Censorship

Harassment, Cancelling and Freedom of Speech

Censorship is a serious problem.  In today’s censorious climate, free speech is being curtailed by trans-activists in order to control the narrative and coerce compliance.  Their rationale is that transgender people are harmed by other people’s opinions.  People who hold wrong opinions must be discouraged from expressing their wrong-think and/or punished for doing so.

Punishment can take several forms such as: 1) Cancelling speakers (de-platforming), 2) Protesting and disrupting speaking events, 3) Refusing to publish or market their books and products, 4) Pressuring others into refusing to publish or market their books and products, 5) Getting people fired from their jobs, 6) Doxxing (ie: publishing identifying contact info), 7) Overt threats of physical harm or death, and 8) Actual violent attacks.

Under this censorship, people are not only having their freedom of speech attacked, they are censoring themselves.  Many people, especially those of younger generations, consider this acceptable.  This “therapeutic censorship” caters to an attitude of fragility and and is entirely illiberal.  The lifeblood of a liberal society is the free exchange of information and ideas.  Liberals need to reclaim free speech.

Examples of Ongoing Censorship, Harassment and Cancelling

Women are being fired all over the place for their views.  To the left is an article about two school teachers in Oregon, USA who have been fired from their jobs for expressing concern about gender identity policies.  Other examples are four Canadian Women (Kathleen Lowrey, Lindsay Shepherd, Amy Hamm and Vanessa Vokey) who have also had their employment terminated or threatened for being gender critical.   Then of course there is the well-known case of Maya Forstater in the UK, who was also fired from her job.  And… there is the attempted no-platforming of Germaine Greer in Australia.  These are just representative examples of how people are being censored for their views.

Feminist speaking events also draw crowds that harass and threaten women.  One such protest occurred outside the Seattle Public Library hosting a women’s rights event which resulted in a woman being assaulted.  Similar scenes have occurred in Toronto and Vancouver when feminist Meghan Murphy held speaking events in those cities, where women were heckled and harassed coming out of the event, though luckily nobody was injured.  But violence does occur, as demonstrated by the attack on this man who was assaulted and had his arm broken on a Montreal street for protesting the medical transition of children.

Big Tech companies are practicing censorship – Amazon is refusing to sell the book titled When Harry Became Sally that challenges the trans movement and Twitter routinely cancels women for expressing gender critical viewpoints.  In response to Twitter’s censorship, Mary Kate Fain found a solution and created Spinster, an on-line forum for gender critical women.

Universities are hotbeds of censorship as demonstrated in this article and well-documented in a book titled The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.  However, there is a glimmer of hope, as demonstrated in an article called Drawing the Line, At Last regarding two universities that found some backbone and stood up to campus radicals.

Overall, the current climate around transgender ideology is extremely censorious.  There needs to be much more push-back to this authoritarian movement.