Popular Irish Singer Literally Gets Canceled After Slamming Puberty Blockers - 5-Hour Radio Tribute Nixed
A five-hour tribute to internationally known Irish singer Roisin Murphy has been cancelled by the BBC following controversy about comments she made about puberty blockers for so-called transgender children.
“Puberty blockers are f***ing, absolutely desolate, big pharma laughing all the way to the bank,” she wrote on a private Facebook post last month that was then shared by one of her Facebook friends, according to The U.K.’s Telegraph.
“Little mixed-up kids are vulnerable and need to be protected, that’s just true,” she added.
She concluded with plea that she not be labelled a “trans exclusionary radical feminist,” or TERF.
“Please don’t call me a terf,” she wrote, according to The Telegraph, “please don’t keep using that word against women.”
Predictably, Murphy became the target of what The Telegraph referred to as “online abuse” after the private Facebook post when public.
Murphy issued a long apology on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, but a radio program featuring her that was set to air Monday morning and then be re-broadcast the following day was canceled last week.
The BBC claimed that it replaced Murphy with rapper Little Simz not for reasons having anything to do with Murphy’s comments on puberty blockers but so that “Little Simz’s work could reflect poetry, rap and spoken word programming the following week,” The Telegraph reported.
“Radio 6 music was set to broadcast five hours of Murphy’s songs, interviews and concert highlights next week, as part of the 6 Music Artist Collection, which celebrates the music and careers of artists and explores their influences and who they have inspired,” according to the outlet.
In her apology, Murphy had promised to stay out of such conversations in the future.
“I have been thrown into a very public discourse in an arena I’m uncomfortable in and deeply unsuitable for,” she wrote. “I cannot apologise enough for being the reason for this eruption of damaging and potentially dangerous social-media fire and brimstone. To witness the ramifications of my actions and the divisions it has caused is heartbreaking.”
Murphy wrote that she had “spent my whole life celebrating diversity and different views” but said that social activism for any issue was not her “true calling.”
“I will now completely bow out of this conversation within the public domain. I’m not in the slightest bit interested in turning it into ANY kind of ‘campaign’, because campaigning is not what I do,” she wrote. “My true calling is music and music will never exclude any of us.”
— Róisín Murphy (@roisinmurphy) August 29, 2023
Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley compared the outcry against Murphy to that of campaigns to “cancel” public figures like J.K. Rowling for not toeing the liberal line of support for adults and children who claim to be transgender.
“[W]hat is alarming is that artists must now repeat approved positions on political and social issues or, as here, pledge to remain silent in order to be artists,” a Friday post on Turley’s blog read.
“The irony is crushing. The left was once the target of censorship and blacklisting during the Red Scare. Today, they have literally adopted the arguments used to target liberals and socialists.”
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