Twitter censors are continuing to patrol the platform for posts that acknowledge the scientific fact that male-to-female transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard is a biological man.
As The Daily Wire reported last week, the tech giant suspended popular conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey for a post that read, “Hubbard failing at the [Olympic] event doesn’t make his inclusion fair. He’s still a man, and men shouldn’t compete against women in weightlifting.”
Twitter promptly notified Stuckey that she had violated its policy against “hateful conduct.”
Later the same day, responding to news of Stuckey’s suspension, conservative Christian radio host Erick Erickson tweeted, “This is absurd. Laurel Hubbard is a man, even if Twitter doesn’t like it.” Erickson, too, was promptly suspended.
Erickson’s high-profile lockout inspired gay conservative writer Chad Felix Greene to repeat Erickson’s comment with the added hashtag, #StopSuppressingSpeech. At present, Twitter has not reacted to Greene’s post, but it did suspend Esther O’Reilly for taking up the call with Greene’s hashtag, in a post of her own that said, “Laurel Hubbard is a man, get over it.”
For this, O’Reilly also found herself locked out of her account, with Twitter telling her in an automated notification, “We have determined that you have violated the Twitter Rules, so you’ll need to wait some time before using Twitter again … Note: You may need to perform some additional tasks to resume using Twitter.” By that, the company meant she would have to delete the tweet. “I’ve earned my jailbird badge!” she joked to The Daily Wire in an email.
The math Ph.D. and social critic uses a nom de plume in her writing for her popular Substack newsletter and opinion outlets like Quillette, The American Conservative, and British publication, The Spectator. She explained that, like Stuckey, she chose to drop an appeal to revisit the decision because she didn’t want to wait to regain access to her account, particularly because she doubted Twitter would give her petition a fair hearing given that its latest user policy classes “misgendering” as “hateful conduct.” But as soon as she was allowed back on the platform, O’Reilly began sharing screenshots of the tweet that prompted Twitter’s 12-hour penalty.
Such time-outs are becoming the norm for the app, especially as they relate to speech about transgender individuals and the transgender movement. While writers and commentators like O’Reilly, Erickson, and Stuckey have complied by removing the posts that triggered Twitter’s action, all immediately reiterated their conviction that men cannot become women once they regained access to their accounts. And all have continued to speak about the issue in other formats.
On Monday, after his suspension was lifted, Erickson reemphasized his belief in biological reality in a new post.
“I return to Twitter to reiterate my tweet,” he said. “Twitter may have decided to ally with Woke-O Haram, but no one can change their sex, including Laurel Hubbard.”
Erickson then posted a link to a lengthy Substack essay in which he declared, “I stand by my Tweet. Laurel Hubbard remains a man. While there are exceptions … the rule for biological sex is based on chromosomes.” He then highlighted basic scientific facts about chromosomal pairings in mammals before continuing:
For some time the transgender community has sought to bully people into acceptance of their psychosis. Anyone who speaks the truth is punished.
Major corporations, who want to protect themselves from controversy, have embraced the psychosis and are the agents of censorship for the transgender community.
In theistic creation, mankind is created by God and He made them male and female. In Darwinian evolution, through a process of natural selection, the fittest survive. In neither theistic creation or Darwinian evolution can a human being change sex because the survival and perpetuation of the species require that a woman get pregnant.
If climate change is settled science, biological sex is even more settled. Less than five years ago, the transgender movement argued that sex was biologically determined, but gender was socially constructed. Now, rapidly moving the goalposts, sex is also now claimed to be a social construct.
Twitter may not like that I called Laurel Hubbard a man, but Hubbard is a man even if he has decided otherwise. None of us should indulge in a lie for the sake of someone’s self-esteem. That is not healthy for society.
That said, the radio host did not revisit his past argument that social media giants are entitled to police speech on their platforms in light of his suspension. But he has acknowledged that his views on repealing section 230 — legislation that protects platforms like Twitter from lawsuits and allows them greater leeway to censor — may be evolving.
O’Reilly believes the argument put forth by conservative pundits like Constitutional lawyer David French, that Twitter, as a private platform, has a right to suppress speech like her Hubbard post is “a silly red herring and always has been.”
“At this point,” she said, “everyone paying attention knows Washington has nothing on Silicon Valley when it comes to power.”
As evidence of this, by Sunday evening, Twitter began suspending even accounts with a small number of followers for sharing the hashtag #LaurelHubbardIsAMan. One such user, Evelyn De Gallery reached out to The Daily Wire to share a screenshot of her suspension. She said she hasn’t deleted her post yet, however, because she “doesn’t want [Twitter censors] to win.”
The Babylon Bee took note of Twitter’s suspension rampage and shared their own satirical take, with a fake news story headlined, “Y Chromosome Suspended From Twitter For Calling Laurel Hubbard A Man.”
The article went on, “’We’ve repeatedly warned the Y chromosome to respect people’s gender identities,’ said Twitter spokesman Patrick Simpson. ‘Yet there it is, every day, in each one of Laurel Hubbard’s cells, insisting she’s a man. If that’s not hateful conduct, I don’t know what is.'”