Meghan Murphy
Feminist journalist and Feminist Current founder
Meghan Murphy is the Canadian feminist writer who founded Feminist Current and became one of the first high-profile voices permanently banned from Twitter for stating that men are not women. Her story carries sharp resonance in Ireland, where proposed hate speech legislation has raised serious concerns that biological reality may become legally unsayable.
Meghan Murphy built Feminist Current into one of the most widely read radical feminist publications in the English-speaking world before gender identity politics placed her at the centre of one of the defining free-speech controversies of the era. In 2018, Twitter permanently suspended her account after she posted that men are not women — making her among the first prominent writers to be deplatformed specifically for asserting biological sex as a material reality. The ban drew international attention and marked an early, high-visibility moment in the institutional suppression of gender-critical speech.
In the Beyond Gender episode Meghan Murphy on Third-Wave Feminism, Cancel Culture, and the Tweet That Got Her Banned (December 2025), Stella O'Malley speaks with Murphy about how third-wave feminism laid the ideological groundwork for silencing women's dissent, how cancel culture operates as a mechanism of social control, and what it cost her — personally and professionally — to refuse to recant. The conversation presses on what it means to hold a line when platforms, employers, and institutions demand capitulation.
For Irish listeners, that question is far from abstract. Ireland's proposed hate speech legislation has alarmed gender-critical women who fear that its drafting could make stating biological sex a criminal matter. Murphy's trajectory — from respected feminist commentator to banned user to independent voice — traces the path Irish women fear for themselves if such legislation passes in its most restrictive form. Her case gives that fear a name, a timeline, and a face.
Murphy continues to write and speak through Feminist Current and her own platforms. Her willingness to absorb serious professional and reputational costs rather than abandon her position has made her a touchstone for women in Ireland and elsewhere who are navigating the same pressures under very different legal conditions.
