Twitter suspends Christian magazine for saying Biden’s trans nominee is a man, not a woman
Twitter has suspended a Christian magazine's account for reporting that one of President Joe Biden's nominees is a man who believes he's a woman.
The Daily Citizen, a publication of the Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family, tweeted on Jan. 19 that Biden's nominee for assistant secretary of health, Rachel Levine, "is a transgender woman, that is, a man who believes he is a woman," along with a link to an article about the nomination.
As a result, the social media giant locked the magazine out of its account, informing the publication that the tweet violated Twitter's user rules forbidding "hateful conduct."
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The Daily Citizen appealed the suspension but was informed that its account will remain locked until it deletes the tweet.
Twitter wrote in a subsequent email to the magazine: “Hi The Daily Citizen, your account, @FocusCitizen has been locked for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically for: Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
“Please note that repeated violations may lead to a permanent suspension of your account,” the email said. “Proceed to Twitter now to fix the issue with your account.”
The Daily Citizen said in its reply to Twitter that numerous media outlets have reported on the nomination and wrote in their articles that Levine was born male and remains a man who believes he is female. Levine has undergone elective cosmetic surgery and taken cross-sex hormones in an attempt to look more like a woman physically.
The magazine has insisted that it never promoted violence and rejected Twitter's claims that it violated its rules.
"As a Christian organization, we would never do so. We simply explained to our readers the appointment and defined what transgender women are — those born male who believe they are a woman, regardless of whether they have had opposite-sex hormones or surgeries."
“We believe Twitter’s blocking of this tweet and lockdown of our account discriminates against Focus on the Family’s The Daily Citizen on the basis of our religious affiliation."
Twitter has persisted in its insistence that the publication violated its user rules and rejected the publication's appeal. The platform said the ban would not be overturned.
Big tech's censorship of voices who state biological facts in the context of transgender issues and policies has not been limited to religious or philosophically conservative accounts on the platform.
In November 2018, Twitter updated its policies to prohibit users from tweeting the birth names of trans-identifying people — which transgender activists refer to as "dead-naming" — or from using biologically accurate pronouns when tweeting about trans-identifying people.
Transgender advocates call the use of "he" to describe a male who identifies as female "misgendering." Both dead-naming and misgendering are akin to "abuse" and "violence," according to trans-activists.
For example, Twitter permanently booted radical feminist journalist Meghan Murphy from the platform after she tweeted that "men aren't women." Twitter took this action days before it instituted its trans-activist policy.
Murphy wrote in an editorial at the time that "while Twitter knowingly permits graphic pornography and death threats on the platform (I have reported countless violent threats, the vast majority of which have gone unaddressed), they won’t allow me to state very basic facts, such as ‘men aren’t women.'"
“This is hardly an abhorrent thing to say, nor should it be considered ‘hateful’ to ask questions about the notion that people can change sex, or ask for explanations about transgender ideology,” she said.
