Ken Paxton posted a few accurate statements on Twitter about transgender people — and the website censored him for it.
Between March 17 and March 18, the Republican Texas attorney general posted three tweets that were deemed to have violated Twitter’s hateful conduct policy. Twitter kept the tweets up, saying: “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about hateful conduct. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.” One cannot reply to the tweets, like the tweets, view the tweets without seeing the disclaimer first, retweet the tweets (except for quote tweets), or use the website’s share function to send the tweets elsewhere.
The first tweet that got Paxton in trouble? He tweeted a photo of USA Today naming Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine one of its women of the year. He wrote, “Rachel Levine is a man.” That’s correct. Levine is male. Levine was born in 1957 and started identifying as a woman in 2011. It doesn’t matter what Levine identifies as though; Levine is a man, just as Levine was a man in 2011.
If someone is born with XY chromosomes and male genitalia, he is male. Calling yourself a woman doesn’t make you one in the same way that calling yourself a bird doesn’t mean you can fly.
The next day, Paxton then put out a statement on what he called “Big Tech censorship.” In the tweet, he defended his original tweet. Twitter censored that, too.
Yet whether or not Twitter thinks it’s bigoted to point out that Levine is a man doesn’t change the fact that Levine is a man.
And later that day, Paxton tweeted about a transgender person again. Paxton wrote, “Congratulations to Emma Weyant for being the real champion of the Division 1 NCAA women’s 500-yard freestyle, because the person who came in ‘first’ is actually a man.” Again, that’s a perfectly fine tweet. Thomas is a man who spent two seasons on the men’s team competing as Will Thomas before joining the women’s team.
If Paxton thinks Thomas’s Division 1 title win is illegitimate because Thomas is a man, that’s fine. Paxton has a right to that opinion. It’s not the first time in sports that someone said an athlete’s achievement was illegitimate; many people don’t consider Barry Bonds to be Major League Baseball’s true home run king because he was a performance-enhancing drug user. They think of Bonds as a cheater. Meanwhile, Paxton thinks of Thomas as a cheater because Thomas is a man competing against women.
The ones who are wrong here are the people who can look at the pictures of Thomas standing on the first place podium next to two actual women and say that Thomas is a woman. It’s unfortunate that Twitter censored Paxton for posting a common-sense opinion.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that Twitter has a left-leaning bias in 2018. This incident is only further proof of it. The social media giant is denying reality for the sake of political correctness.
Twitter should be a place for honest dialogue. It isn’t.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.
