When you look at the state of some ostensibly progressive media organisations these days, it’s hard to understand how their more talented employees find the energy to get up in the morning. Imagine starting your career inspired by visions of Woodward and Bernstein and Pulitzer Prizes, and ending up having to capitulate to a rapist’s preferred pronouns.
Imagine having your painstaking investigative work on the cost-of-living crisis or the Ukrainian war sit alongside a piece called “How I freed myself from inherited gender roles and stopped feeling unworthy of my own womanhood”, written by someone called Jeremy. Or imagine opining critically about the role of “disinformation” in a publication which also accuses mainstream media outlets of using a “technique employed in Nazi Germany to silence trans people”. The brave souls enduring these indignities at the hands of their colleagues are the real journalist heroes. Truly, it must be a slog.
Earlier this week, former Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman gave a revealing interview to Woman’s Hour about her time at the paper, describing it as an initially happy marriage but one in which her partner eventually became a “conspiracy theorist”. A few years ago, while Freeman was away on a work trip, representatives from lobbyist organisation All About Trans — who had a close working relationship with Mermaids at the time — were brought in to talk about “how trans people should be discussed in the media”. In the course of their intervention (the chummy flavour of which presumably can be gauged from this piece about the same group lobbying the BBC Newsnight team in 2016), two relatively innocuous pieces of Freeman’s were presented to her colleagues as examples of transphobia, she said.
From then on, her viewpoint was dismissed by colleagues as “mean”. Editors would repeatedly refuse pitches from her about Mermaids or J.K. Rowling on the flimsiest of excuses, while continuing to publish gushing pieces about child transition. At one point, she said, senior management told her that only journalists with relevant specialities, who also happened to be male, could write about the politics of gender. Books by gender-critical authors were uniformly passed over for review, and only a single interview with one such author made it onto the page (that is, with me — albeit in the education and not the main section, and with a lot of anxiety on the part of the section editor as I recall). Meanwhile, as befits a good and obedient Stonewall Diversity Champion, trans memoir after memoir was puffed in the paper, approved mantras were intoned, and stories of wrong bodies and wrongthink abounded.
Though Guardian management were not prepared to send a representative to discuss the matter, in a prepared response read out by interviewer Emma Barnett a spokesperson explained, as if talking very slowly to toddlers, or to Russian citizens during the Soviet period: “All writers work with their editors to decide the topics on which they write. This is a completely standard practice across the media. That is not censorship. It is editing”. It is perhaps hard to understand how such a venerable and supposedly sophisticated publication could have reached this level of audience infantilisation. It’s almost as if they think their readers are idiots.
Actually, I’ve come to think that they do think some of their readers are idiots — a fact which partly explains progressive policing and censorship around discussion of gender identity, as well as other controversial topics too. One reason why someone might talk to a group of people as if they were stupid is inadvertent: namely, if the person is himself an idiot and simply trying to describe the world as he sincerely sees it. Into this category would seem to fall some of the gender lobbyists generally benighting our institutions and instructing newspapers what to write. Recent court cases in which they have appeared as witnesses have afforded ample opportunity to scrutinise the extent of their knowledge of biology, ethics, and childhood development. Pearls of wisdom offered include: “describing any particular transwoman as male is inherently transphobic and abusive, unless that trans person as an individual has asked you to do so” (Kirrin Medcalf, Stonewall Head of Trans Inclusion), and “I am not clear that children come out of the womb with a sex, to be honest” (Dr Belinda Bell, Chair of Mermaids trustees).
As it happens, I once met the founder of All About Trans, the transactivist body named by Freeman as involved in lobbying the Guardian. Nathalie McDermott, not herself trans, met me for coffee in a hotel near the BBC in January 2019. Our companions were fellow gender-sceptic Graham Linehan and transwoman Ayla Holdom, a patron of Mermaids and consultant for All About Trans. The meeting was initiated by McDermott, who seemed convinced that if only we sceptics could meet the eminently likeable and reasonable Holdom, we would seamlessly extrapolate outwards to anyone else who identifies as a woman for whatever reason, and our strong doubts about things like putting males in women’s prisons or women’s sporting competitions might be quashed.
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