Juno News - January 25, 2019


Andrew Lawton with Lindsay Shepherd： Standing up for Free Speech in Canada Pt 2


Episode Stats

Length

12 minutes

Words per Minute

174.54955

Word Count

2,170

Sentence Count

36

Misogynist Sentences

12

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

In Part 2 of my interview with Lindsay Shepard, I discuss the controversy surrounding Megan Murphy's event at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2017, the Vancouver Public Library's handling of the event, and the ongoing legal battles surrounding free speech in general.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 We are back. Andrew Lawton here with True North for part two of my interview with Lindsay Shepard.
00:00:13.400 We spent the first part of our discussion talking about not just what went on at Laurier University back in 2017,
00:00:20.840 but the legal battles, plural, that have taken place in recent months stemming from that.
00:00:26.280 I wanted to turn to another aspect of the cultural battle surrounding free speech here,
00:00:32.100 and that is the woman that many people have heard of as a controversial figure,
00:00:37.560 though if you read her words, that doesn't really describe her accurately,
00:00:41.340 and that's Megan Murphy, founder of Feminist Current,
00:00:44.420 and of course now a prolific speaker on issues of women rights and gender rights specifically.
00:00:51.440 Lindsay Shepard, good to talk to you. Thanks for sticking around for another segment here.
00:00:54.820 No problem.
00:00:56.280 So you had an event that you hosted with Megan Murphy at Laurier, part of the Laurier,
00:01:01.500 well, not at Laurier, but supposed to be at Laurier,
00:01:05.140 and now we've had that you're back in BC, Megan Murphy also doing an event in the Vancouver Public Library space,
00:01:12.440 where it really became a hotbed for controversy.
00:01:16.680 People were trying to get the event shut down, as they so often do.
00:01:19.620 You had a lot of transgender activists that were saying that this was a hateful event,
00:01:25.720 that the library should revoke the space, and thank goodness it didn't.
00:01:30.040 Talk to me about why Megan Murphy has been such a figure of controversy,
00:01:34.840 because it really reminded me a lot of where you were when this whole free speech battle for you started,
00:01:41.700 in that you check off so many of these boxes that the left claims to care about,
00:01:46.720 but when one or two issues of disagreement come up, it's you're the enemy.
00:01:50.760 Yeah, so Megan Murphy is a radical feminist, so she's the founder and editor of Feminist Current,
00:01:58.780 and in my discussions with her, it seems like she's kind of always diverged a little bit from the mainstream feminism movement,
00:02:06.980 so she has kind of different ideas about sex work, for one, and so that's a new term I learned is SWERF,
00:02:14.620 a sex worker exclusionary radical feminist, so she gets called a SWERF, and also a TERF,
00:02:21.720 which is a trans exclusionary radical feminist, so that's why she's kind of demonized by other people,
00:02:29.300 is because she's a SWERF and a TERF.
00:02:30.760 Yeah, and we've seen this really take place within feminists, where you get, I've heard of the TERF wars,
00:02:37.220 the trans exclusionary radical feminists, so the feminists that think that a woman is a biological woman is a woman,
00:02:43.700 and when you see that this side is really eating its own, I mean, if you're someone who completely is anti-feminist,
00:02:51.200 I'm sure there's some schadenfreude that you can embrace about this,
00:02:54.040 but for a lot of people, there's just completely no sense of appreciation for just the absurdities in this case,
00:03:03.920 so you had the event in, ultimately, Kitchener, did anything happen that made this a hate fest?
00:03:10.360 No, and actually, so you were right, so we originally wanted to have the event at Wilfrid Laurier University,
00:03:19.480 they were going to charge us $8,055 plus tax, in security fees, to host it on the university campus,
00:03:28.440 so that was out quite quickly, but luckily, actually, we found a municipal venue in the city of Kitchener,
00:03:35.660 that were actually quite helpful in helping us organize the event, and it went well,
00:03:41.700 there was a protest of maybe 15 people outside, but that's it, we still had to pay for security,
00:03:47.900 but not nearly as much as 8,000, so the way that Vancouver Public Library treated Megan Murphy this time,
00:03:57.580 just a couple days ago for this January event, it was really deplorable,
00:04:01.480 I mean, they released this statement saying it's hard for them to host Megan Murphy because they just disagree with her so much,
00:04:09.820 and you know, you kind of have to wonder, is it really your place to make a statement like that, you know,
00:04:15.240 and then they changed the time of the event to make it 9.30 p.m. to 11.30 p.m.,
00:04:22.120 which, you know, kind of causes problems for people, you know, people who have kids, for example,
00:04:28.340 can't find a babysitter that late, or people who have to work in the morning, all of a sudden,
00:04:34.000 it's kind of a barrier for them.
00:04:36.820 Yeah, so this was going, and if it was going to be a brawl, now they've just made it like a late night brawl
00:04:41.060 at the library after hours, right, I mean, by having it so late, and again, you had people that were,
00:04:47.360 one in particular, a notable trans activist, Morgane Auger, who is herself a trans woman,
00:04:53.760 so a biological male, lives as a woman, and Morgane, who said this was no different than a
00:04:59.180 Holocaust denial event, according to one report, that, you know, if a bunch of Holocaust deniers
00:05:05.160 were to book a space at the library, it would be no different than a feminist talking about what
00:05:10.860 she perceives to be women's issues, alongside several other people, in fact, and I'm wondering if
00:05:16.920 you think, as someone who's put on these events before, that people are ever going to tire out
00:05:23.000 about these things, or do you think that as long as there's a Megan Murphy event, there's going to
00:05:27.140 be a Morgane Auger and a bunch of other minions trying to shut it down?
00:05:33.940 Do you mean, like, the protesters will get tired of protesting, or?
00:05:38.800 Well, yeah, I mean, the protesters themselves, that the venues will just say, you know, completely
00:05:45.140 we're tired of doing this, really, you could, will any of the people that are trying to, that have
00:05:50.040 the power to block this, give up?
00:05:53.660 Well, I mean, actually, the Vancouver Public Library, after this event, they said, this year,
00:05:59.420 they plan to review their policies for renting out meeting rooms, so that's a very disappointing
00:06:05.900 thing to hear, because we know what that means, it means the activism against this event was
00:06:12.220 in some way successful, in that they've at least pressured the library to maybe not rent
00:06:18.140 out to these events anymore, and this is a huge problem, because something I faced a lot when I
00:06:22.680 was organizing events on campus, is people would say, you know what, we don't want this speaker
00:06:28.880 on a campus, take them somewhere else, rent a space somewhere else, and it's like, okay,
00:06:35.700 well, now you're trying to make excuses for the library, now you're trying to say, we
00:06:39.960 can't have an event at the library, because the library is a safe space, the Vancouver
00:06:44.020 Public Library hosts some sort of LGBTQ reading circles, that's why people were mad, is they
00:06:50.380 were saying, oh, you host this reading circle, but you're not a safe space, and also Janice
00:06:55.780 Spiamengo, who's a professor of English at UOttawa, she was shut down by fire alarm at the
00:07:01.460 Ottawa Public Library last year, in March or April, so, I mean, so people can say, you
00:07:07.660 know, don't have this speaker on campus, have them somewhere else, well, there's going to
00:07:11.540 be nowhere to go.
00:07:13.280 Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned some of the issues that Janice Spiamengo has encountered,
00:07:18.260 I mean, we're not talking about firebrand type people here, we're talking about academics,
00:07:23.340 I mean, in the case of Janice, an English professor, in the case of Francis Widowson, a very far-left
00:07:28.320 professor who's seen very similar things, Megan Murphy, again, a feminist blogger, I
00:07:33.880 mean, most people never would have thought that someone like that could be such a lightning
00:07:37.760 rod, and I remember when I was involved in the infamous Ann Coulter tour back in 2010,
00:07:43.380 you almost expected it, because, okay, well, it's Ann Coulter, whereas now to trip that radar
00:07:49.500 of these radical anti-free speech activists does not take much, like, you don't need to be
00:07:55.460 that significant, I don't know what that says about me, that no one protested my talk
00:07:59.400 at Laurier, but you don't need to be all that significant to really get this, I mean, we're
00:08:03.860 talking about an event that had a few hundred people, I don't know how many of those were
00:08:08.160 supporters, observers, versus people that were at odds with Megan, but I guess I wonder
00:08:15.060 where the endgame is, because the best case scenario is that free speech wins out and eventually
00:08:20.100 everyone goes home, but these people live for that fight in a way that a lot of the people
00:08:25.280 that want to talk about these issues, whether it's transgender identity or any other issues,
00:08:29.760 don't necessarily do, they're just there to talk about their research, talk about their
00:08:33.560 work, not necessarily because they want a full-out brawl.
00:08:38.140 Yeah, and I mean, sometimes the protesters don't even seem to be specifically protesting anything
00:08:45.000 in particular, so for example, at this event, which was about gender identity and women's
00:08:49.660 rights, the protesters outside were yelling, you know, no borders, no nation, stop deportations,
00:08:56.020 and you know, no KKK, no fascists, but it's like, if you go into the event, it's, this was kind of
00:09:02.680 a lefty event in a lot of ways, I mean, there was an Indigenous land acknowledgement before it started,
00:09:08.280 and we, there was this Indigenous elder who spoke for 20 minutes about, like, residential school trauma
00:09:15.340 and Indigenous peoples, so this was not like a racist or KKK event, like the protesters were yelling, right?
00:09:24.860 So for Megan Murphy, I mean, you've had a number of interactions with her, you've booked her to speak,
00:09:31.120 does she still very much identify as being on the left, or has, has the resistance to
00:09:38.280 her on the transgender issue really pushed her, similarly to, in a way that it did to you, I would
00:09:44.140 argue? No, I think she still considers herself a leftist and all that, she just, I think she's kind
00:09:51.500 of always maybe just strayed a bit from, from the mainstream, and she's always kind of been okay
00:09:58.420 with being a little bit different, and now I, I think she's just more open to talking to people
00:10:05.360 she wouldn't have normally talked to, which is the same thing I experienced, but from what I can tell,
00:10:10.860 yeah, I mean, her master's is in gender, sexuality, and women's studies, right, which is something a lot
00:10:16.480 of people would mock, but, you know, she, she really stands by her radical feminist ideas and all that.
00:10:23.500 I wanted to go back to that point you raised about, you know, we're okay with the free speech,
00:10:27.180 right, but not on a campus, because this is, is very, it's very much the same rationale as we're
00:10:33.860 okay with her speaking on a street corner, but not in a public library, and eventually the goalposts
00:10:39.520 are going to move to such a point where they aren't okay with anything. I mean, it's going to be,
00:10:43.440 well, we're, we're not okay with a library, but we're okay at some private venue. Oh, we're not okay
00:10:47.800 there, but we're okay on the sidewalk, and eventually it's, you know, you're, you're okay, you know,
00:10:52.640 in your own basement with no one else there, and, and I'm wondering what advice you would give as
00:10:57.280 someone who has hosted these events, you fought back, to push back, because one time that you did
00:11:02.860 this, you ended up raising, I forget the exact amount, but it was thousands and thousands of
00:11:07.060 dollars for security fees, you know, and as much as I love the idea of, you know, just sticking your
00:11:12.420 middle finger at the people that throw those fees on you, most groups can't raise that money,
00:11:16.660 and secondly, I don't want to be giving that much money to these, to these censors. So how can you
00:11:21.500 push back that doesn't break the bank, and that doesn't really cede this important ground?
00:11:28.100 Um, I think it's really, a cultural overhaul would be necessary. For now, it seems like you just have
00:11:36.840 to pay the fees, and yeah, you are paying, essentially, to subsidize a protest against your event,
00:11:43.060 where, you know, the protesters are intimidating people, you don't know if they're going to pull
00:11:49.060 a fire alarm. You know, with the Megan Murphy event, I mean, people came from, for example,
00:11:53.720 there was one woman who came from Oregon, um, so imagine traveling that far and, and having it shut
00:11:58.620 down, right? And when Megan Murphy was in Kitchener for my event that I organized, um, you know, someone
00:12:04.480 came from Montreal, for example. So you're subsidizing protesters who have no regard for anyone else's time or
00:12:12.300 efforts. Well, I'm glad you've been doing it. I'm glad you've been pushing back. And obviously,
00:12:17.200 we all hope it's not necessary in the long run. But Lindsay Shepard, thanks very much for coming on
00:12:22.180 today. Thanks. All right. For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.