A Medium Sized Censorship Problem

The truth shall land you in content creator jail.

The first lesson you learn if you write on the internet is that the truth, in almost all cases, will make somebody mad. 

Some will accuse you of hating them, or, more likely, the entire category of people they identify with. Others, no matter how scrupulously you’ve sourced your facts, will accuse you of being misinformed or biased or a shill for a leftist/far-right, woke/Neo-Nazi, activist group/think tank. And most annoying of all, in 2024, you have to worry about the platform you’re writing on banning you or suspending you or at best, removing your hard work because it might theoretically, possibly, offend some unspecified person.  

And in my article, The Intoxicating Power Of Powerlessness, I wrote about how victimhood is often used to justify this.

Victimhood allows people to weaponise words like "racist" and "transphobe" and "bigot" against opponents. It allows people to pretend that disagreement is hate. And worst of all, it pressures kind, reasonable people to censor themselves and tempts cruel, unreasonable authoritarians to censor other people. 

And right on cue, a few hours after I published, Medium sent me an email proving my point:

Hello, I am writing in regards to your post on Medium.com. We have determined that it is in violation of our rules (https://medium.com/policy/medium-rules-30e5502c4eb4):

We do not allow content that may undermine the dignity and rights of transgender and/or non-binary individuals. This may include misgendering, dead-naming, claims that transgender individuals are not their gender identity (“trans women are men”), or erroneous claims based on disinformation or pseudoscience. This paragraph violates these rules:

“If a rapist announced, in the middle of his trial, that he wanted to go to a women's prison, I'm sure the First Minister of Scotland wouldn't tie herself in linguistic knots trying to defend the decision. But if that same rapist claims to feel like a woman (a claim even his estranged wife describes as a "sham"), I guess anyone who questions his sincerity is a transphobe now?”

Please make any necessary edits within the next 6 hours for the post to remain active. If you do not, we will suspend it until you can bring it into compliance.

Perhaps, like I was, you’re wondering how this paragraph violates the rules. 

It doesn't mention any names, so deadnaming was out. No mention of trans women being men or erroneous claims based on pseudoscience either. So by process of elimination, I must be guilty of “misgendering.” 

But who had I misgendered? The hypothetical rapist asking to be housed in a woman's prison? Nope, I don’t claim he’s trans.

So that leaves the second sentence, where I refer to the very same rapist but now he claims to feel like a woman. Could this be the source of my thought crime? Do true believers really think this declaration is all that differentiates a man from a woman?

There was only one way to find out. I edited the paragraph as follows: