Meghan Murphy



Meghan Emily Murphy is a Canadian trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) who founded and operates the TERF webshite Feminist Current. Among other things, she is notorious for her opposition to third-wave feminism. She was permanently banned from Twitter for hate speech in 2018 and lost a lawsuit over her ban.

Background
She graduated from Simon Fraser University with a master's degree in Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies in 2012. She was a writer for the online magazine rabble.ca until 2016.

Misgendering of trans women
Murphy groups trans women together with cis men by analysing sex instead of gender as a class, arguing that trans women were socialized as male, while apparently ignoring the fact that many transgender women have spent a good part (perhaps even most) of their lives living as women and thus being perceived and "socialized" as female. She regards trans women merely as "gender non-conforming male(s)" and denies that they are treated in any manner comparable to (or in some cases, worse than) cisgender women, despite evidence that trans women do indeed suffer from such phenomena as the wage gap, high levels of sexual violence, and the trans panic "defense".

Worse still, Murphy repeatedly and quite deliberately misgenders trans women by referring to them as "he" and "him" and has characterized the use of the pronoun "she" to refer to trans women as "gaslighting of women". In 2018, this continued behaviour resulted in the permanent suspension of her Twitter account; she contested this with a lawsuit which was dismissed in June 2019.

Persecution complex
Murphy maintains a persecution complex by conflating her trans-exclusionary strain of "feminism" with feminism in general, thus claiming that those who oppose the former are opposing feminism itself, and similarly, framing cherry-picked instances of backlash against certain women who express transphobic talking points as an attack on women in general. Accordingly, she maintains that the term "TERF" is not merely a slur, but actual hate speech, citing an example of violence and instances of people calling for violence against TERFs. These claims are comparable to those from the far-right declaring "homophobe" or "misogynist" to be slurs or hate speech, which are similarly accompanied by anecdotal evidence. In addition, Murphy skips over examples of violence threatened, abetted, or committed by TERFs against transgender people.

To be clear, we at RationalWiki do not condone violence (or calls to violence) against anyone, whether TERF, homophobe, or misogynist.

Other positions
Murphy also holds sex-worker-exclusionary (SWERF) positions, as do several of her fellow Feminist Current writers,  seeing prostitutes and other sex workers invariably as both exploited victims and enablers of the patriarchy.

On a related note, in 2015, Murphy described transgender actress Laverne Cox's nude photo shot for the magazine Allure as a "sexualized object" and "defined by patriarchal/porn culture", prompting a Change.org petition by a sex workers' lobby group which accused her of both transphobia and racism and called for rabble.ca to cut ties with her, although the petition was ultimately rejected.

She's also engaged in apologia for the mass graves at Canadian residential schools.

Public libraries
Vancouver Public Library held a talk by Murphy, which led to them being banned from Vancouver Pride, with the Vancouver Pride Society's statement explaining that "...this is due to their decision to provide a platform for discriminatory, transphobic speech."

Toronto Public Library also garnered huge controversy for allowing Murphy to rent space from them, in view of the following excerpt from their rental policy:

The librarian defended the decision to support Murphy under the justifications of free speech and Murphy's never having been convicted of hate speech in a court of law. The decision drew widespread condemnation from Canada's LGBT community. The talk was widely protested and Toronto Pride said that they may ban the library from future Pride events.