Vancouver-based journalist and founder of Feminist Current, Canada's leading radical feminist website. Meghan was one of the first journalists to publicly challenge gender identity legislation in Canada, testifying before the Senate against Bill C-16 in 2017 — and was subsequently banned from Twitter for stating that men are not women.
Feminist Current (2012–present)
A Canadian radical feminist website and podcast founded by Meghan Murphy in 2012. At the time of its launch, it was one of the few platforms in Canada willing to publish a socialist and radical feminist critique of sex work, pornography, and — eventually — gender identity legislation. It became Canada's most-read feminist website and helped establish the intellectual framework that much of the Canadian sex-based rights movement now draws on. The site published early and substantive critiques of Bill C-16 years before that debate had entered mainstream consciousness.
The Same Drugs podcast
Meghan Murphy's current Substack and podcast, launched after her Twitter ban and departure from Canada. The show conducts long-form interviews and commentary outside what she describes as "the algorithm" — including conversations with detransitioners, gender-critical feminists, philosophers, journalists, and heterodox thinkers across the political spectrum. It has built a following of tens of thousands of subscribers and remains one of the most widely circulated independent platforms in the gender-critical space.
Contributed to Freedom Fallacy: The Limits of Liberal Feminism
Freedom Fallacy (2015), edited by Miranda Kiraly and Meagan Tyler, is an academic collection that mounts a collective challenge to the dominance of liberal feminism — the brand of feminist thought, associated with the third wave and popular culture, that centres individual choice and personal empowerment at the expense of structural analysis.
Murphy's contribution to the collection, titled "'I do what I want, fuck yeah!': moving beyond 'a woman's choice'," examines how the concept of "choice" — originally a powerful feminist rallying call rooted in reproductive rights — was gradually hollowed out and co-opted by capitalism and patriarchy, until "choice feminism" became a mechanism for shutting down critique rather than enabling liberation.
Taking SlutWalk as her primary case study, she argues that a movement which reframes objectification as empowerment, and the sex industry as a personal lifestyle choice, does not challenge the root of women's oppression but accommodates it. Her central argument is that individual choice divorced from political context carries no feminist weight: feminism is not a self-help philosophy but a collective movement confronting systemic patriarchal power, and "feeling good" is not the same as political change.
Published the same year she was building Feminist Current into Canada's most-read feminist website, the essay is an early and characteristically direct statement of the radical feminist position that would define her public work throughout the gender identity debate that followed.
Biography
Meghan Murphy is a Canadian journalist and founder of Feminist Current, which she launched in 2012 and built into Canada's most-read feminist website. She holds a Master's degree in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies from Simon Fraser University, and has published work in The Spectator, UnHerd, Quillette, the CBC, New Statesman, The Globe and Mail, Al Jazeera, and numerous other publications. She has been podcasting and writing on feminism, sex work policy, and gender ideology since 2010.
In 2017, she testified before the Canadian Senate in opposition to Bill C-16, making the feminist case that conflating sex with gender identity would erode the legal protections women depend on. In 2018, Twitter permanently suspended her account for stating that "men aren't women" — a decision that became an international flashpoint in debates about free speech and gender ideology, and which she subsequently challenged in court.
Meghan left Canada in early 2021 and is now based in Mexico, where she continues her work independently through The Same Drugs — her Substack publication and podcast covering politics, culture, feminism, relationships, and heterodox thought outside the mainstream. With tens of thousands of subscribers, she is among the most widely read gender-critical writers in the English-speaking world, and one of the first journalists in Canada to publicly name what was at stake when sex was replaced by gender identity in law.
