It’s cowardly censorship! Guardian star writer’s anger as she’s forced out over her trans views
A FORMER Guardian columnist forced to quit after one of her articles prompted a transgender row among colleagues has accused the newspaper of censorship and cowardice.
Suzanne Moore said she felt hounded out by other staff who rounded on her over the piece – and betrayed by bosses who failed to come to her defence.
She also shed light on what she described as a ‘poisonous atmosphere’ at the title where free speech is stifled.
Miss Moore announced her resignation last week in a tweet using a picture of Mad Men’s Peggy Olson walking down an office corridor with her belongings in her box. She pointedly wrote: ‘I will very much miss SOME of the people there.’
It came after more than 300 colleagues signed a letter criticising The Guardian’s ‘pattern of publishing transphobic content’. Although the letter did not refer directly to Miss Moore she said it was clearly a response to her column.
She has now revealed it left her feeling she had no choice but to resign after 25 years at the paper and hand over to the ‘young Corbyn crew who spend their lives slagging off the mainstream media but cannot wait to be part of it’. In a
‘Afraid of saying the wrong thing’
stinging essay on the UnHerd website, Miss Moore also criticises the ‘ cult of righteousness’ at The Guardian and tells of her sadness that bosses at the paper – which regards itself as a beacon of liberal thinking – did not defend her.
She said that in 30 years of journalism she had often disagreed with people but said ‘no one has ever done something so underhand as to try and get someone fired because of one column’.
In the offending article, published in March, she lamented the culture of ‘cancellation’ and ‘no-platforming’ – modern forms of ostracism – which has seen women banned from events after speaking out on gender issues. She also reiterated her view that gender is a biological fact. It came after Harry Potter author JK Rowling was accused of being transphobic for expressing similar views that biological gender is real.
Miss Moore was met by a backlash on social media, before the letter to Guardian editor Katharine Viner signed by 338 editorial, technology and commercial staff. The 62-year-old winner of the 2019 Orwell Prize for political journalism, said: ‘ We are living in a world in which it is increasingly difficult to say certain things.
‘Almost every week now a different woman is put on the pyre. It’s always a woman who is some sort of heretic and must be punished.’
She said she believed The Guardian should be a welcoming place for trans people to work – after it emerged three had quit – but also one where complicated issues could be discussed.
‘The way the column is spoken about, it’s as if it was Mein Kampf,’ she told the Daily Telegraph. ‘The situation has become so crazy, I have friends, academics and others who are afraid of losing their jobs because of inadvertently saying the wrong thing.’ Miss Moore said she was ‘devastated’ to find people she liked and worked with had signed the letter.
She told how, six months on, she was ‘still trying to work out why I have been treated so appallingly’.
She added: ‘I naively thought I would be defended, because that’s what’s always happened at other newspapers.
‘I thought a public statement would be issued making clear this letter-writing business was not on. What happened was, the editor offered to take me out to lunch. I said I didn’t want a lunch. I’m not five, I don’t need to be patted on the head and given a veggie burger.’
And she pointed out the hypocrisy of Guardian editors who ran an obituary for Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, while Jeremy Corbyn’s communications director Seumas Milne even reprinted a sermon by Osama Bin Laden when he was the paper’s comment editor. ‘What about that? Not a word. So what did I do that was so terrible? I stepped outside the orthodoxy,’ she wrote.
Miss Moore, mother to three daughters, said she had since received messages of support from among others, author Irvine Welsh and sports presenter Gary Lineker, but she felt some still employed by the paper were too scared to speak out for fear of losing their jobs.
Broadcaster and feminist campaigner Julie Bindel said the atmosphere at The Guardian was now ‘totally toxic for feminism’.
Writer Julie Burchill said it showed activists had succeeded in getting women ‘erased – no matter how tolerant and open-minded they are’.
Ruth Smeeth, chief executive of Index on Censorship, said: ‘The issue is becoming so toxic because people are shouting at each other rather than listening – we need to start listening.’
A Guardian spokesman said: ‘We wish Suzanne all the best with her future career and are sorry to see her leave. We are a news organisation that’s always been committed to representing a wide range of views on many topics in our reporting and on our opinion pages.’