Meghan Murphy

Racism was conquered today in Canada. After Vancouver-based Lululemon art director Trevor Fleming linked to a t-shirt design by California artist Jess Sluder, called ‘bat fried rice’, brave internet warriors took action, accusing the company responsible for turning yoga pants into streetwear of ‘insulting China’. The long-sleeved t-shirt showed an image of a pair of chopsticks with bat wings on the front and a Chinese takeout box with bat wings on the back, with the words, ‘No thank you’. On his website, Sluder was offering the shirt for $60, adding, ‘Where did COVID-19 come from? Nothing is certain, but we know a bat was involved. This quarantine offers a friendly reminder to avoid foods containing this nocturnal beast.

‘It’s ok’ is a meme that enables lazy millennials across social media to bail on plans last minute in favor of wallowing in self-pity. It seemed to have already completed its meme rounds, having come to its satirical end in January. Now, however, ‘It’s ok’ has experienced a resurgence — thanks to Lord COVID.Social media has been even more drowned in comforting posts than normal. ‘It’s ok’ posts are in overdrive. Would-be influencers insist, ‘It’s ok to eat chips three meals in a row,’ ‘It’s ok to do literally nothing!

If you have ever visited the internet, you likely noticed it is rife with hyperbole and lacking in nuance. All jokes are to be taken literally, and responded to with long, academic-sounding threads that explain why the joke, in fact, amounts to violence. Everyone we don’t like is a fascist. Those who disagree with our ideologies are murderers, and political differences are cause for excommunication. The response to foibles or disagreements is a days-long hounding of the guilty party, leading them to get down on their knees and beg for forgiveness or simply disappear. The best way to make the world a better place, according to social media, is by destroying someone else. I have been told to kill myself, drink bleach, and die in a fire more times than I can count.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Those who want me canceled should probably admit that their efforts have been mostly unsuccessful. I have been banned from Twitter for speaking about the impact of gender-identity legislation on women’s rights, but I haven’t been silenced. Long before I began on trans issues, I’d already fallen into disfavor among those who claim progress as their own, on account of my opposition to the sex trade. The New New Left, for those not in the know, believes the invisible hand of the market will regulate the global sex trade, mysteriously transforming one of the most dangerous and exploitative industries in the world into something ethical, despite all evidence to the contrary.

The question of how we will finally achieve true equality has finally been answered. For centuries, feminists have been struggling to ensure women and men are treated fairly and equitably. Little did they know the final arena determining an end to their fight would be the beauty pageant. Last month, a trans-identified male from Portland, Oregon sued the Miss United States Of America Pageant for barring transgender women from competing.In truth, the pageant does not specifically exclude transwomen from participating, but rather males. According to the Miss USA website, in order to be eligible to compete, you must be a ‘natural born female’.

Trans activists are discovering that, while their mantras may go far on Twitter, when it comes to biology and sexual attraction, virtue signaling garners less positive results. A 2018 study revealed a lot about how much sway gender identity ideology has in real life. Namely, if you are heterosexual, you want to date the opposite sex, regardless of how they identify. And if you are a lesbian, insisting that ‘transwomen are women’ will not persuade a woman who is only attracted to females. While the study did find that those identifying as ‘queer’, lesbian, or gay were slightly more willing to date a ‘trans person’, a large majority were still disinclined.

Whoops! Turns out men are not women after all. Over a year after a man then-named Jonathan Yaniv filed multiple complaints against British Columbia estheticians who declined to wax his balls, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal has ruled against the now-named ‘Jessica.’ Back in August 2018, Yaniv told Canadian media he had been discriminated against based on ‘gender identity.’ In reality, the female estheticians he approached simply didn’t feel comfortable touching a man’s genitals.

This week, three Canadian writers launched a petition demanding the Toronto Public Library cancel a room rental for a sold-out event, ‘Gender Identity: What Does It Mean for Society, the Law, and Women?’ Sounds frightening, I know.The local women organizing the event, a group called Radical Feminists Unite, asked me in June if they could bring me to Toronto to speak about gender identity legislation and women’s rights, unhappy that the debate was not being given space in their city. This is not an uncommon sentiment. The events I have been asked to participate in generally have been organized by regular women who have serious concerns about how gender identity ideology and policy could affect, and already is affecting, women’s sex-based rights.