I Got Thrown Off Etsy and PayPal for Expressing My Belief in Biological Reality
Quillette | Colin Wright
As Wright warns on Twitter, “It's a serious problem when payment processors like @PayPal become political. If this happened to a biologist like myself for calmly arguing for the reality of biological sex, it can happen to anyone.” In his Quillette piece, Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist, writer, founding editor of Reality’s Last Stand and contributing editor for Quillette, documents his removal from Etsy and PayPal—”And the kicker is that PayPal evidently has no intention of giving me back my own funds anytime soon.”
“My case isn’t an isolated one,” Wright explains. “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” … 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.”
“Whether we like it or not, payment processors are now a big part of the economy,” Wright explains. “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.”
