B.C. writer sues Twitter over misgendering rule

Feminist says she was singled out for pronoun use

A feminist writer in Vancouver claims in a new lawsuit that Twitter banned her for using a male pronoun for the transwoman complainant in a human rights dispute over access to genital waxing at beauty salons.

“Yeeeah it’s him,” Meghan Murphy tweeted about an image of the complainant, which she claims Twitter cited as the reason for being kicked off the social media site.

The claim in Superior Court of California is technically over breach of contract and violation of unfair competition law. It asks for an order forcing Twitter to stop enforcing its rule against misgendering trans people, and to lift any bans that rely on it.

But Murphy’s lawsuit is also the latest test of whether and how Twitter is obliged to uphold free speech, and what duties governments might have to impose that value on corporate social media.

As a writer in modern media, Murphy says she needs to be on it, and her ban represents a corporation exerting control over public debate.

“The reality, and Twitter knows this, is this is our public square,” she said in an interview. “This is where conversation happens … I can’t share my work now.”

Murphy is associated with the right-wing Intellectual Dark Web movement through the publication Quillette, and she has been a controversial figure in discussion of transgender people and their rights, what she calls gender identity ideology.

“The whole situation destroys women’s rights. I don’t even see how we can uphold women’s rights if there is no cohesive definition for women,” she said, and referred to matters of wide interest she has been prevented from discussing on Twitter, such as the rights of transgender people in sports, prisons, and designated spaces for women.

The complainant in the human rights cases against salons denied the lawsuit’s claim that all 16 of them relate to genital waxing. One is about a haircut, for example. She said she is “legally female,” and that neither Murphy nor her lawyers know as much about her genitalia as they claim to in the lawsuit documents. She also denied the claim of having connections at Twitter. The National Post is not naming the complainant in accordance with an order of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.

Murphy ’s lawsuit alleges Twitter “covertly made sweeping changes to its Hateful Conduct Policy sometime in late October 2018, banning, for the first time ‘misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.’ This new policy banned expression of a political belief and perspective held by a majority (54 per cent, according to a 2017 Pew Research poll) of the American public: that whether someone is a man or a woman is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth … (Twitter) retroactively enforced its new policy against the plaintiff in this case, Meghan Murphy.”

Murphy said she hopes to win access to the complainant’s emails about her or Twitter, to help her build the case that Twitter has unfairly banned her.

She cited democratic ideals in demanding Twitter reinstate her account, and in a press release said the suit was filed “on behalf of everyone who has had their voices silenced by social media censorship.”

She wants a court to ensure her right to free expression, even if that means the government regulating the free expression of a company.

“Yeah, I think the government should be enforcing free expression and free speech,” Murphy said. “We should understand and acknowledge the role of Twitter” and make sure people are allowed to communicate freely, she said.

She cited advocating violence as the appropriate limit, and referred to examples of threatened violence on Twitter to support her claim of the company’s hypocrisy.

“It’s disgusting, and then to ban someone like me,” she said.

Murphy said she is not anonymously on Twitter. She misses it, but has not tried to get around the ban, on the understanding that Twitter monitors not only her login name or contact email but also her IP address and other identifiers.

It is not the first time courts have engaged with the general question of how free expression applies to social media, and the ways in which Twitter, Facebook, Google and the rest can be considered publishers.

The Supreme Court of Canada, for example, has clarified that publishing (or tweeting) a link to libellous material is not itself libellous, although it can be if it is presented with an endorsement.

In Ontario, political consultant and author Warren Kinsella filed a libel claim against Twitter Canada over a 2017 tweet by Lawrence Mccurry, a man associated with Your Ward News, a publication whose editor and publisher were recently convicted of criminal hate promotion after a campaign led in part by Kinsella.

“Twitter has published and/or republished the Tweet,” the claim reads. It says Twitter simply blocked him from seeing the tweet, and “stood by their original decision not to remove the tweet, but that they would closely monitor activity from Lawrence Mccurry’s account.”

The account is still active. It could not be immediately confirmed what became of the lawsuit, but there has been no trial or decision.

Murphy’s suit was certified this week, and no reply has yet been filed.

Meghan Murphy