Morgane Oger

As a campaign targeting transgender women continues to sweep the UK with the help of Canadian bloggers, anti-trans hate crimes there have jumped 81%…

It is only after our institutions and our governments fail to recognize populist hatred for what it is that such hate propaganda has a sufficient impact to be reflected in crime statistics.

Openly anti-transgender Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) Megan Murphy traveled to Great Britain and the US this year to help incite the same kind of anti-transgender sentiment that she has been pushing in BC for years. Murphy was banned from Twitter and recently lost a court battle with the social media giant attempting to force her reinstatement.

We may never know how many of the hate-motivated crimes occurring in the flare up of anti-transgender crime in the UK were encouraged because Canada allows our citizens to incite anti-transgender hatred online from our country.

We do know that the UK press has been extremely hostile to transgender women in recent years, reveling in opportunities to attack the dignity of trans women when they are at their must vulnerable to sell copy.

We also know the work of Vancouver-based Megan Murphy on her website Feminist Current has been extremely popular in England, Scotland, and Wales in recent years. We also know the website incites and defends discrimination and bias on the basis of gender identity that Canadians are protected from. Murphy and her team regularly write articles flaming negative sentiment targeting transgender women and claiming that transgender women are men.

Canada has done nothing tangible to address sites like Feminist Current and others mentioned in my May 2019 testimony on addressing hate online to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, which helped inform for inciting anti-transgender sentiment that goes against Canadian values and canadian hate laws as they apply to publications. Since the Harper government rescinded section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the Canadian internet is the wild west of hate propaganda, and it shows.

What we do know however is that when Canadian universities, municipalities, and public libraries allow people to use their facilities to give credibility to their attempt to incite hateful sentiment targeting transgender persons, it’s not helping PREVENT criminal violence targeting transgender women and others in the LGBTQ2+ community.

We also know that Murphy has leveraged her appearance on videos filmed in public Canadian institutions to take her hate message to the UK in person, including to speak to the Scottish Parliament.

The paralysis made evident by in the lack of action of Canadian institutions when they allow hate propaganda to be created or presented in their facilities is more than a national embarrassment, it’s enabling hate-motivated violence.