© UnknownColin Wright • PayPal
If readers recognize my byline, it's because I've spent the last few years arguing strenuously for the (apparently controversial) positions that biological sex is real, that there are only two sexes, and that the differences between males and females matter in some policy contexts.
My views are hardly out of the mainstream. Indeed, we are now seeing a pronounced (if belated) pushback against activists who've insisted that biological sex is some kind of transphobic mirage. But for several years, those activists have controlled the commanding heights of many universities, NGOs, and even political parties. This is one of the reasons why I left my career as an academic biologist in 2020: I was tired of researching science in a subculture whose gatekeepers demanded that I repudiate basic scientific facts about human beings.
In my post-academic life, I've been growing my online following, including my subscriber base on Reality's Last Stand, a Substack that I describe as "dedicated to providing weekly news, articles, and other content about gender ideology and the science of sex differences." Earlier this spring, I found that I'd accumulated enough subscribers to pay my rent, bills, and feed myself, thereby allowing me to quit my day job so I could pursue this mission full-time.
Self-employment in this kind of milieu necessitates being a bit scrappy: This isn't the genteel world of academic publishing, in which one can rely on university publicists or conference organizers to legitimize and promote one's work (and which, in any case, cater to a smaller, specialized audience). To reach a mass readership, you need to be up-to-the-minute on current events and well-researched, and you can't shrink away from the critics who misrepresent your views (often in bad faith). It's a brash and fast-paced world that doesn't appeal to everyone. But those who stick around learn the rules of engagement very quickly.
Raising money means asking readers to support me if they find my content valuable, whether through subscriptions or direct donations, which is something I've always found awkward. My other route is to sell merchandise with brand logos and graphics (and a political cartoon I made that went viral when Elon Musk retweeted it, which I also sold as an NFT).
Like any Substack user, I try to balance my desire to get my message out with the need to attract paying supporters. The former motivation argues against a paywall, but the latter argues for putting one up. So I've adopted a compromise practice, by which I make my articles freely available, while offering bonus content for paying subscribers, such as weekly news commentary and reading lists.
All of this has attracted a predictable stream of "grifting" accusations from the perpetually enraged activist cadres that hate-follow me. It's par for the course in their world, where a "grifter" is defined to include any gainfully employed person whose views they don't like. I've tried to ignore them. But, as explained below, some of them have given up trying to argue with me, and have instead gone after my revenue streams.
Earlier this month, I received an email from Etsy, a large online store that allows everyday folks to sell their (often self-crafted) merchandise, informing me that the company had "elected to revoke [my] account privileges permanently" for violating Etsy's policy against selling merchandise that "promotes, supports, or glorifies hatred or violence towards protected groups." Etsy says the decision was made with "great consideration," following a "comprehensive review" of my account.
I'll let readers decide for themselves whether the images I printed on my merchandise, reproduced below, fit that description. I am not presenting a biased sample. This is a comprehensive inventory of the imagery used on my Etsy-sold products.
© Colin Wright
© Colin Wright
Etsy's standard practice in the case of allegedly rules-violating listings is to disable the impugned listing (not the seller's entire account), and issue the seller a warning to the effect that persistent violations could result in a permanent suspension. The company generally follows a three-strike rule on such matters. Having observed the content that Etsy reliably takes down, I'd opted to play it totally safe and made sure my messaging was completely benign. The fact that I received no warning and no (real) explanation suggests there was nothing Etsy employees could specifically point to that violated any policy. Rather, one of my critics had presumably indicated to Etsy that my designs were intended to signal an unfashionable view on issues related to gender and sex; and it was on that basis that my account was axed.
If there were any substantive appeals procedure that allowed an Etsy user to demand a real explanation as to why he or she had been banned (as opposed to just a rote citation of a generic policy), it's unlikely Etsy would have banned me — since I hadn't done anything wrong. But no such procedures exist. In my case, when I complained about getting banned, all I got was a response purporting to claim that
"our team has comprehensively reviewed your response, as well as your account history and information on Etsy, and we have determined that we are unable to reconsider the decision made in this circumstance."My case isn't an isolated one. At one point last year, Etsy purged any listing associated with Dr. Seuss, following a social panic centered on the view that the famed children's author and artist was racist. And in 2020, Etsy officials asserted that the slogan "I 💜 J.K. Rowling" promotes hatred, even while allowing the sale of products that read "Fuck J.K. Rowling"; and that instruct ideologically non-compliant "TERFs" (a term of abuse that stands for Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists) to "shut the fuck up." Indeed, there's a whole product sub-category dedicated to merchandise marked "Fuck TERFs." Amazingly, none of these explicit expressions of hatred has (to my knowledge) been judged as being offside Etsy's rule against promoting hatred.
© Unknown
The problem here isn't just Etsy: The same activists who seek to deplatform people like me often will complain to numerous other online services, in hopes that their complaint will land in the inbox of an ideologically sympathetic employee. (At the same time, they will sometimes sprinkle in lurid personal accusations, as when independent-minded author Jesse Singal was falsely maligned as a predator by high-profile trans activists who'd become furious at Singal's mainstream media prominence.)
And so it was that I recently received an email from PayPal, the payment service I use to collect both one-time and recurring monthly donations from supporters who send me money outside of Substack. PayPal's note instructed me that
"after a review, we decided to permanently limit your account, as there was a change in your business model or your business was considered risky."
When I called PayPal's help line to ask what this was about, I was told that I would receive an email from another department that would provide me with the information I needed. That email never came, and I instead received a message through PayPal informing me that if I wanted "to request information about a customer's PayPal account" — apparently including my own account — I would need to "submit a legal subpoena." It's a slick move, given that PayPal can count on the fact that few of its users have the means to lawyer up in this way.
© PayPal
It's true that these large online services are free to adopt their own policies, and can ban people for any reason they want — or for no reason at all. And it is also true that small business owners who use such services can migrate their shops and payment systems to other providers. But in many cases, this involves huge attrition costs, as there will always be a substantial drop-off in support when customers are asked to log on to new services, a process involving the creation of fresh accounts with new usernames and passwords. As noted above, I hadn't yet accumulated a large donor base through PayPal. But if this ban had been imposed years down the road, it could have been financially devastating.
Moreover, while I search for a new online home, how can I be confident that any new site I pick won't also be similarly captured by woke ideological bias? Substack is unusual in that it has dedicated itself to free speech and ideological pluralism (much to the consternation of the chattering classes), which gives me some peace of mind. And Stripe, the payment service utilized by Substack, has taken a similar stance. But platforms such as Patreon made similar promises in the past, only to later cut off long-time customers and ban them without notice (which is what sparked a Sam Harris-led boycott of Patreon in 2018).
Whether we like it or not, payment processors are now a big part of the economy. And unless these companies can find a way to excise ideological bias from the implementation of their usage policies, some kind of government-imposed regulatory oversight may become inevitable.
If and when that happens, many progressives (and not a few free-market conservatives) will howl in protest. But these companies will have only themselves to blame. And when their leaders look back at how their commercial freedoms were curtailed, they'd do well to recall how they let their employees slap words such as "hatred" on what the vast bulk of humanity correctly refers to as "reality."
About the Author:
Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist, writer, founding editor of Reality's Last Stand, contributing editor for Quillette, and an academic advisor to the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine.
Reader Comments
That aside (or going from that angle), yes, it is shocking how crazy humans are, even to the point of believing absurdities... as its said, those who believe in absurdities will commit atrocities.
as they know, to maintain power, is to cultivate their influence. therefore, is essential to keep the people hooked/habituated...with a large and repeated craving for their guidance - sufficient enough to lessen the individual appetite for self-knowledge, thus lowering the peoples awareness, and belief/trust in themselves - so constantly raising theirs.
thank you, Pedro..
With no spiritual guidance, people with that kind of education are left traumatized, psychologically divided: "if one does not accept LGBT, it is because one is LGBT"... How is an innocent child in a classroom supposed to overcome that kind of psychological operation? Perhaps after years of internal battling, many will just accept it as truth, whilst others will decide to make the experiment and find out for themselves, participating in the LGBT culture. Very few are able to come to the conclusion and the understanding that these degenerate impulses and strange sexual desires, are not their true yearnings of the heart, but desires and impulses instilled into them by the culture of Babylon, like beliefs 'implanted' and grafted into the consciousness, (rather than seeds of wisdom... albeit in many cases it is through the corrupted Church, nevertheless, the seeds and 'words of God' are still dispersed and dispersed by the hands of devotees.)
Many people participate and act out those thoughts and desires which have been implanted by Babylon... and whilst realizing that one is not that, nevertheless, some kind of internal 'beast' awakens as a consequence of participating in those acts... Whilst the rational mind is aware that those desires are not 'oneself', this bestial force is made 'woke' all the same, and 'desires' to do more degeneration... and more... and more... It is like an onslaught of apocalyptic horses that 'conquer and divide', because inside, one is no longer one, but two, between 'subservient' and 'dominant'... The concept of saying the great truth 'I am' comes to almost seem impossible, because, essentially, 'one is not'.
Many indigenous cultures refer to the homosexual as 'half man', or divided... Some call them 'two men', others refer to them as 'the man of two days'. To be gay means to be 'subservient' and/or 'dominant', divided in two... and if one is divided in 2, then one is easily conquered by the internal beast.
To overcome the Beast, one needs Faith and Patience. In that terrible repentance, one has to feel oneself as the Christ, suffering, crucified between the two thieves of his divided self... to be able to, at last, pronounce to the Father: 'I am'.
Homosexuality and the culture of LGBT is the spiritual 'mark of the beast', that one receives in their foreheads (thoughts) or in their right hands (their actions that they consider to be right).
It is the Christ principle (not the historic personage that has been transformed into an idol) that is able to heal us and make us whole again... that is, if one wants the healing.
This is not to promote any Christian church nor sect, it is very true what the Coran has to offer humanity in terms of a human being (Jesus) being erroneously transformed into a god in order to lead people away from the true path. Jesus the Christ made the ultimate sacrifice by living out as historic fact the true path of salvation and internal healing, which is depicted in 'the passion of the Christ', crucified on the cross of physical existence, between two thieves on either side... all of us sick ones here on planet earth are in the same predicament. We are all children of God, not just one historic personage in the past, because we all carry that Christ-life principle in us, which is our only redeeming force, to be able to reach 'the Father'... no one comes to his Father except he be like his child... it is not through some historical person, but through the life that we carry inside... that is what the original Christians taught, and that is what became so heretic, because the official Christian church wanted a dead historic christ from the past to hang on the cross... that is their god.
To return to God as 'the Father' is not a question of 'mere machoism and patriarchy'... We need the Mother and the Father... The child Christ is born of the Mother (like our virgin Mother Earth), and equally, we have to leave Babylon behind and return back to the bosom of Mother Nature, because that wicked city Babylon is fallen, and her ultimate destruction will come in a matter of seconds - no one knows when. For the Christian churches to denounce paganism, shamanism, natural healing, and so on, as 'the work of the devil' actually reveals how far they have strayed from the natural path of Mother Earth, where one is able to be who one really is - natural.
"No one can buy or sell without the Mark of the Beast"... that is what PayPal are conditioning the people to accept, whether in the forehead (thought) or in the hand (action). What the actual physical manifestation of the 'Mark of the Beast' will be, it is slowly emerging day by day, like a giant monster emerging from the sea.