Dylan Mulvaney is back in the news, this time because a video resurfaced of the transgender activist pushing to criminalize journalists who refuse to call her by her preferred pronouns. In a video titled “Adult Bullies,” Mulvaney says, “Like, the articles written about me using ‘he’ pronouns and calling me a man over and over again, I feel like that should be illegal.”
The video raises a point that proponents of hate speech laws need to grapple with: What exactly is hate speech?
For Mulvaney, hate speech apparently means calling her by the wrong pronouns. I understand why this would be hurtful, but the fact is that transgender matters deeply divide the nation along the lines of politics and religion. Conservative commentator David French said , “While I strive to treat every person I encounter with dignity and respect, I don’t use preferred pronouns because their use is a form of assent to a system of belief to which I don’t subscribe.” You can agree or disagree with French, but his speech isn’t hateful.
Many on the Right view gender dysphoria as a mental illness that needs to be treated rather than celebrated. In this view, validating someone’s decision to change genders is hurting rather than helping them. Mulvaney herself seems to be aware of this. “I’m reminding myself that those people actually feel like they’re doing the Lord’s work,” she says in the same video. But she still calls to criminalize speech that she seems to admit can represent good-faith disagreement.
The danger of punishing political speech under the guise of “hate speech” isn’t unique to Mulvaney. One person’s hate speech is another person’s righteous anger. A report by Tufts University titled “Under Musk, Hate Speech Is Rising” cited several examples of so-called hateful tweets it said were pushing a “toxic narrative.” Among them were Charlie Kirk’s tweets that “the virus came from a lab” (which experts now admit is highly plausible, even likely) and “climate change is a power grab scam.” I don’t much like Kirk, but his tweets aren’t exactly beyond the pale.
One tweet that Tufts explicitly did not claim pushed a “toxic narrative” said that painting a gun on a 10-year-old’s birthday cake in icing represented “grooming and indoctrination.” For Tufts researchers, Kirk’s tweets constituted hate speech, while the tweet alleging that pro-gun families are guilty of “grooming” was merely edgy (probably because it agreed with their existing beliefs).
It’s bad enough when university studies allege speech that researchers dislike is hateful, but the real danger is when governments get into the game. In the antebellum South, states worked hard to criminalize abolitionist literature. In 1836, Virginia banned any publication intent on “persuading persons of colour … to rebel, or denying the right of masters to property in their slaves, and inculcating the duty of resistance to such right.”
Other states banned “incendiary publications,” by which they meant pamphlets that criticized slavery. Their justifications even had an eerie parallel to today’s proposals to ban hate speech. Sen. John Calhoun of South Carolina complained that antislavery publications “contained reflections injurious to the feelings” of Southerners who were being “deeply, basely and maliciously slandered.”
History is replete with such examples. In the 1950s, the United States made it a crime to advocate violence to achieve a particular political goal. These laws, too, were rapidly weaponized against political ideas that the government did not like. Writing for the American Enterprise Institute, Tom Sydnor notes , “While framed in general terms, those statutes were mostly intended to make it illegal to advocate the adoption of Marxism, communism, and most forms of socialism — all of which preached the need for a violent workers revolution — in the U.S.”
Censorship laws have a long and unhappy history of being wielded by those in power to crack down on out-of-favor ideas. Mulvaney shouldn’t be trying to add to that legacy.
* Article From: The Washington Examiner