On Friday night, Twitter banned the co-founder of a women’s coalition dedicated to defending biological sex over gender identity. Her crime? Tweeting about a biological man harassing a Catholic mother whose family has been targeted because she disagrees with transgender identity.
“I’m in Twitter jail for calling Caroline Farrow’s male stalker a man,” Kaeley Triller Harms, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women’s Coalition, posted on Facebook Friday night.
“It’s 2019, and people are supposed to be listening to women, not allowing entitled bully men to silence us,” Harms added bitterly. “The new patriarchy wears a dress and pronoun buttons.”
Harms shared a screenshot of her tweet and Twitter’s claim that the message violated its rules against hateful conduct.
“An abusive man named ‘Stephanie’ Hayden has been aggressively stalking [Caroline Farrow], even coordinating his schedule so as to appear in places she is likely to see him (church, train, neighborhood golf). But today he filed an anti-harassment order against her. Scary!” Harms tweeted last Monday, April 29.
Twitter flagged this message as “hateful conduct,” quoting its policy: “You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
This likely refers to Twitter’s policy against “misgendering” — referring to someone with pronouns that do not match their gender identity, even if the pronouns match their biological sex.
In her tweet, Harms was reporting an anti-harassment order Hayden filed against Caroline Farrow, a Roman Catholic mother and journalist in Britain who has stood up for biological sex over against transgender identity. This has brought Farrow a torrent of harassment that has extended to her children, her husband, and even her ex-husband whom she divorced 13 years ago.
“I’ve just got a team of people, they seem to attach so much importance and so much weight to what I say and they’re just determined to shut down my point of view,” Farrow told PJ Media last month. “They feel that they can be as abusive as they like: they can target my family, target my children, and I deserve it because I’m full of ‘hate’ because I believe that men can’t become women.”
She has received online harassment involving pictures of “enormous disgusting sex toys” and misogynistic slurs, and one website even discusses whether or not to disfigure her face — and the faces of her children — with acid.
“I’m deemed to have asked for it,” Farrow remarked bitterly.
The Catholic mother had reported her harassment to the police, but they did not protect her. Instead, police investigated her after she tweeted about a transgender activist and mother who had gone to Thailand to castrate her son in order to “affirm” his transgender identity.
On Monday, Hayden — a male lawyer who identifies as a woman — announced he had “served an Order of the High Court with the authority and authorisation of a High Court Judge.”
The transgender lawyer previously sued the writer of Father Ted (an Irish TV show popular in Britain, the U.S., and Australia), Graham Linehan, for allegedly publishing tweets “deliberately misgendering” him.
Hayden appeared at Farrow’s house to deliver the papers, and she told The Telegraph she did not accept them. She said she was “shocked” and “alarmed” by the complaint and by Hayden’s decision to deliver the papers in person.
On Twitter, Farrow warned that she will fight back against such legal proceedings.
“By the way. If I get issued with any legal proceedings I will firmly challenge them & highlight what’s going on. It is staggering that men can openly intimidate, threaten, harass a woman on a public forum and then make veiled threats & gloat over legal proceedings to silence her,” the Catholic mother tweeted.
https://twitter.com/CF_Farrow/status/1122801597250191361
Farrow and Harms are not the first to point out the horrifying fact that transgender activists seem keen on harassing women who refuse to acknowledge the claim that biological men can become women.
Kara Dansky, a feminist lawyer and spokeswoman for the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), called the transgender movement a “men’s rights movement” this past January. Both radical feminists and conservatives warn about opening women’s restrooms and locker rooms to biological men who claim to identify as women, opening women’s sports to biological men who have athletic advantages, and proposed laws that would silence dissent on these important issues. Indeed, parents have lost custody of their children (and worse) for disagreeing with transgender identity.
These people do not deny the real struggles of people with gender dysphoria (the persistent identification with the gender opposite one’s biological sex), but they disagree with the claim that only societal acceptance of transgender identity can help such people. They rightly warn that if society rejects the notion of biological sex, it will harm women and reverse many of the gains feminists worked hard to achieve.
For these reasons, lesbian feminist Julia Beck — who was kicked off of Baltimore’s LGBT commission for talking about a male rapist who identifies as a woman — testified against the Equality Act, calling it a “human rights violation.” Lesbians have protested against transgender activism, warning that it “erases” lesbians by encouraging them to identify as men and to be willing to have sex with biological men who identify as women. Many other critics would agree with Harms that this is a “new patriarchy.”
This is far from the first time Twitter has suspended a woman’s account over tweets complaining that a biological man is not a woman. Last year, Twitter permanently banned feminist journalist Meghan Murphy after she complained about a man who claimed to identify as a woman and tried to force waxing studios to wax his genitals. When the studios refused, he would file human rights complaints against them. The man involved did not even present himself as a woman on all of his social media profiles.
“This reality presents a dark truth to women: Twitter is a boys club. A boys club that protects its friends above its users, even if those friends present a potential threat to women,” Murphy wrote.
Harms’ suspension seems to confirm Murphy’s claims.
Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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