{"id":1409244,"date":"2022-03-30T08:00:49","date_gmt":"2022-03-30T12:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1409244"},"modified":"2022-03-30T08:00:59","modified_gmt":"2022-03-30T12:00:59","slug":"twitter-locked-my-account-for-telling-the-truth-about-rachel-levine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/twitter-locked-my-account-for-telling-the-truth-about-rachel-levine\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter Locked My Account For Telling The Truth About Rachel Levine"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Ftwitter-locked-my-account-for-telling-the-truth-about-rachel-levine%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1409244&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Davidson-banned-tweet.png\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>Over the weekend, Twitter locked me out of my account for stating the obvious fact that Rachel Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, is a man. The corporate press, Big Tech, and even the U.S. government all refer to Levine, 64, as a \u201ctrans woman.\u201d But this only means he dresses and presents himself as a woman, and asks the rest of the world to indulge him in what amounts to at best a flight of fancy, and at worst a dangerous delusion. For the most part, the world obliges.<\/p>\n<p>But there is no way around the stubborn fact of Levine\u2019s manhood. He lived the first 54 years of his life as a man, fathered two children with his wife of 25 years, and only decided to \u201ctransition\u201d about ten years ago. Twitter has told me it will unlock my account if I delete my offending tweet, but I\u2019m not going to. Rachel Levine is a man, he will always be a man, and I refuse to pretend he\u2019s not.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not the first commentator to get locked out of Twitter for pointing this out. Indeed, my offending tweet was merely linking to\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/03\/25\/if-congress-doesnt-rein-in-big-tech-censors-will-eliminate-the-right-from-public-discourse\/\">a column I wrote last week<\/a>\u00a0detailing how Twitter had locked out The Babylon Bee, its Editor in Chief Kyle Mann, its founder Adam Ford, and Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, all of whom ran afoul of Twitter\u2019s terms of service for saying Levine is a man. (Actually, Mann got locked out for joking, in response to the Bee\u2019s account getting locked, \u201cMaybe they\u2019ll let us back into our @TheBabylonBee Twitter account if we throw a few thousand Uighurs in a concentration camp.\u201d But you get the point.)<\/p>\n<p>In Twitter world, saying Levine is a man amounts to \u201chateful conduct.\u201d As you can well imagine, Twitter\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/help.twitter.com\/en\/rules-and-policies\/hateful-conduct-policy\">hateful conduct policy<\/a>\u00a0is rather capacious. It isn\u2019t limited to prohibitions on obvious things like violent threats or harassment, or calling for harm to specific groups of people. It also includes, \u201ctargeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Deadnaming is when you use a person\u2019s given name. For example, before Rachel Levine \u201ctransitioned,\u201d his given name was Richard. Misgendering is when you say a trans woman is in fact a man, or a trans man is in fact a woman.<\/p>\n<p>Twitter\u2019s rules have severed all connection to reality and abandoned any sense of compassion. Is it really \u201chateful\u201d to insist that Levine is man? Not at all. In fact, it\u2019s far more compassionate than indulging his delusion that he\u2019s really a woman. <\/p>\n<p>Consider any other delusion or mental illness. If you were to tell a woman suffering from anorexia that she really is overweight, and that she really should continue starving herself, that would be cruel, even hateful. The compassionate person would tell her the truth and try to get her the help she needs to break free from her dangerous delusion. You would not have to be especially compassionate, either. You would simply have to understand that if the anorexic woman does not get help, she will die.<\/p>\n<p>So too with trans people, who likewise suffer from a dangerous delusion. Whatever painful things happened in Levine\u2019s life that led him to the conclusion that he is a woman, he needs help. And he needs people to tell him the truth. That is what being compassionate means in his case.<\/p>\n<p>What Levine most certainly\u00a0<em>doesn\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0need is for Twitter, along with the government and academia and corporate America, to affirm his delusion and tell him that his trans identity is healthy, that he really is a woman, that living this way is okay. Levine doesn\u2019t need us to lie to him, to affirm him in his misery and self-negation. He needs us to tell him the truth, and help him accept it and live with it. Anything less than that is hateful and cruel.<\/p>\n<p>Such are the backward ethics of Twitter world, where telling the truth is considered \u201chateful conduct,\u201d and those who lie, who affirm dangerous delusions that men can be women and women can be men, are celebrated as tolerant and compassionate truth-tellers.<\/p>\n<p>Some will say, who cares? Twitter is a private company, it can make whatever asinine rules it wants. If you don\u2019t like it, don\u2019t use Twitter. <\/p>\n<p>But companies like Twitter and Facebook have become much more than private social media companies. They are effectively public utilities that control the flow of information in a digital age, and Congress should regulate them as common carriers, barred from censoring users based on the content of their speech or the opinions expressed on their platforms.<\/p>\n<p>In the grand scheme of things, my banishment from Twitter is not very important. Neither, perhaps, is the banishment of the Babylon Bee or Kirk, or even President Donald Trump, who has been permanently banned from Twitter.<\/p>\n<p>But what Twitter has done to us it will eventually do to everyone who dares to tell the truth. Today, Twitter will censor you for telling the truth about trans women. Tomorrow, Twitter will censor you for telling the truth about abortion, or about what\u2019s being taught in public schools, or about election integrity, or about any number of other things. Eventually, companies like Twitter and Facebook will lock out everyone who dissents, depriving them of a voice in the digital public square.<\/p>\n<p>It doesn\u2019t have to be that way, but for now, it is.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<p>\n  John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the weekend, Twitter locked me out of my account for stating the obvious fact that Rachel Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, is a man. The corporate press,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":518,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1409244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1409244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1409244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1409244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1409244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}