The other night the familiar whispering started. I was at a prestigious private view in a famous gallery and woman after woman came up to me and whispered that they supported my views on gender ideology. “Fight the good fight,” they said. Often men say this too and more commonly younger and younger people on the street, bus or Tube.
My views, put simply, are that biology is real, that single-sex spaces for women should be maintained, that children should not be medicalised via hormones and surgery, and that trans people should be treated with respect and dignity. These everyday views are considered “transphobic” by my own tribe, the nebulous blob that we might call the Left, hence the whispering, the private messages, endless DMs and emails from those too afraid to say these things in public.
They have reason to be fearful. Women who have challenged this orthodoxy have lost their jobs, their income, their reputations and have in some cases, including mine, been subject to death and rape threats for several years. My experience has pushed me to see that something I took for granted — free speech — is something that has to be fought for by each generation. Everyone is theoretically “for” free speech… until suddenly they are not. Until suddenly they find themselves mouthing something they are afraid to say out loud and are afraid to put in writing.
I do not want to be melodramatic. Free speech in law is a qualified, not absolute right. “This right shall include freedom to hold and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authorities and regardless of frontiers.”
Essentially, freedom of speech allows the testing of ideas and the possibility is always that some ideas might make some people uncomfortable. I do not see it as a Left or Right issue. We know all over the world that freedom of expression is under attack and pride ourselves that in this country it isn’t. But I am here to tell you otherwise and to mourn that this highest of values is not being passed onto younger generations.
Let me be clear, my freedom of speech has not been curtailed but by stating my view that sex is real and immutable, whereas gender identity is just some newly fashionable version of the soul, I suffered the consequences of expressing a view contrary to the liberal orthodoxy (the oft parroted dogma that trans women are women and non-binary identities are valid).
When I raised the question of the competing rights between biological women and trans women in the paper I then worked for, The Guardian, my world went bonkers for a while. A trans person who worked at the paper (I never went into the office) who had already resigned earlier, resigned again and 338 staff signed an anonymous letter about transphobia in that organisation. I was not named except the person that the letter was leaked to indicated it was clearly about me.
It all ended up with me choosing to leave a good job because I could no longer say what I wanted to say there. This is not a sob story. I was welcomed at the Daily Telegraph, who have honoured their promise that I would not be censored. My position then is privileged, unlike that of the teaching assistants, medics and those working in the arts who dare not speak up against the prevailing ideology for fear of losing their jobs and who email me daily. Women have been demonised for liking a tweet! This new McCarthyism is fuelled by social media witch hunts.
Such women are vilified as Terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) who deserve to be tortured and burnt. Look at what happened to JK Rowling when she said some very mild things about protecting women’s rights. When women want to gather together, there are usually counter-protests to try to shut us down. One way to end free speech is of course violence and that is what has happened often on university campuses where the “authorities” are running scared of their ever more fragile students. They no longer believe that the job of university education is to critically challenge ideas but rather to imbibe imported cultist ideology. This is an utter dereliction of duty and we are all the poorer for it. Is stating that there are two sexes detrimental to anyone’s mental health? Please don’t tell them where babies come from then.
Employment-wise I have not been harmed nor cancelled nor silenced, but then I am a fairly flame-retardant witch. Personally, though, it has been horrible. Former friends do not speak to me anymore — presumably I am too busy enacting a genocide on trans folk to care, but I do care. I have always had friends with whom I disagree with on certain subjects and so what?
Other friendships have changed because of the things we can no longer talk about. I still have trans mates and know many whose kids are going through gender dysphoria, for which I have enormous empathy. So I have been subject to what the great writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie referred to as “social censure” after she said simply that “transwomen are transwomen”.
I am no longer invited to events, parties, discussions in the way that I used to be and was told I am on a BBC blacklist. Why? Might I suddenly, in a discussion about politics, blurt out “only women have a cervix”? What is everyone afraid of? As Chimamanda said the concern here is not with goodness (or I would say actual trans rights) “but the appearance of goodness”. Thankfully love and support has flowed towards me from surprising directions. Without this I could not have coped. A huge part of the abstract debate on free speech ignores what is really happening. While we may insist that we are free, actually many self-censor so as not to offend anyone else. We have this neutered discourse instead.
The truth is often offensive to the powerful. The freedom to offend is absolutely paramount. As Salman Rushdie said: “Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true. What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” The self-policing has to stop. Incredibly, the “offence” that I caused at The Guardian is now the policy of the party that paper supports. Labour now agrees that sex and gender are not the same. Maybe they learnt something? I certainly have. Without free speech, we may kid ourselves we are safe. Far from it. We have simply given away our power. In cherishing freedom of speech we are cherishing truth. Don’t whisper that, shout it.
We want to draw on the experiences of a wide variety of individuals in our free speech inquiry. If you have a story to tell please email: freedomofspeech@standard.co.uk
