September 2, 2023 - 5:00pm

The words that sent Irish singer-songwriter Róisín Murphy’s career up in flames hardly live up to the charge. “Please don’t call me a TERF, please don’t keep using that word against women I beg you!” Murphy wrote. “Puberty blockers are fucked, absolutely desolate, Big Pharma laughing all the way to the bank. Little mixed-up kids are vulnerable and need to be protected, that’s just true.” It’s worth mentioning that Murphy’s words were also private, posted to her personal Facebook page, where someone the singer likely trusted decided to take a screenshot and turn a private disagreement into front-page news.  Murphy is hardly alone in her fears. The long-term effects of tampering with human development in this way are unknown — something even advocates must acknowledge. Serious questions remain, such as whether puberty blockers ‘lock’ children into a trans identity that may have otherwise resolved in self-acceptance — just as the vast majority of cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolved before clinicians started intervening to block puberty.  There are a wide range of known and unknown risks at play. Known risks include loss of bone density and the uncomfortable fact that when a child goes from puberty blockers to opposite-sex hormones he or she will be rendered infertile. Unknown risks include possible effects on brain development. Right now, the answer is: nobody knows. But there is plenty of cause for concern — no bigotry required. As the gap between public understanding and medical practice closes, ever more people will find themselves sharing Murphy’s concerns.  But it is the very reasonableness of Murphy’s concerns that condemned her. In the same week that two other musical legends — Alice Cooper and Carlos Santana — made public statements critical of transgender ideology, it’s Murphy who pays the steepest price for comments she never intended to make public.  Murphy issued an anguished apology, in which she begged her fans to understand that her “concern was out of love for all of us.” Murphy promised that she would “now completely bow out of this conversation, adding that she was not “in the slightest bit interested in turning it into ANY kind of ‘campaign,’ because campaigning is not what I do”.  But her apology didn’t spare her. Activists decided to make an example of Murphy, in order to terrify anyone with similarly reasonable concerns into silence. Even in private, one cannot speak without fear — which is to say, even in private, one cannot speak freely.  Amid the cancelled gigs and public condemnations, the true shape of Murphy’s punishment is coming into view. Not only will her words be turned against her, but her music, too — her life’s work. Forget music as “one of the greatest tools we can use to create a culture of tolerance.”  Whatever cannot be taken away will be poisoned: her record label will donate the proceeds of her latest album to the very cause Murphy warned about. Thus, this musical artist will be made into a vessel of views she does not hold: if her album sells, then her own work will fund what Murphy clearly sees as the medical abuse of vulnerable children. If the album doesn’t sell, she drowns, her cancellation complete.  The NKVD or the Scientologists would be proud of such a thorough unpersonning. But any open, liberal society must balk.

Eliza Mondegreen is a graduate student in psychiatry and the author of Writing Behavior on Substack.

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