Could the trans madness have crested and begun to recede? At very least, that may be starting to happen on Twitter. When Elon Musk took over that platform, he promised to restore the freedom of speech. While his fulfillment of that promise has not been as comprehensive as many patriots hoped it would be, the social media giant took an enormous step toward freedom and sanity Monday when it quietly dropped its rule against calling a man a man if he thinks he’s a woman.
The rule against “misgendering” and “deadnaming” people who are “transgender” was one of the most sinister and Orwellian aspects of woke culture, and of course similar rules are still in place among the other Big Tech corporations. Nothing more vividly recalled the passage in 1984 where the hapless dissident, Winston Smith, is forced to agree that if the party says that two plus two equals five, then it equals five. We were forced to agree that if a man or a woman became dominated by delusions and fantasies, we couldn’t speak out for sanity, but instead had to play along with the elaborate charade.
To be sure, “misgendering” and “deadnaming” are two quite different phenomena. One of them is insane, and the other is simply rude (under certain circumstances). “Misgendering” refers to calling a male a man and a female a woman even if they insist they are of the opposite sex. While that may seem harsh to hypersensitive woke Leftists, it’s actually a supreme act of charity to try to bring such people back to a sane and realistic understanding of themselves and the world around them.
“Deadnaming,” that is, using the name that such a person has discarded in favor of one that reinforces his delusions, is quite a different matter. If Bruce Jenner wants to call himself Caitlyn, that’s no problem; Evelyn Waugh was a guy, too. “Deadnaming” can be an attempt to shake a “transgender” person out of his fantasies, but it may also be simply rude. There is generally little reason not to call people what they wish to be called. And that’s not to say that “deadnaming” is in any respect a serious offense.
Twitter, however, along with the other social media giants, declared that both constituted “hate speech,” and would get you banned from their platforms. Twitter temporarily suspended PJM’s Matt Margolis for an article entitled “Rachel Levine Is Not the ‘First Female Four-Star Admiral’ … Because He’s a Male,” and then suspended him permanently for saying that transgender people “have a mental disorder.” Well, yeah.
In a similar vein, The Babylon Bee was locked out of its account for naming Levine its “Man of the Year.” This kind of harassment and censorship put the Left squarely at odds with plain reality and heralded an ominous new age in which the political and media elites enforced their vision of the world by brute force and silenced anyone and everyone who dared to speak up for truth and reason.
The rollback of this ridiculous and truth-denying censorship is encouraging, but it isn’t total. Just the News reported that Twitter “further announced on Monday that it would no longer delete tweets that ‘potentially’ run afoul of its hate speech rules and instead merely attach warning labels on some of them.” Hate speech? Attach a warning label? For saying that a man can’t really become a woman, or a woman a man? While this is certainly preferable to banning sane people altogether, it’s still a revolting and unjustified stigma to suggest that people who refuse to play along with the Left’s enforced insanity are engaging in “hate speech.”
Related: Twitter Files Journalist: Global Governments Coordinate to Censor Citizens
The “hate speech” gambit is one of the Left’s tested weapons, honed in the successful demonization of opposition to jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women as “hate.” In both the case of jihad violence and in regard to transgenderism, the charge of “hate” is generally levied by people who are far more hateful than their targets and who want to sweep away all opposition to the phenomena in question. But there is no arguing with success. The stigmatizing and de-platforming of “hate groups,” many of which are simply standing for positions the authoritarian Left opposes, is now a multibillion-dollar industry and is accepted as legitimate at the highest levels.
So while Elon Musk’s small rollback of insane rules at Twitter is welcome and deserves to be applauded, there is still a great deal more to do in order to restore American public discourse to full health.
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