The Guardian’s top columnist today lashed out at the ‘left-wing media’ and ‘cowardly institutions’ giving in to ‘bullies’ who want to shut down the debate about transgender rights.
Hadley Freeman denies it was a swipe at her employer – who lost a star writer over the issue in 2020 – but admitted that she had considered leaving journalism because she did not feel supported to voice doubts about ‘gender ideology’.
The writer, 43, who won columnist of the year at the 2021 British Society of Magazine Editors Awards, said women ‘angry at how things have shifted’ are being dismissed ‘as irrelevant middle-aged mums, or just a bunch of Karens’.
Ms Freeman also wrote that she ‘wanted to write for a magazine about the vilification of JK Rowling, I was told no, because it would cause “too much of a Twitter storm”.’
She said that transgender rights activists will often paint their critics ‘right-wing bigots’, but that she and her friends are liberals who meet up and often talk about the vilification of the Harry Potter author and academics as well as concerns about trans athletes ‘smashing women’s swimming records’.
The Guardian’s Suzanne Moore, one of its leading lights, quit 15 months ago after she wrote a column standing up for women that she claims was treated ‘as if it was Mein Kampf.’
The award-winning journalist, 62, said she felt hounded out by the 338 fellow Guardian staff and accused her editor Katherine Viner of failing to defend her. Hadley Freeman was one of the few colleagues who did, she said.
Ms Freeman tweeted today that she was not prevented ‘by Guardian editors’ from writing about JK Rowling, and said she was ‘very much not leaving’.
But writing for UnHerd, in a piece headlined: ‘Why I stopped being a good girl. Women can no longer afford to sit out the gender wars’, she said: ‘I see left-wing feminist writers being funnelled towards rightwing publications, simply because leftwing ones are too anxious to stay on The Right Side of History to publish them. This makes it easier for the leftwing bullies to discredit them, but it does not make what they’re saying any less true.’
Hadley Freeman wrote that she ‘wanted to write for a magazine about the vilification of JK Rowling, I was told no, because it would cause “too much of a Twitter storm”.’
The Guardian columnist has written a piece for UnHerd, headlined: ‘Why I stopped being a good girl. Women can no longer afford to sit out the gender wars’
Ms Freeman added that said she had considered quitting journalism because of ‘cowardly institutions that have allowed themselves to be bullied’. She said that speaking out for women’s rights should not equate to her having anti-trans views.
‘I certainly feel no anger or animosity towards trans people,’ she said. ‘The only feeling I have towards them is compassion. Not to the point where I’m willing to give up all of women’s sex-based rights, no. But I do know I can only imagine the trauma and pain they have endured.’
But she added: ‘Activists like to claim that the only people who have a problem with this [gender ideology] are “Right-wing bigots”.’
She continued: ‘I know a lot of non-Right-wing, non-bigots who are extremely angry at how things have shifted. My friendship group consists mainly of thirty-something to fifty-something progressive women.
‘Most are not on Twitter, or TikTok, or any Mumsnet message boards. But when we meet up these days, they talk about Lia Thomas, the Ivy League swimmer who recently transitioned and is allowed to compete against female swimmers and is duly smashing women’s swimming records.
‘They talk about JK Rowling, vilified for saying that women — not people — menstruate and calling for single-sex spaces to be preserved. They talk about Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor, who had to leave her job at Sussex University due to ongoing harassment from gender activists.
‘They talk about politicians who say things so stupid about gender it’s impossible to believe that they truly believe what they are saying, from Dawn Butler’s claim that “a child is born without a sex”, to Layla Moran’s insistence that she doesn’t care about a person’s sex because she can see “their soul”, to Keir Starmer’s stammering insistence that it’s wrong to say “only women have a cervix”.
She added: ‘You can — and many do — dismiss these angry women as irrelevant middle-aged mums, or just a bunch of Karens, but they do not fit into the “Right-wing bigot” pigeonhole, however much gender ideologues try to squash them in.
Ms Freeman today responded to an article in The Times, which suggested she had taken aim at the Guardian.
She tweeted: ‘I was not prevented “by Guardian editors” from writing about JK Rowling. It was a freelance magazine job’, adding: ‘I barely write about The Guardian specifically at all in my piece but rather progressive circles.
‘I have not taken “a swipe” at my employer, but rather at lazy journalism, and the latter, ironically, is amply demonstrated by this incorrect, non-news piece’.
Fellow columnist Suzanne Moore revealed in November 2020 how The Guardian’s editor tried to fob her off with lunch instead of standing up for her against ‘bullying’ by colleagues following the transphobia row that prompted her resignation.
‘I naively thought I would be defended, because that’s what’s always happened at other newspapers,’ she told the Telegraph. ‘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.’
Ms Moore said she felt ‘bullied and betrayed’ by her colleagues, who reacted to her column standing up for women ‘as if it was Mein Kampf.’
She also shed light on a culture of fear at The Guardian – which presents itself as a bastion of liberalism and tolerance, and which openly stands in judgement of other media – saying ‘a lot of people’ wanted to stand up for her but were afraid of losing their jobs.
Ms Moore was thrust into the centre of the ‘transphobia’ storm on March 20 2020 over a column about feminists being abused by trans-extremists.
The article, headlined ‘Women must have the right to organise. We will not be silenced’, saw her write about gender being a biological classification, ‘not a feeling’.
But the comment piece prompted 338 Guardian employees to write to Viner, complaining about the paper’s ‘pattern of publishing transphobic content’.
Suzanne Moore (pictured in 2016 with Paul Burston) said she felt hounded out by the 338 colleagues who rounded on her over an article that caused a huge ‘transphobia’ row. Guardian editor Katherine Viner is pictured right
Ms Moore, who won the Orwell Foundation’s Journalism Prize in 2019 and has written for the paper for a decade, and her children also faced death and rape threats.
‘I feel betrayed,’ she told the Telegraph. ‘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: J K Rowling, Rosie Duffield, Selina Todd. It’s always a woman who is some sort of heretic and must be punished. If all this is about how trans people can have the best lives they can possibly have, how does this help them?’
The row began after Ms Moore wrote a column denouncing how Oxford academic Selina Todd had been barred from speaking at a feminist history event.
Professor Todd, a professor in Modern History at St Hilda’s College, was provided with security over a ‘transphobia’ row.
Trans-rights campaigners were believed to have taken issue with her ties to the women’s rights group Woman’s Place UK – which some claim to be ‘transphobic’.
‘The way the column is spoken about, it’s as if it was Mein Kampf,’ Ms Moore said.
‘Obviously I defended Selina Todd, but it’s mad that a professor of modern history at Oxford has to go around with security. 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.’
‘In an editorial conference, I’m told, a trans woman, who had resigned some weeks earlier – so not over my column – made a dramatic and upsetting speech about feeling unsafe and I think that was horrible for everybody.’
Announcing her resignation, Ms Moore tweeted: ‘I have left The Guardian. I will very much miss SOME of the people there. For now that’s all I can say.’
She added: ‘It was entirely my choice to go. I will tell you all about it one day. For now thank you for these lovely messages. I feel like I am at my own funeral or something.
‘Anyway, I will keep writing of course! The efforts to shut me up seem not to have been very well thought through.’
