Trans activists try to deplatform journalists on Substack

Author Jude Ellison Sady Doyle is pulling down their Substack until such time as the online blogging platform complies with their demands to remove authors they don't like. With pronouns "they/he" and articles about Britney Spears, or "which is the most transgender Tarot deck," Doyle has amassed a following in their two years on the platform. But now, unless Substack removes other writers, Doyle will no longer treat their adoring public to their musings.

They write that they brought their concerns to Substack admin, telling the platform that they no longer had need of their hosting services because of their continuing to host writers Doyle doesn't like. For Doyle, Substack's response was unsatisfactory, and not enough of a reason for them to stay on the platform.

Doesn't seem like much of a story, except that what Doyle is doing, which mirrors what others are doing in the blogging space, is trying to coerce, cajole, threaten, and manipulate online platforms into adhering to social justice ideologies.

And Doyle isn't the only one. Disgraced former Buzzfeed reporter and serial plagiarist Ryan Broderick also demanded that Substack bend to the will of the trans lobby.

Glenn Greenwald, who famously left the outlet he founded and moved his work entirely to the Substack platform, reported that: "...much if not most Silicon Valley censorship of political speech emanates from pressure campaigns led by corporate media outlets and their journalists, demanding that more and more of their competitors and ideological adversaries be silenced. Big media, in other words, is coopting the power of Big Tech for their own purposes."

It's not enough anymore for authors to hold their own views, to write about their relative merits in whatever way they see fit, even to encourage readers to adopt their views. The new thing now, or the old thing that has become new again, is to impose ideology by force–economic force, political force, social pressure.

Doyle seems to have got this down.

"OK. At this point, I want to be clear on the discussion with Substack. I got an email defending their business model which ended by offering me Pro money to stay. I told them that as long as the platform hosts and funds TERFs, I can't take that deal."

At issue for Doyle are two writers specifically, Graham Linehan, a television writer who writes The Glinner Update, and Jesse Singal, a journalist who writes Singal-Minded. These writers have both penned critiques of trans gender ideology. Glinner was so vocal he was banned from Twitter—a remedy Doyle encourages Substack to emulate. Singal writes aboue billions of other things, too, but his 2018 article in The Atlantic about trans identifying children and the difficult choices that follow earned him the name TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) simply because he dared question the narrative that transing children results in magical unicorns puking rainbows of joy.

Doyle uses the acronym TERF to describe Singal as well, though radical feminists would undoubtedly say that, because Singal is male, he is in no way a feminist. In any case, Doyle wants him off the platform. They write:

"I said that if they had money to throw at me, they had money to invest in content moderation, and they could also afford to lose the revenues they're currently generating through folks like Glinner and Singal, who are professional transphobes working to roll back trans rights."

Content moderation, that upspeak term for censorship, has been tossed about by everyone from Congressmen and Senators to, well, authors like Doyle. The demand is on for platforms to moderate their content. In real terms, this means that social media and blogging platforms that were once open to all comers, to be vetted by other users' willingness to follow or not, would be judged first by a code not of the platform's own making, but by one that was cribbed from a social justice activist handbook.

Doyle uses the concept that transgender kids who are not permitted to medically, surgically, and socially transition will commit suicide as their reasoning to call for the censoring of Linehan and Singal. But this study itself, from 2015, is used as a cudgel to badger people into accepting that children can be born in the wrong body and that medical science needs to fix it. Additionally, it did not track outcomes, meaning that there's no reason to believe that medical transition, which results in early aging, problems with bone density, uterine atrophy, and endocrine issues, will necessarily result in a happier child or adult.

But none of that is even the point. The point is that authors are calling to censor other authors and they're doing it because they feel that silencing others is the right and just thing to do.

In defense of their manipulative, censorious actions, Doyle writes:

"Even as many of Substack's high-profile hires are working to discredit, smear and harass me, the company is taking a conciliatory stance. I am, currently, getting both the carrot and the stick. What that says to me is that the pressure is working.

"Second: You deserve to know the demand for content moderation has been made. I'd expect Substack to make cosmetic hires of queer and trans people in coming months. I can't tell you whether to take or not take that deal. To me, without real moderation, it felt wrong."

Doyle is intent on making sure that others are prevented from expressing themselves. Doyle feels that harm and speech she disagrees with are equivalent. This is a problem, not just for Linehan and Singal, who will undoubtedly survive this latest attempt to quiet their pens, but for civilization itself.

Online discourse is not something that should be ideologically controlled. Companies are free to spend their profits however they wish, but not at the expense of basic human rights on their platforms.

Jon Kay summed it up best: "I got an offer to make money for creating content, but I'm more interested in preventing other people from creating content I disagree with."

Companies are free to spend their profits however they wish, but not at the expense of basic human rights Give to charities that support your corporate catechism, give to political causes or candidates, but don't manipulate your product so that only those who kow-tow to your beliefs, or are willing to appear to do so, can use it. That's not democratic, it's not liberal, and it ought not be the course of action for any of these tech giants.