying that we've given all this power over to these social media companies to control politics and political discussion and debate.

And who's allowed to say what, and in what way, and what kinds of analysis is we're allowed to have. 

So I was working with a local publisher here in Vancouver for two and a half years on a book. And my manuscript was all but done. We'd gone through the last round of edits. So nothing in the book was a surprise to my publisher. We we'd been working on it for quite some time. 

The book is a critique of third wave feminism and sort of a call to return to a more radical version of feminism that began during the second wave and really much before the second wave. But, um, you know, that's sort of a continuation of a movement that's been going on for over a century, for sure.

But there were a couple of chapters about the issue of gender identity. There was nothing offensive or rude in those chapters. They were quite polite as far as I'm concerned. It's possible to be much ruder about these things when we're angry. I just got an email one day from my publisher, the owner of the company, saying that I guess, you know, he was worried about what other people would think he was worried about offending people. He specifically said he was worried about hurting people's feelings. So they were dropping my book and he'd fought with my editor and some other women at the publisher too, about this. And he just made a decision based on his own fears of, you know, people not liking him or people being angry at him for publishing the book. So, you know, I have an essentially completed manuscript and I just need to find a new publisher, which actually shouldn't be that hard, but I just have had no time at all to do that. And, it's, it's a lot of work to try to do that also. 

It's frustrating on principle and it's frustrating to have been working with this business for however long, just for them to drop it. And then for me to have to kind of go back to the drawing board, but it is also significant in terms of, in terms of how women are being silenced in this, like we can't even talk about it.

There's no hate speech, there's nothing hateful or bigoted that I'm ever seeing. nonetheless, it's just an unwillingness to even acknowledge that there's a debate that there's questions that need to be answered. That there's concerns that women have in particular, but also more broadly there's concerns that the general public has that are not being discussed and that people are scared to discuss.

Heather: I suppose what is so shocking is it's now got to the point which even possibly critiquing the concept of gender identity is interpreted as hate speech and exclusionary and hurtful to people and so on. So speech is being shut down and free thought has being shut down at every possible turn. So what I imagine is apart from the impact on you personally, what it's led you to understand, or maybe I'm talking about myself here, but it's led me to understand is that where I was researching something that felt very important, the importance of it just becomes more and more magnified the more silenced the attempt to stop our voices makes us realise what a serious issue this is.

I wondered whether you had some of the same sorts of feelings as me around that, the more you research it, the more there's some force to prevent such a strong force to prevent women from speaking about it. It beggars belief almost. 

Meghan Murphy: Yeah, I totally agree with you. It would seem less urgent and less of like a massive deal to be having these conversations and to be holding these events and these meetings and to be trying to publish work about this issue the gender identity issue, if not for the silencing and for the massive harassment, I mean the amount of stress and harassment and bullying that happens to people who try to speak out about this is insane. 

And it's completely ironic because we're being accused of being hateful and we're not saying anything hateful. And meanwhile, we're being subjected to all these horrible, like frightening, violent threats all the time. 

We held an event last week on Thursday in Vancouver specifically about the issue of gender identity and kids and we had Dagny, who's a young de- transitioned woman who's involved with the Pique Resilience Project and she’s great. She's super articulate. And we're really grateful that she's talking about her experience as a young woman who transitioned and then de-transitioned and realised that transitioning has a lot to do with social pressure and stuff that's going on social media and stuff like that. 

And we had Ken Zucker who ran the gender identity clinic in Toronto for, I think over two decades and was fired after some trans activists started a smear campaign against him. And only because, you know, he's not even necessarily opposed to transition. He would just take a more wait and see approach with kids, he didn't want to immediately put them on the path to transition because he knew that kids might say they're trans or might say they want to be the opposite sex and then change their mind down the road so he wanted to wait and see if it stuck essentially before putting them on that path.

 The venue got so many threats. It was shocking ‘don't have this event or else’ and much worse things and they had to file a police report, we filed a police report on our end as the organisers because of threats.  There were almost 200 protesters came out. They seem to have no idea what it was they're even protesting, you know, they had no clue what it was we were talking about inside. 

I remember one of the signs said, let kids be themselves. And I was like, that's literally what I say in my talk is we want kids to just be themselves. Just let them be themselves. You know just because a boy likes to wear dresses or wants to play with dolls or likes playing with girls more than boys, it doesn't mean you need to do anything to his body or that there's something wrong with him. It just means he's a boy who likes to wear dresses and play with dolls you know and that's fine. 

Heather:  What fascinates me about this is getting back to the theme of your book is that feminists have been saying this for so long.

Let kids be themselves. Let's not police kids in relation to gender identity. And so it's very strange. The two schools what seem to be identical are very, very different aren't they? So when, when young people now stand outside of the placards, shouting at you, me or anybody else, let kids be kids. And that's all we're saying, let kids just be kids.  But they're saying something quite different to us underneath, if you just peel a layer from the top of it. 

And I think this must be very confusing to the general public, to know how to place any of these complex arguments really say for the young kids.

Now, when they're shouting, let kids be kids when young people shout that, what they mean is let their inherent gender identity that they were born with allow itself to come out, let’s tolerate that, which is in fact very different from what you're saying because you're saying there isn't an inherent gender identity.

Meghan Murphy: Yeah. I mean we're seeing that just because a kid identifies with certain gender stereotypes and gender roles, that doesn't mean that we need to change their body to match that. I essentially see the ‘gender identity’ and using that term in quotations because I don't agree with the idea of gender identity. I don't think somebody has an inherent gender identity. I just think that we're talking about personalities. I just think we're talking about likes and dislikes. Like, I don't think there's anything different about, you know, the brain of a little boy who prefers girls’ toys or toys that are supposedly for girls or a girl who we might have, a couple of decades ago, been called a tomboy, which was like me. Like when I was a kid, I hated dresses and I wanted to play with the boys and I wanted to play with trucks and I wanted to have short hair and I wanted to wear pants and I refused to wear pink. I didn't like so-called girly things.

And who knows why that was, you know, it could've just been in rebellion against my sister who really liked girly things and I wanted to differentiate from her. But either way, I was identifying, as they might say, with boys’ things and liked the boys’ world better than the girls’ world.

Today I'd be told probably that maybe I had actually a boy's brain and maybe it was really a boy and not a girl, which is crazy to me. And so scary. You know. 

Heather: It isn't science either, there, isn't a scientific basis for this idea, it's an ideology, but you know, what is interesting and as we're talking together, I'm thinking of all the years that you have created Feminist Current, and you've been amplifying women's voices on it and a whole range of different issues that are important to women. Including, we could talk about pornography, prostitution and so on and so forth. Yet here, we are preoccupied with gender identity. I'm putting another hat on here. It's not my hat but another hat, which would be somebody saying, why are you so preoccupied with that? Get off it. 

There are so many other things going on that are important to women. There are so many different ways in which we could be drawing attention to the oppression of women in society, women's inequality or however, we want to describe it, but here are you and I talking about gender identity. So I have my own view of why I'm concentrating on it at the moment, but I wondered what you think about that because I did see the video of you talking a few days ago, it was fascinating, but I noticed that you too had been thinking about the significance, the importance of the trans-gendering of children.

So I noticed that you were getting quite preoccupied with this yourself. Do you think you and I, and everybody else are just going down a rabbit hole that will never get out of or do you think it is important to concentrate on this at the moment? 

Meghan Murphy: Well, I mean, I've said a couple of times if I were a conspiracy theorist, I would have thought that this whole gender identity would be like a plot to distract the feminist movement from getting anything done.

Because I think a lot of feminists are really frustrated to have to focus on this issue actually, because there is so much more important work to do. You know, women are still in situations of domestic abuse, prostitution is a huge, massive industry all over the world. Women and girls are being trafficked and abused and exploited all over the world all the time.

Pornography is a massive industry. Women in the US are, are losing abortion rights, right now, we're losing bodily autonomy. There's the issue of surrogacy there's female genital mutilation is still going on. There's all sorts of issues. Women are still very oppressed in lots of parts of the world and in different ways.

And we're fighting about whether or not there's even such a thing as a woman. The reason that we've been forced to fight this is for exactly that reason, because if there's no such thing as biological sex and therefore there's no such thing as men and women and girls and boys, then I don't know how we can even talk about all of these issues in the first place. We can't talk about domestic abuse as something that's gendered as it were. I mean, I almost hate using the term gender anymore because it's come to be such a frustrating, like confusing meaningless term, but, you know, and we can't talk about pornography as something that specifically harms women through objectification and through sexualising violence and sexualising and humiliation and things like that. 

We can't talk about reproductive rights for goodness sakes. If we can't acknowledge that women have female bodies and that female bodies are very different from male bodies. women have been oppressed over centuries because of their female bodies and because they're capable of reproducing. 

So that's really what it all comes down to. And so, yeah, I think a lot of people might be like, who cares? Like just let people do this trans thing or whatever, but there's these huge repercussions because we're losing access to women's spaces, female only spaces.

So transition houses are being bullied into letting to letting men in. And, and obviously there's the issue of men having access to women's change rooms and things like that and female prisons. 

We can't fight for women if there's no such thing as women. And if we don't understand why it is that women are oppressed under patriarchy in the first place.

Heather: I completely agree. I totally agree. So people often say to me, but why are you writing about this so much? Write about something else. There's more to life issues of gender identity, but it seems to me the crux at this current moment in history upon which patriarchal oppression is being fought out in some way.

So, Meghan, you are coming to the UK and you're speaking at numerous events. 

Meghan Murphy: Yeah. There's a lot of stuff going on so I'll be in Brighton speaking at an event on the 18th.  And then on the 20th, I hope I'm not getting confused. I'm speaking at a meeting organised by Women's Place UK. Which will be great. And then I'm going to Edinburgh to speak at Parliament, which has been very controversial over in Scotland, it seems like a lot of people are pretty angry that I've been invited to talk about what's going on in Canada with the gender identity situation, because in Scotland, they're talking about their own gender identity laws and then I speak in Glasgow on the 24th also. 

Heather: So, Meghan, may I ask you were invited to Scottish Parliament were you, in order to speak? How did that come about that invitation? I'm very pleased you're doing it, but I just wondered how that's come about because there is so much suppression of women's voices here in the UK. Gender critical voices I mean. The lack of platforming and UK feminists. So it's great that you're doing it, but I'm quite curious as to how you got that invitation to do that. 

Meghan Murphy: I don’t really know.

Heather: What I imagine is you on a whirlwind of invitations and you're not quite sure how they've come about. 

Meghan Murphy: I’ve been agreeing to do everything that people are asking me to do. Originally I was just coming over for the Women's Place meeting and then a bunch of other invitations came along and I'm just trying to do as much as possible while I'm over there and I'm trying to agree to everything I can. 

There's been some things that I've had to turn down because I just am not able to do it time-wise and financially and stuff like that. So, I was just invited and agreed and didn't know why I was being invited or who was inviting me, but it turns out that it was a Joan McAlpine, who's an MSP with the Scottish National Party, which I know is the leftist party over there, which is great. Because here in Canada, no one, no leftist politicians are facilitating this conversation at all. And they've actually been quite hostile to feminists on the left here in Canada.

So yeah, so I'm really grateful to have been invited. Joan McAlpine has been super attacked and bullied and harassed over inviting me by members of her own party and, and all sorts of people over there in Scotland. So I hope that people will support her. I think she's been trying to speak out about this issue herself, which is really courageous considering the attacks that we face when we do talk about this thing.

Heather: Do you have any sense, I know you haven't been to the UK yet, about this particular topic talking about this, but do you have any sense that in some sense in the UK we’re more open to having a discussion than in Canada?

Have you got a sense that there's more freedom here in the UK than there is in Canada? Or have you not made a decision about that yet? 

Meghan Murphy: No, definitely all along in terms of this debate the UK has been way ahead of us. People have been much braver over there about speaking out and much more organised. 

I've noticed in the UK there's several groups who've organised and come together around this issue. I feel that women have been much braver in doing public activism and in organising talks and in publishing writing around this issue and getting in contact with politicians and politicians over there have been speaking out about this issue and no politicians in Canada have spoken out on this issue, or very few in any case, maybe like a couple on the right, but barely even that.

Not in our liberal party, not in our left-wing party, supposedly left-wing party. They're really not very left-wing at all. A party, used to be a socialist party covered this issue in an extremely biased way. So they'll paint the trans kids issue in a positive light only, and won't interview or speak with critics on the issue of gender identity in general. They, again, won't really acknowledge that there's a feminist critique. 

There's been no real public discussion. We've finally kind of forced a public discussion because some women over here have been organising events and even then the media won't cover it.

We had this event on Thursday and 260 people attend. And there was also this huge protest outside, and there was just silence from the media. They just didn't want to acknowledge that it was even happening. It's nuts. The media has been covering this issue in the UK and there's been some really brave journalists also, who've been writing about this issue and forcing people to see what's going on and how it's harming girls and women, how it's harming kids, it's just not happening in Canada, I've been trying to force it, but it's, it's been a real challenge. 

Heather: So in that sense, I think you've exercised a particular bravery in relation to this and without seeming sycophantic. I am full of admiration for you. I know that you'll be supported by Feminist Current and the kinds of women that you end up having conversations with and being supported by and so on, but even so to be a relatively lone voice is very, very difficult and frightening, I think.

Meghan Murphy: It is difficult and it is frightening. I do have a lot of support and I'm really grateful that I live in Vancouver in particular because in Vancouver we do have a strong feminist community. So there's a lot of women over here who've been really, really supportive of me and, you know, women all around the world and I get tons and tons of supportive emails from people all the time. 

 I think there's this impression that I'm like hated, but I barely get any hate mail. I get like, there's all sorts of threats and horrible things said about me publicly online, which is odd because I guess people like to be public with their threats, but, you know, privately, I get a lot of really, really supportive, wonderful emails. And again, people have been really supportive of Feminist Current, so I'm really grateful for that. 

But yeah, at the same time it does feel a bit lonely over here. I mean, in most of Canada, there's not too much of a discussion around this happening. And so it just makes it easy for people to treat me as a scapegoat.

So people can pretend as though I'm the only one talking about this. And I'm the only one who's worried about this issue or I'm the only one who's angry about what's going on. And it's not true. There's lots of people who are worried and angry, but it's when they can position it as though it's only me, it's easy for them to pretend as though there's a majority that supportive of gender identity, ideology, and legislation. And I actually don't think that's true. I think that the most of the world, most of the general population doesn't support the idea that you can change sex or that men should be allowed access to women’s spaces or that there's no such thing as a female body. I think that's a real minority perspective, but when they can pretend it’s only Meghan Murphy, who's just being mean, then it's easy for them to manipulate the conversation. 

Heather: Absolutely. Meghan, that's been lovely to speak to you 

Meghan Murphy: Yeah. It's so great to talk to you. I'm so glad that we were able to do this interview and I'm so excited to meet you all.