If a Liberal-dominated federal Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights from last parliament gets its way, this type of flash censorship will likely become a lot more common. Earlier this year, the committee recommended that Ottawa require social media companies to “remove all posts that would constitute online hatred in a timely manner” and to “properly report on online hate” or face “significant monetary penalties.” It’s a sweeping recommendation with far-reaching implications for free speech.

What got Blanchard in trouble was a Twitter thread that began: “Transsexualism and milder forms of gender dysphoria are types of mental disorder, which may leave the individual with average or even above-average functioning in unrelated areas of life. Sex change surgery is still the best treatment for carefully screened, adult patients, whose gender dysphoria has proven resistant to other forms of treatment.” Blanchard added a critical caveat: “Sex change surgery should not be considered for any patient until that patient has reached the age of 21 years and has lived for at least two years in the desired gender role.”

Blanchard also shared his view on when governments and sports leagues should accept male-to-female trans people’s preferred genders, and vice versa. “There are two main types of gender dysphoria in males, one associated with homosexuality and one associated with autogynephilia (sexual arousal at the thought or image of oneself as a female),” he wrote. Accordingly, he concluded, “The sex of a postoperative transsexual should be analogous to a legal fiction. This legal fiction would apply to some things (e.g., sex designation on a driver’s license) but not to others (entering a sports competition as one’s adopted sex).”

Blanchard’s views likely strike most people as considered, compassionate and reasoned. Among other things, his position was aimed at addressing the growing problem of physically strong natal males who have had many years of testosterone pumping through their systems disrupting women’s sports. Yet to the transgender activists who police speech on Twitter his thoughts constitute hate, and Twitter agreed. Twitter says it suspends accounts only “when we determine that a person has violated the Twitter Rules in a particularly egregious way, or has repeatedly violated them even after receiving notifications from us.” For Blanchard, however, his banishment seemed to come out of the blue.

Blanchard believes his account was suspended because trans activists don’t like being told that gender dysphoria is a “mental disorder,” even though that is how it’s defined in the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). Blanchard may also have sinned in the eyes of the transgender speech police by mentioning autogynephilia, a term he coined in the early 1990s and that appears in the DSM-V.

Blanchard wasn’t the first or the last person censored for crossing trans activists. He points out that Miranda Yardley, a transgender woman who admits that she is biologically male, was also permanently banned, after tweeting that a transgender politician was “a man.” Twitter also went after Feminist Current editor Meghan Murphy and free speech activist Lindsay Shepherd after they both offended Vancouver trans activist Jessica Yaniv (sometimes referred to as Johnathan Yaniv) who became infamous for 16 human rights tribunal complaints alleging discrimination, and seeking financial compensation in redress, from female business owners who declined to perform a Brazilian wax on her male genitalia.

Murphy was permanently banished from Twitter after referring to Yaniv by her male given name and birth sex, which violated Twitter’s hateful conduct policy. Murphy sued but has not been reinstated. Yaniv’s attempted shakedown was precisely what Murphy was trying to sound the alarm over when Yaniv succeeded in having her account shut down. The story of Yaniv’s vexatious complaints eventually became common knowledge thanks to outlets like Quillette and The Post Millennial, but it might have flown under the radar entirely had Murphy not raised the alarm.

Shepherd was also banned while trying to draw attention to Yaniv’s lunacy. She called Yaniv an “ugly fat man,” in response to Yaniv’s tweet stating that Shepherd had a “reproductive abnormality” (i.e., a uterus) and that Yaniv hoped Donald Trump would build a wall in Shepherd’s vagina.

Yaniv wasn’t banned and instead did a victory lap. After an outcry, Twitter reinstated Shepherd’s account. A bitter irony for Murphy and Shepherd came in late October when the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal dismissed all of Yaniv’s complaints, stating not only that the aestheticians’ actions were not discriminatory but also that Yaniv was deceptive and motivated by financial gain.

It’s understandable that Twitter would want to try to protect its users from hateful comments, but the company betrays a rather obvious bias in how it decides what constitutes hate. It is quick to suppress speech that offends the radical transgender activists, while it’s unwilling to protect people who are maliciously targeted by spiteful trans activists. This is why a respected researcher like Blanchard can be temporarily kicked off the platform while Yaniv gets free rein.

This kind of selective online censorship isn’t new to social media, but it seems to be accelerating. Thousands of users have been de-platformed (kicked off) or de-monetized (prevented from generating revenue and earning a living). The targets range from famous names like actor James Woods to relatively obscure journalists but they all tend to have one thing in common: views leftists don’t like.