I‘ll admit it, I felt pretty untouchable on Twitter. Pushing the boundaries of what I could say on the platform, I was surprised — even a little bit disappointed — how rarely I was handed a temporary suspension, Twitter’s equivalent of the “naughty step”. But then I realized it’s because I’m just not that important: my follower count was in the mid-range of GC accounts (and towards the lower end of that), so I had to face up to the fact that I simply wasn’t significant enough for trans activists to target.

I received an email from Twitter saying that my account had been permanently suspended

There is certainly an upside to being small fry. I could post my opinions quite freely, including repeating what had got other accounts banned. While Twitter’s faceless and completely unaccountable mods scythed through the bigger names, I could merrily post “men aren’t women”, “trans women are men”, and other such blasphemies without fear of losing my account.

So when I replied to someone’s lazy slander that LGB Alliance wants to deny trans people “healthcare” with a photo of a young woman’s double mastectomy taken from her own Huffington Post blog, I never thought anything would come of it.

And nothing did — just like all the other times I’ve posted repulsive imagery that shows the reality behind the gender cult’s euphemisms.

That was, until a week or so later when I put a call out to parents of autistic children. I’m planning an article for The Critic about how young autistic people are especially vulnerable to gender ideology, based on the fact that somewhere between up to a quarter and a third of young people presenting at gender abattoirs have ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). (In the general population, about 1-2% are autistic.)

I expected a handful of parents to reply, but my tweet got a fair bit of attention and the responses came in their dozens. I got lost in a vast ocean of parental pain, and was up half the night just replying to people who had shared their stories.

And that’s where things get interesting…and potentially, very dark indeed. Hours after putting out my request for parents, I received an email from Twitter saying that my account had been permanently suspended for “engaging in targeted harassment…including wishing or hoping that someone experiences physical harm”. Someone — or some people — had reported my mastectomy tweet.

Of course, there was no truth in the allegation that I’d harassed or targeted anyone. The image I chose was in the public domain; it even had the poor young woman’s face cropped out of shot. As for “wishing or hoping for someone to experience harm”, not even the most malicious reading of my tweet could not have concluded that I was in favour of young women having double mastectomies of healthy breast tissue. What’s more, I thought “top surgery” was supposed to be an unalloyed good, an affirming and life-saving procedure for trans youth? 

But will that stop me writing this article? Will it fuck

You’ll go mad trying to read rhyme or reason into Twitter’s decision-making: you just have to accept that there are certain subjects where it wants to restrict thought and debate, and that some groups of people — men, of course, but especially those who pretend to be women — are much more equal than others. 

But it’s telling that this ban should happen within hours of my public call for witnesses to one of the biggest medical scandals in history — the drugging and mutilation of vulnerable, autistic children. Given my former Twitter insignificance and the freedom it afforded me, the only reasonable explanation is that people do not want this story to be told, and hunted through my tweets to find something — anything — to shut me up. God knows I’ve given them enough material to choose from over the last five years.

I can live perfectly happily without Twitter, but I’m saddened to have lost all those messages from parents, many of whom said that they were at their wits’ end and that it felt so good just to be able to talk to someone about what they were going through. I’m gutted to have lost contact with them. But will that stop me writing this article? Will it fuck. If anything, it’s galvanised me. If the trans activist army thinks that an article on autism is enough of a threat that they should shut me down, you can bet your boots I’m going to write the thing.