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Murphy runs the website Feminist Current and has written opinion pieces for mainstream North American outlets including CBC and the National Post. She has a master’s degree in gender, sexuality and women’s studies from Simon Fraser University, where she focused on “women in the media and the medicalization of sex,” she said.

She made news in recent months for her conflict with Jessica Yaniv, the transwoman who brought a failed human rights complaint over discrimination at beauty salons. Twitter banned Murphy for describing Yaniv as male, in violation of its hate and harassment policy, which had recently been changed as regards transgender people. Murphy later filed a lawsuit in California seeking to overturn the ban on free speech grounds, but failed. She has appealed.

She testified against Bill C-16, a Canadian law that added gender identity and expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act. She did something similar in Scotland.

Her key concern is the absence in policy debates of a rigid and exclusive definition of a woman. Her fear is that accepting a small minority of people as women because they say so puts the rights and safety of all women at risk.

“A woman is a female. That’s it. And if you are born male there is no way to become female. It’s simply not biologically possible,” she wrote in the email interview. “And beyond that, why would a male ever NEED to ‘become female’? I mean, by all means, be yourself, dress how you like, express yourself as you wish, in ways that make you feel good and authentic. Push back against gender stereotypes. But why that would demand one is literally the opposite sex, I do not know. ‘Woman’ is not simply a set of stereotypes, an outfit, a feeling. There is nothing wrong with being male or being a male who rejects masculinity. But it is ridiculous to say that if you reject gender stereotypes you are literally no longer male.”

• Email: jbrean@nationalpost.com | Twitter: josephbrean