Tag Archives: Twitter terms of service

Benji/gnc_centric: On being kicked off Twitter and Medium

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by Benji, gnc_centric

 Benji/gnc_centric—in the words of her now-suspended Twitter profile—is a “socially detransitioned dysphoric female,” a “homoSEXUal not homoGENDERal” lesbian.  Benji, a Canadian activist, writer, and YouTuber, writes here about how she was recently suspended from Twitter and subsequently Medium for (she believes) referring to the biological sex of a certain UK trans woman. Benji joins many other women whose voices have been censored by Silicon Valley tech companies. (4thWaveNow is also currently under a Twitter lockdown for similar reasons.)

Despite being silenced on some platforms, Benji is still very much active on the Internet. See the bottom of this article for ways to contact her and to see her work.

 4thWaveNow is pleased to host the below article, originally published in a slightly different form on Benji’s now-suspended Medium account.

Benji wrote another piece for 4thWaveNow earlier this year, about her less-than-supportive experiences in a Toronto trans-teen support group.

We will continue to offer 4thWaveNow as a platform for others who find themselves in a similar situation; please let us know if you would like to be published here.

 My Twitter Suspension

On the morning of December 11th, I was tweeting away as usual when at 11:40am, I tried to reply to a tweet and this is what I saw:

I went to check my account and saw this:

I had just recently reached 4000 followers so I was very upset. I checked the hashtags where I posted most, #TransTheGayAway #DiscussingDysphoria #Detrans and #QueerRapeCulture and all my tweets have been erased from Twitter.

I was confused, so I checked my email to see what offence I had committed and found this:

I can only assume that this happened because I referred to a trans woman, Katy Montgomerie, as a male. If she wasn’t a male, she wouldn’t have dysphoria and wouldn’t have anywhere to transition from; the whole concept of “Male to Female”. I struggle to see how this tweet is “hateful”.

Context

On December 7th, 4th Wave Now tweeted a thread about an affirmation-only parent support group on Facebook, specifically about a thread in that group that had developed on the topic of families with multiple trans children.

Katy Montgomerie replied in the thread, claiming that families with multiple trans kids are statistically likely and nothing to be concerned about. Katy then went on to say that the parents who run 4th Wave Now are anti trans; desperate not to have trans kids. The reality is, that the daughter of one of the founders of 4th Wave Now is a 22 year old, detransitioned lesbian.

The tweet that is missing from this thread is here:

This tweet is not visible because it violates Twitter’s rules, as “hateful conduct” for a similar reason to mine; referring to a Katy, a trans woman, as a “natal male”. 4thWaveNow explains their current situation here and here.

Here’s where I responded to Katy, after being tagged into the thread by 4thWaveNow, the missing tweet is the one I was suspended for because it was ruled “hateful.”

The missing tweet is at the top of this article but I’ll put the text here so you don’t have to scroll up. I tweeted:

“This is nonsense. Where are you getting this? A 4000% increase in females transitioning in the UK isn’t just because ~acceptance~. You presume to know the female motivators for transition when you are in fact male. What do you base this on?”

Here’s one source for the 4,400% increase in female minors in the UK being referred for transition that I was referencing

On Twitter, Katy says she has detrans friends and wants to help detrans people, but I’ve only ever seen her dismissing detransition as so rare that it’s not relevant enough to merit a change in the way transition is prescribed. She says she is a friend to detrans people but attacks one of the few websites –4thWaveNow– that will amplify our writing about our experiences. She says she supports detrans people but calls any resource we use “anti-trans”. Obviously, she has her own ideology to propagate and this is her method. I would advise detransitioned people to steer clear of her on Twitter and Medium.

Appeals

As soon as I understood that I had been suspended, I appealed to Twitter. Predictably, they said they were looking into it but (initially) did not respond beyond that. I don’t have much faith in Twitter or their review process, so on December 15th, I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. I know a few women who’ve had their Twitter accounts suspended and were able to reverse this using the BBB, so I was cautiously optimistic.

This was my appeal to them:

I have been using twitter for many years, mostly for lesbian activism. A few days ago, my account @gnc_centric was indefinitely suspended for “hateful conduct” which is shocking because the tweet that is cited is not at all hateful. I believe that this is the result of targeted reporting by homophobes who do not like what I have to say. I appealed to Twitter but they have not explained why my tweet was hateful or why it rises to the level of an indefinite suspension. I am appealing to you because for me, Twitter is a powerful networking tool and I need it to stay in contact with journalists and other professionals, as part of my activism.

They immediately replied, saying that they were looking into it. On the morning of December 23rd, I awoke to find this response in my email.

It’s true I’ve been put in Twitter jail a few times. If I recall correctly, I’ve had my account locked twice, for 12h and had it locked once, for 7 days (thanks @AidanCTweets 😉). As you can imagine, I did not wish violence on anyone or say anything cruel or tweet with malicious intent. I would love to be able to go through how I “violated Twitter rules” each time, but I can’t access my old tweets now and I didn’t keep track of it as it happened.

This was my reply to this result:

I am rejecting this response because: if you were to review the history of all the times I’ve violated the twitter rules, you would see that the tweets in question were all just as innocuous as this one. I have never tweeted anything violent or hateful but because of mass reporting, I’ve had my account locked several times. I thought the BBB would see I’m not using the Twitter service in hateful or violent way and see the reality of the situation; those who oppose me will find ways to disrupt my use of Twitter, regardless of the reality that I’m not hateful or violent. Twitter is woefully unable to screen reported tweets and as a result this has happened to me repeatedly.

This was the response I received on December 24th:

I can’t believe the irony of this response. I would really, really, REALLY like to know, who experienced “targeted abuse” by me. Not to be too narcissistic, but am I not the one in this situation who is unable to “feel safe expressing diverse opinions and beliefs” on Twitter? I’ve had multiple short suspensions for expressing my beliefs, is that not “abusive behaviour” on the part of those who see me as a threat? “This includes behaviour that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence someone else’s voice”. I can’t believe they sent ME this message, when I’m the one who has been continuously harassed and now, silenced on Twitter.

What makes me so angry is that extremist ideologues know this is how Twitter works, and they are meticulous in their reporting. Their goal is to get the most vocal women who question gender ideology off of the platform and they know exactly how to do it.

Medium Suspension

On December 25th (Merry Christmas!) I checked in to see what people on Twitter were saying about GNC Centric… and they were saying my Medium account (where this article was originally posted on December 23rd) had been suspended. I suspect that this happened because I mentioned Katy Montgomerie– and the fact that they were male–in my Medium piece.

I searched for my Medium on incognito and found this:

So I checked my email and found this:

Since Medium has very similar policies to Twitter, I will not bother attempting to appeal this suspension. When I was first suspended from Twitter, I planned to post much more on Medium; what I used to post as Twitter threads I would now format as short articles.

Since this is obviously now impossible, I’ve made alternate plans. For the time being, I will be guest posting on other sites like here on 4thWaveNow and Graham Linehan’s blog. I’m now in the process of building my own website (finally!) where I can’t be censored and I’m very much looking forward to that! I’m also going to start posting YouTube videos more regularly now.

In 4thWaveNow’s first article about their concurrent Twitter suspension, they have two quotes from Orwell’s 1984. They seem relevant as ever, so I’ll add them here as well.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” — George Orwell, 1984

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” — George Orwell, 1984

 

Contact

Now that I’m no longer on Twitter (though I’m keeping an eye on what’s going on there 🤨) I’m spending more time on other social media. The most direct way of contacting me now is through email.

 

📲Social Media 💁🏻‍♂️
Email ► GncCentric@gmail.com
Tumblr ►https://gnc-centric.tumblr.com
Reddit ► https://www.reddit.com/user/GNC-centric
Spinster ► https://spinster.xyz/@GncCentric
YouTube ► https://www.youtube.com/c/gnc-centric

 

Update: Twitter remains obstinate in defamatory lockout after Better Business Bureau complaint

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Last week, we wrote about Twitter’s lockdown of our account for use of the scientific term “natal male.”

We filed a complaint with the Northern California Better Business Bureau. That complaint was today rejected, with Twitter [in its boilerplate response] doubling down on its defamatory claim that we engaged in “hateful conduct,” specifically: threatening, directly attacking, and promoting violence.

If we continue in this “abusive behavior,” so sayeth our Twitter Overlord-bot, we are risking our account.

Once again, below is the tweet Twitter claims to be “abusive behavior,” worthy of the potential forfeiture of over 13,000 followers (including many prominent journalists, politicians, and others who wield political and public opinion influence) and five years of substantive information shared with the public.

Were we surprised by Twitter’s automated response? Of course not; it’s par for the course in the current zeitgeist, where totalitarian-minded scolds running the most influential social media platform in the world believe it is their solemn duty to serve as Reeducation Nannies for the teeming masses.

In the two weeks since our lockout, other thought criminals have also been Twitter-jailed or perma-banned for their “abusive behavior” (otherwise known as telling truths certain trans-activist tattletales don’t want you to know). Fellow inmates include reasonable trans people like MarsBruh, a trans man who goes out of his way in his interview series to feature diverse viewpoints, and detransitioned lesbian activist and Youtuber gnc_centric, who as of this writing has also filed a BBB complaint--to no avail–to reverse her permanent suspension from Twitter.

There have been many more before us, and there will undoubtedly be more to come who’ll be ejected from the 21st century public square and condemned to Big Tech thought-crime prisons.

Nevertheless, despite our cynicism, we believe it’s important to keep telling our truth, and that now includes rejecting Twitter’s libelous edict:

Since our previous post on the matter, our Twitter lockout has been written up in a very good article by Libby Emmons in the Canadian Post Millennial, and the journalist Jesse Singal confirmed via Twitter that “simply describing what being trans is could lead to you losing your account.”

And as everyone not living in a cave now knows, just a few days ago beloved author of the Harry Potter series, JK Rowling, has come under international fire (including ridiculous propaganda pieces in major US outlets such as NBC, CNN, and the onetime paper-of-record) for tweeting her views about biological sex in regard to the recent UK court case against Maya Forstater.

The 4th_WaveNow Twitter account is fairly well known, but is puny by Twitter standards. Banning JK Rowling (and others with 1M or more followers) from the public square for her past or future thought crimes might be a bridge too far–but for how long?

Maybe Rowling and other celebrities with adequate financial wherewithal and intestinal fortitude should put their heads together and try pushing that biological (aka “natal”) sex envelope a wee bit further on Twitter.

Just a thought. You know, just to see what might happen…

4thWaveNow lockout: Twitter employee admits “mistake” to journalist, yet account remains disabled

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On December 11, 2019, the 4thWaveNow Twitter account was disabled. That morning, we received an email from Twitter, claiming we had engaged in “hateful conduct” with this tweet:

Presumably, the “hateful conduct” was our use of the term “natal male” in the tweet’s concluding clause. In its Rules and Policies document, Twitter says a tweet that engages in “hateful conduct” will “promote violence against, directly attack or threaten” someone on the basis of their identity.

Did this tweet engage in hateful conduct?

Let’s let the founder’s daughter speak for herself, shall we? She belongs to a population of young lesbians who once believed they were trans—a population Katy neither advocates for (yes, we do) nor understands from personal experience, being a natal male.

The now-unavailable tweet also included a link to an article by the daughter of 4thWaveNow founder—a 22-year-old lesbian and cofounder of the Pique Resilience Project—wherein she describes her former trans-identification and subsequent desistance.

We appealed the false claim that the term “natal male” is “hateful” (more on that terminology shortly). Our appeal was immediately denied, and two subsequent appeals have been thus far ignored. Our only option appears to be deleting the tweet to end our total account lockout. Right now, this is what Twitter users see where the tweet originally appeared.

But the plot quickly thickened. On the day our account was frozen, the journalist Jesse Singal wrote an email to the Twitter press office, inquiring whether mention of biological [in this case, “natal”] sex was now against the Twitter rules. Singal expressed concern that such suspensions might affect his own work.

Singal received an email response from Twitter employee “Liz” which he posted on his Twitter feed. Liz couldn’t have been more unequivocal in her mea culpa on Twitter’s behalf:

“This was our mistake and shouldn’t have been actioned….We work quickly to make [it] right.”

Case closed? Evidently not.

It has now been 6 days since the lockout, with no responses to our appeals, no unfreezing of the account, no emails from Twitter…nuttin’. Since “working quickly” is highly unlikely to mean almost a week (especially given the use of past tense in Liz’s email), we can only surmise that the Twitter representative–clearly someone with significant authority–either lied to prominent journalist Jesse Singal (to what end, exactly?), or something else happened behind the scenes that caused “the team” to ignore Liz’s very clear admission of fault on Twitter’s behalf.

Our only option continues to be deleting the tweet (and taking an undeserved “strike” against our account–something we’ve not had in five years of tweets), but given Twitter’s self-admitted “mistake that should never have been actioned”—why should we delete it?

Since it’s unlikely Twitter suspended the 4thWaveNow Twitter account for anything other than referring to birth sex, let’s look a little closer at the term “natal male” and whether (and how) it should be interpreted as “hateful conduct.” This is of particular interest, since the very next morning after our account was frozen, another report against us turned up in our email—this time for using the term “natal boys.” But this time, Twitter rightly concluded the tweet broke no rules.

Putting aside the obvious inconsistency in Twitter’s “hateful conduct” policy, “natal male” is not, in fact, “misgendering,” a Twitter policy we are well aware of:

How does using the term “natal” in reference to birth sex “dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes”? The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), version 5 (DSM-5) uses the term at least six times in its latest rendition—including in its definition of “transgender:”

The DSM-5 defines “gender assignment” thusly:

And it’s not just the DSM-5: Natal [sex or gender] is a term used by many trans-supportive sources, websites, and scientific studies. It’s a standard term often used as a synonym for “assigned sex at birth” or AMAB/AFAB.

 

Be that as it may, whoever(s) reported our tweet clearly thought the term “natal male” was offensive. Fair enough: They could have (instead of tattling to the Twitter Thought Police) engaged an argument here, and there are at least two we’ve seen routinely before: (a) a trans woman has always been female, and/or (b) just because someone was “assigned” male at birth doesn’t mean they don’t understand the experience of lesbians born female [leading us back to (a)].

Mature adults who approach matters in good faith engage in discussion, usually hoping their conversation partner can, at the very least, see their point of view (if not agree with it). But that’s not what people who tattle to Big Tech censors do. Instead—like the authoritarians they are—they try to shut down those who don’t conform 100% to their point of view.

Mass reporting, gaming the Twitter terms of service, playing “gotcha” on Twitter—what, exactly, do the trans-activist scolds think they have achieved? When, in fact, has the suppression of dialogue resulted in changing anyone’s mind?

If “natal male” is a term of offense, can it be long before the term “transgender” itself is verboten? Because “trans” or “transgender” explicitly refers to transitioning from one state to another state. Why allow the term at all, since it points to the inconvenient truth that a person was at one time something different?

Perhaps that is the end game: Make any and all terminology that would differentiate a trans person from a “cis” person unsayable (oddly, “cis” is not on the Twitter Thought Police list of bannable Crime-Words, given that many of us take offense at it), and you’ve achieved at least one Orwellian goal:

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”—George Orwell, 1984

The key point here is of greater import than one Twitter account (of many) being muzzled by this absurd but ominous censorship. The real issue is the chilling of everyone‘s discourse, the right to be exposed to many varied opinions on (like it or not) the social media platform most used by those with power to influence policy and public opinion.

To stay afloat on the platform, we are forced to write and converse with each other in coded, sanitized language; to paraphrase and obfuscate meanings. Orwell’s Big Brother couldn’t have thought of a better medium to control the masses.

When you silence someone by misusing the (already censorious) policies of one of the most powerful social-media companies in the world, you’ve tainted thought itself.

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” — George Orwell, 1984

Is it any wonder so many people now question the motives and tactics behind (what many of us originally thought was) the Next Civil Rights movement–a movement we started off supporting?

Stay tuned for updates.