Suzanne Moore: driven out of the Guardian by the trans row

i felt um absolutely sort of betrayed actually it's betrayed yeah hello and welcome this is lockdown tv from unheard today we are joined by suzanne moore one of the most famous columnists from the guardian newspaper who sadly recently has decided to leave the guardian and she's here to tell us about it and the context of that decision so suzanne hi hello so let's start with your more recent story earlier this year you published an article that people got upset about in the guardian there was a letter what was the circumstances of all of that well it started in march i guess um but for a long time i've been trying to write something on the growing trans it's called the trans debate you know the conflict really between certain feminists and people who are lobbying for trans rights and that had really come to a head in the previous year because of the labour party pledges and the election where organizations like women's plays were deemed hate groups which was a very very strong statement and a lot lots of women i wouldn't describe them in any way is transphobic or anti-trans but they were simply women getting together saying we have the right to organize and not have our rights um conflicted you know anyway so that that row had been bubbling and it had become very very heated and it was it's sort of presented as though there are two sides and i actually i don't think there are two sides i think there's this incredibly strong lobby group that dictates the language in which we can have that debate and then there's just a whole load of people men women whoever going hang on a minute just not quite sure about this you know i don't think it's like good pro trans people and bad anti-trans people that's to simplify it but at the guardian definitely the line was um very much what the mantra you know trans rights are human rights and trans women are women trans men and men non-binary people are non-binary people all of that's fine i mean to which i would answer and women's rights are human rights and children's rights are human rights and sometimes we just have to negotiate how we deal with all these different rights that's what we do but i hadn't been able to write about it because it was a very very sort of touchy subject and then in march i did write about it and the thing that set me off i think that made me really um upset was that more and more people that i knew either personally or just knew of were now being no platformed or having to have a heavy security to teach so the person i wrote about selena todd is a professor of modern history at oxford she wrote a great book called on the history of the working class and another book on sheila delaney she's a very respected person who now has to have security guards to go to teach because she had attended a woman's place meeting now so this then becomes a kind of almost mccarthyite witch hunt so that's what your column was about that's how it started and the other thing that was happening uh was that you know i'm a feminist so i'm completely on the side of people being able to express their gender in whatever way they want to that gender is the social construct and that's how things will change but we started to get from certain parts of trans rights activists this idea that in fact sex biological sex was a construct a spectrum it didn't exist and that to me then became a kind of ideology that i could not go along with so i write the column which i think is still is quite mild and the reaction on social media is i would say split between lots and lots of people saying oh thank god thank god you've said it sort of reaction and the usual reaction that i've had for years now die in a ditch turf you know you deserve to be raped i'm gonna get you all of that because that's what it's like um okay so that's the reaction do they come from people from the left i mean do you think it's that the reaction is worse because you're seen to be as someone from the left you're rising at the guardian and therefore it's more vicious it's so hard to know where some of it comes from because i've never really associated a lot of the abuse i get particularly even with trans people i think it's i think it's a kind of misogyny actually um you never really know i mean this is a this is the issue isn't it with twitter and everybody being anonymous so it probably is worse on the left just in terms because because there's a line there's an orthodoxy and the labour party has made it clear what that line was so you publish the piece you get this huge kind of counter reaction and at that point you think story's over but it's not yeah of course you know i mean i'm a columnist some columns get a lot of reaction yeah and sometimes you push a button and you think okay well you know that was a good week to do that because that's something that everybody's talking about and it's just the way it is yeah so yeah i did think stories over and the next thing i know um is because i never go to the god you know i don't work there um i'm not staff i'm freelance um is that there's been this horrible incident in in daily conference where a trans person a trans woman who had apparently already resigned some weeks earlier got very upset and resigned again in conference and i think said that uh she felt unsafe she felt you having written that column made her feel i can't because i wasn't there i can't say exactly what she said but i think the gist of it was if the guardian was publishing this sort of watch what was deemed transphobic that i had written that she did not feel safe working there so she resigned but she had already resigned so she obviously wanted to make a statement she made the statement i think people in the meeting found it very very upsetting i think it was horrible and hadley freeman uh defended me i think claire phipps i think a couple of people did i think most people were just kind of shocked i think it was a yeah it sounds like not a nice thing that happened and i heard about that i mean can we just pause on that for one second what does it mean this whole unsafe thing because that yeah she wouldn't have been the first person to no use that line how did it happen that we we now have people saying they feel unsafe because of an article having been printed well that's a really interesting question because i think you do actually have to listen to people when they say they feel unsafe um i i would say when women say you know you know the whole me too movement has been often women say i never really felt safe around that guy so i would i would say we must listen to it i i don't i don't i don't dismiss it but i think i'm talking more about behavior actually than written words i mean if if i you know didn't read or listen to music or watch films that had content that was i mean i just culturally speaking a lot of my favorite authors or my favorite films have things in fact extremely unsafe to watch as a as a woman you know i don't i don't want this sanitized culture uh but because it's a sort of way of making it out that you've been violent violent exactly and it's also yes and it's also i mean i could say i never felt particularly safe at the guardian because i was working class and therefore i didn't it you know it's like we can use this word if safe just means comfortable or what does it mean does it mean threatened or you know we can use this word in different ways but certainly the idea that i've written something that makes someone feel unsafe is not um is not well do you know what if i could i would because i'd be a witch and i could do spells i mean it would be bloody brilliant wouldn't it if i could actually write something that made someone feel i i'd be happy you know i'd do it tomorrow you know i mean like i've got a list but what i'm saying is no i don't think words themselves are unsafe and someone said to me actually turns out to be a wonderful transsexual that i know famous uh um in the back in the day he's said to me you know this is how book book burning starts word by word and i thought this is so true you know you ban that word and then you ban that word the next where it where do you go there was this big reaction to the column there was this ugly event inside the daily conference and then what happened after that and then i was told that a letter had been leaked to buzzfeed and 338 people who worked at the guardian had signed this letter and it the letter was about transphobia um and the guardian the guardian being a safe space needing to be a safe space for trans people and three people had resigned in the last year including this trans person yeah and that obviously so i'm not named in the letter but this is just immediately after this event so i'm obviously the letter is associated with me it's leaked by somebody who knows patrick strodwick at buzzfeed and the names are out there so 338 is a lot of people even in a relatively big organization yes it is a lot of people yeah so were you surprised what do you feel when you see that leaking well obviously when i saw the names i was really personally upset because some of these people i've worked with and i just thought why can't anyone just pick up the phone to me or write to me or anything half most of them i didn't know who they were or care to be honest because you know i don't know who who works for guardian australia and all that um my other reaction was what kind of journalists do this because i've worked in lots of newspapers with lots of people who i fundamentally disagree with and i've had huge rows with them and sat and beside them the next day and got on i mean you know that's to me life um and what is the aim of this letter is the aim of this letter to go yeah she is such an evil sort of presence at the guardian even though she never goes there that she must be got rid of um you know what what what did they want i think some of the people who signed the letter probably just wanted to say i'm a nice person and i love all people and you know i like trans people and i i'm hamsters you know it's sort of you know sort of just that kind of if someone put a letter in front of you and said to show they were virtuous to show that you're a good person except i just don't think journalists should do that i mean i wouldn't i don't think joey should ever sign open letters i've got a thing about it i think it's lazy it's dumb it's just no don't do it and also if you're going to sign a letter and you're a journalist don't think it's going to be kept anonymous and don't think it's not going to cause a reaction and also ask yourself what it is i mean what is what is the fundamental quality that a journalist needs curiosity right so what did they think they were doing and what did they want i can't answer that because i'm not them but yes i felt i felt um absolutely sort of betrayed actually betrayed yeah did you talk to any of the signatories of it did you ring anyone up and go what the hell are you doing signing this i had a few drinks and wrote a very emotional sort of letter to the people i knew about sort of two o'clock in the morning probably didn't even make very much sense but it was obviously indicated that i was upset because i was um and then that was yeah i i still you know i still don't i still don't know if some of them do know what they will do i don't look i can't say so at that point are you then thinking i'm gonna have to leave yeah was that sort of overnight there's no chance i can now stay here for years this is no longer a welcoming place for me yeah or oh actually no that that thought yes and the second thought is but this isn't right and therefore i will be protected by the management and and the editors because that has been my experience in every other newspaper that i've worked for but that didn't happen no i've been the left-wing irritant for instance at the mail on sunday and i wrote many things that the what were against the editorial line but if anybody complained about me well they did complain about me but they had your back they had my back yes that's absolutely the phrase i think that you don't have to agree with someone to have their back yeah so you would have liked them to do some kind of gesture to say well what would you like to see i knew it was going to be discussed at the scot trust which runs the guardian i wanted an assertion of editorial independence i wanted people to know that they could not do that to journalists i wondered why given what some given what has been published in the guardian previously why i was the worst thing that ever happened i mean we're talking about that great savior of the left you know something like sheamus milne publishing a sermon by osama bin laden no one wrote a letter about that you know like quite why was this the worst thing ever partly because people haven't got any sense of i've got memory or no history or whatever i wanted people to know that you you you can't behave like this when you disagree with someone because i thought well if if it's not if it wasn't me it would be the next person you know this isn't a good way to be also it's one of the most famous newspapers in the world it needs to be and if you're going to say you're a liberal newspaper that encourages a range of views you just stand up for your journalists just do it just one and all of it it would have taken one one one statement so why didn't they do that do you think because the other big thing that was happening was absolute support pouring in for me from all their big writers from all sorts of people you could see that this was not good so i didn't feel all alone you know what i mean i felt like there's this massive support but no one can sort of put it together and it's not in public in public i've got trap i've been trashed um and therefore it's up to the editor or the management all the scot trust i don't know exactly how it all works to say we stand by um you know this particular writer we don't agree with her never ever have i asked for anyone to agree with me i'm a columnist you know but we stand by oh that's it and that didn't happen what happened was kath took me out to a lunch that i said i didn't want because i didn't i didn't want to sleep yeah i mean i the managing editor said i said i don't i said i don't want a lunch because i you know i feel it's like being you know passing on the head and given like a chicken nugget you know no i don't want the lunch i went because they weren't there for you publicly so don't pretend that you're they're being all friendly privately yeah the reason this is important and so much broader than just your particular example is that people have been talking about so-called institutional capture and yes there's been this sort of um warning signs about certain so-called woke ideologies that have spilled out of university campuses and often the message back is you guys are being paranoid about this you know you're you're exaggerating it either because you have some sort of conservative agenda and so you want to demonize the left or whatever but what you're telling is a is a real life story of an institution that has been captured parts of it i think yes but uh parts of it definitely and also because uh parts of the guardian have been captured parts of really the public sector the bbc all of it um that i get emails every single day and i'm really not exaggerating from people who are teachers doctors social workers therapists telling me that they're scared of losing their jobs because they're not that again they have got not nothing they are the most liberal people they have nothing against trans people they want trans people to have good lives but they just can't go along with the idea that if a little boy wants to put on a dress they got they've got to be taken to a clinic and you know all of that the other the other the other part of the capture as a journalist i feel very bad about the guardians all these stories that we now know about mermaids and the funding about stonewall and the lobbying about who funds who um we haven't investigated and the tavern stop and a few years ago i did a two i did two years training and as a therapist myself i was interested and of course my tutors everybody knew it's been going on since 2005 the tavistock is a small institution that deals a lot with gender dysphoria people they're extremely qualified and well trained and respected and the staff turnover has been absolutely massive for a small institution so you should start thinking why and it's because you know there's been whistleblowers um there's been um huge unhappiness about who who transitions and how and how young and what the repercussions of that are so these are people who you think are leaving because they've been shocked what they've seen well yes they have you know i mean regarding i'm not here to slag off the whole guardian i mean look at that look at something like wind rush that emilia gentlemen did absolutely fantastic investigation took years brilliant you know brilliant exactly what the guardian should be doing but who has investigated uh tavistock yeah the times have done stuff the telegraph has done stuff private eye the spectator my argument to my newspaper and i do consider myself on the left whether anyone else will now i don't know but is that if if you do if we do not have this debate because we're scared the right will have it and you and that's what's happened you know that is what's happened so like don't don't i mean christopher hitchens said uh you know we can all have our different views on chris page and says but if you're too scared to write about something you shouldn't be a journalist so do you think that's what it is then you don't think that it's a kind of moral blind spot um and that they actually think it's sort of dangerous and improper to investigate this because it will you know cause too much upset too many people do you think it's actually that they're scared of the repercussions from this very vocal i think i think it's a really a mixture of things and different influences that within a big organization i think for some people this is simply a belief system that trans people are the most marginalized people on the planet and anyone who says otherwise is probably like a murderer like me um they quote you continually statistics that come from america and if you tell them that it's not these are you know for instance you know all these all these people are killed in brazil or something and you think oh my god how awful what terrible awful risky lives these people have that's awful but actually maybe one trans person a year has been killed here in the last top 10 years 3.5 women a week have been being killed during covered so like let's have a sense of proportion about who is affected and who we are setting out to protect here is one thing i'd say but but you asked me what the nervousness is around investigation um i think some of it comes from the relationship between the um different parts of the guardian and guardian america is full-on with man's agenda so you think it's actually partly inherited from america and big donors in america the guardian also take money from something called the open society which also has a certain agenda i guess like you would expect the guardian to want to keep its labour party readers and so when the labour party decided that transphobia was like something that you know you could be thrown out of the party for us but i mean i've never i've never had this conversation with anyone in the guardian but i guess there's a bit of that too you know although that didn't work out so well for the labour party at the last election no it didn't work out at all did it but i mean it's like who who who who who would could have predicted that you know in bolton that wasn't the number one issue i mean you know but it's a bit like who you listen to isn't it it's a bit like i said i see it connected i see it connected to the anti-semitism issue in that if if if you have a group of people saying to you if you have jewish people saying i don't really feel safe in this labour party right now i feel like there's a lot of stuff going on um you you you maybe say well let's listen to that and tell me about it if you have a lot of women saying i don't like the fact that uh the women's officer is a 19 year old person said he just transitioned i think you listen to that too you know it's a case of dogma versus just listening to people's experiences just to to kind of finish on the the trans issue then i mean you actually feel that it's dangerous for women to take this kind of agenda too far because it sort of delegitimizes women's experience as a distinct thing or what no what do you feel like the threat is i feel no threat from from any trans person and i never have and i never would and i have never been unkind and trans people have looked after him in my life you know it's my issue isn't really about trans people themselves it is about the eurasia and capture of language and ideology and the uh if we now have a situation where women cannot women are now cervix havers or menstruators and we can't say the word women because it's offensive to a small minority of people i think that's part of the backlash that's happening towards feminism i think language is really really important i'm not i'm i'm actually for political correctness because i think political political correctness is just good manners you know if you tell me how you want to be what you want to be called i will call you that i think that's just like manners but for instance with the transist thing i always thought that was a very strange thing to do because nobody was really consulted you know you say hello look at us we're so radical we're getting rid of the binary the binary oh here's a new binary and you women you're now cis and it's like hang on no one really asked us about this and you're just inserting another binary so there's lots of i have lots of issues around um the ability of and the power a lot of there's a lot of power for women and to name their experiences and it's taken a long time i mean when i was young it was really really difficult for girls to talk about periods and now it's better it's not great but it's better you know people can say that word and it's it's really how we give birth what choices we have when we give birth how we talk about you know menopause you know these these female experiences and it's not as i say it's not great but we can be more open about it but we cannot be open about these things and make these things better for people if we are told that actually the word women is somehow excluding other people you render language meaningless when you cannot say what it is and one of these sort of basic insights of feminism you know is that is about naming the ability to name your experience and then you can own it even though you don't think it's a you know you don't feel it's a threat to you but it is a threat to feminism and it turns out to be a threat to people's employment because i know people have lost their jobs over this i mean i can get another job i'm very lucky i'm very very lucky a lot of people couldn't get another job i know people have lost their jobs i know people have been no platformed i know many academics who just have stopped their courses i mean i know a lesbian woman who for many years has taught gender studies who just says no i can't do that anymore it's just you know the hassle you get it's too and they these people are completely the opposite of any kind of horrible right-wing you know bigots they're they're they're on the left they're feminists they can't they can no longer speak but the the other you know the other big thing which i have written about is why are feminists blamed for what's happening to trans people because who murders and rapes trans people is it is it feminists no so like that's the other bit of the not naming no it isn't feminist is it it's men it's mass it's masculine power it's violence same old same old what so what's going on here and i mean i don't know if you saw freddie but you know when jk rowling wrote her essay did you see the levels of abuse the jk rowling thing is obviously relevant to this and i just wonder do you feel like actually the tide is turning a little bit i mean because someone like jk rowling and now yourself and there are lots of kind of liberals in america who are yeah do you feel like there is a bit of a line in the sand being drawn and that faction is if anything in retreat just lately i have felt it and even since i resigned i have felt that people were kind of waiting to for someone to um stand up to it yeah i think a bit i think i i'll be i don't know yet how it's going to play out but i think that many women have felt like is it me i just i can't go along with this is it me and once people stand up to it um and yeah i think they feel that enough is enough yeah and again it's got nothing to do with trying to prevent um the you know the small percentage of trans people who want to transition being able to transition but it is we we should be able to ask some questions about um children i think in particular i mean i think it's absolutely the right of anyone over 18 to do what they want with their bodies but i think when we're talking about teenagers and young people um it it's ethically a you know really really difficult situation and the fact that you know the fact that um mermaids is sort of we don't hear much about them anymore all the celebrities support oh they all deleted their tweets it's because people did start to investigate what was going on so let's go back um in time a bit you you actu you did a first stint at the guardian in the 90s that's right and then you went independent mail on sunday and then you came back to the guardian were the seeds of all of this already sown back then do you think i don't think so i don't really know um i can only say that when i first went to the guardian um i did not fit in then because it was so oxbridge um because i was a woman and there were no women on the comment pages you went out for lunch with peter preston the then editor tell us about that well i won um columnist of the year so i suppose he felt he had to take me out to lunch i don't i don't i don't think he wanted to and i don't think any of them really wanted well i know they didn't it wasn't that they just didn't want to speak to me they just didn't know how i mean they just used to yell the names of these different oxbridge colleges at me and i just go no no and they just still keep doing it was weird it's like what i've said i didn't go there it's like you know was it the bat signal i mean i might as well have been a bat or something and anyway um peter preston took me out for lunch and i had found out just i'd won columnist of the year and that was great you know very happy about that and then i had found out like the day after that i was literally on half the pay of the guys that i was working with and decided i should have a pay rise but i didn't have any clue i mean i was young i didn't have a clue people said ask him for some more money and it's like well how i thought you know what is the middle class code of saying can i have more money how do they do it i don't know how they do it how did you do it well i just waited like well look he was a man who didn't speak a lot anyway so in one of the pauses in the conversation i just said can i have more money i just blurted it out like that because he said is there anything i can do to make you happier and i said give me money and that was that but it worked no because he just called for the bill and i was dismissed and then that's then i just thought i can't deal with it i just can't deal with these people you know um i don't know what to do so i got this agent and she was like super agent and um she seemed to be able to really scare them ah fantastic tiny little tiny little skirt bmw keys rattling and that's the only time you ever phone me you've just phoned me and said suzanne can you promise me that i never have to see that woman again and then i got pay rise so this is back in the 90s so that was the 90s but what's kind of interesting is that at that point you're the kind of anti-establishment figure who is fighting against the what would now be called the patriarchy and now this this time you know there's this new generation of people who are kind of implying that you are part of yeah sort of older yeah yeah establishment that needs to be ousted that's right yeah and there's there's sort of bits of truth and bits of not truth in that isn't there i think i think that um i think for the people who want to ask me now don't kind of quite understand how difficult it was for women of my generation and how we will fight to protect our rights because they're still contested um we didn't have equal pay we didn't get maternity leave do you know what i mean so i think that they don't sort of so you almost think they take for granted the things that you fought for in a way but i'm very very sort of loath to do the whole generational divide thing because um i think there are generational divides and i mean i had i've got you know like my life's like a sort of sociological experiment i had a child in my twenties one in my thirties one of my forties so i've i i've always lived in a house full of young people who think different things and think different things to me and the idea that this generation thinks that and there's this other one over there and never the twain shall meet i just don't think that's true i think that on an issue like this the majority of young people are absolutely liberal on gay rights trans issues and and all of those things i actually think most people are pretty liberal but it's just when you get to the point of but hang on a minute did you do you really think that this person should be in prison with those women or do you think that women's sports can really handle a six foot six per person you know so when you get down to these really kind of quite essential questions of fairness um then people go oh no no i didn't i don't think that's quite right what people will no doubt say now is that you know you've become a right winger basically you know you that you already did a time at the mail on sunday so you probably were damaged goods ever since then and now well yeah yeah of course it's not gonna be the guardian and therefore how do you respond to that do you think you have become more right-wing no i'm an anarchist i mean actually no i mean if that i think the left um and the right and how they're defined has changed is one thing uh certainly i did not like corbin one of the reasons i never liked corbin is because i came my first job i worked i was an editor at marxism today i have been around enough of the hard left to know people like corbin and to know and to reject very much what they stand for i mean how do you show you're not right-wing i mean i i think you'd be hard-pressed to find anything for example isn't that a uh i'd rather boil my own head than vote tory i mean you know that's just that that's just never ever going to happen but i but i don't vote late i haven't voted for many years if you ask me if i'm you know i know i'm not right-wing but i would tend to be libertarian i would always go for freedom of speech yes and so that puts me like that puts me on on a different side to people who want to know platform uh and all of that um i i think the answer to hate speech is always going to be more speech i think the answer to a bad column is a good column you know i i want i think the answer to bad art is make more art you know i'm not you don't like shutting stuff down i really don't like shutting stuff down because because history tells us who gets shut down you know like a minute we know who gets shut down like right away it's not it's not you know no one's going to sort of make it a a raid on on the establishment it'll be some sort of poor little artist artists you know what i mean it's never the weak people end up it's the weak people and and and the idea that you can bring down the powerful with this stuff no no no you can't um so i think what we're seeing it is is this is this tussle between these different kinds of ideas and what will happen and is happening is a fragmentation which i feel like quite sad about because in terms of my own politics for instance you know i came after the aids crisis i'd lived in the states uh of course i was involved in a lot of aids activism and the gay men that i was marching alongside would then march alongside me if i was went to a rally for abortion rights we considered ourselves on the same side and we were on the same side you know and the idea that that's really all fragmented and everyone's in their own little well i've dyed my fringe blue and therefore i'm polyamorous and you just think these i mean or so you think you lose the sense of solidarity with so much yes actually that's a really that's really good word because that was one of the shocks about that letter to me was this absolute lack of solidarity not with my beliefs because that's everyone's true but with you a journalistic solidarity i would defend somebody on another newspaper and in fact i was defended in every other newspaper now okay i get it some of it was just to attack the guardian but also some of it is just to say look come on you know let let people let her write what she wants to write you don't have to like it so solidarity yeah how are we going to make solidarity between people who absolutely believe that um any kind of debate is is literal violence and people like me who say no we are going to carry on saying the things you don't like i mean do you think you could make a accommodation with you know owen jones ash sarcar could there be a yeah a beautiful um reconciliation i don't think there's going to be a reconciliation at all but i think you can you can stand beside someone and disagree with them yeah i don't think it has to be um you know you're the most evil person in the world because you think different things no i think that you know there's things i like for instance i like as much as i disagree with lots of it i like something like navarro media i like something like this i like these new forms of alternative media i do i love because to me it's quite punk so i like it i like the fact there's new things coming i don't i like new radio sessions i this this energy to me is good and it will come in different places and uh i don't i don't i don't feel threatened by that at all i think that's great again i don't have to agree with it but i like it do you feel liberated in some way that you know you don't need to apologize for anything you might have noticed even when i was younger i didn't really care that much anyway and as i've got older there's less and less i mean yes i find i find aging quite liberating in certain ways definitely yes i mean i've i've had my kids um i've had a life and i do i do realize that i should sort of crawl under a rock and you know go away but i'm just not going to do that and i don't think my generation of women are going to do that and um now you've been through this year do you feel you're even stronger they've thrown 338 rocks at you next time that happens you put my you care even less yeah i mean i think earlier in the year when i was really upset about it i probably did want to crawl under a rock and then when i got the support and then also actually deciding to leave is i mean i think it's just yeah you've got to you've got to walk it like you talk it and if you say you know i'm not putting up with this crap anymore um and then you leave it's an incredibly good feeling and i and i realized it took me a long time to it took me a few months really to think do you know what this is bullying and you know what this is an abusive workplace and and i don't want to be here and it because i didn't nobody likes to see them see themselves as a victim or someone who's been bullied i don't i certainly didn't want to see myself like that but once i felt that um emotionally but do you feel like that this kind of take no prisoners attitude is going to be strengthened from now on am i going to tone it down no are you going to turn it up no i don't want to be i don't want to just upset people or be offensive for the sake of it i'm not interested in that what i've been pleasantly surprised by is that when you do say it how it is as much as it upsets some people there's just a whole load of other people out there going oh yes go on go for it just say it you know so there's a kind of relief in it you know of oh god i've been thinking that and now she's said it so um if you can do that as long as i can do that um that's i'm happy but my argument is always being and my politics have always been and my mission is to center women and in in in the experience our experiences in what i write and if that upsets whoever it upsets well i'm going to carry on doing it suzanne thank you very much that was suzanne moore who has just left the guardian telling us about her experiences there and we look forward to seeing where she crops up her whole account is available on unheard from today have a look and check it out

Channel: UnHerd

Views: 167,530

Keywords: Suzanne Moore, The Guardian, Interview, Freddie Sayers, JK Rowling, Trans, Trans people, women, journalist, Labour Party, upset, feminists, reaction, publish, cancelled, no-platorm, newspapers, resigned, interview, Trans debate, LGBT, Mail on Sunday, Journalism, UK Politics, Woke, News, column, columnist, trans rights, Guardian, debate, Left, Jeremy Corbyn, female, editors, Buzzfeed, TERF

Id: wSVd36xEplY

Length: 44min 50sec (2690 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/InsufferableHaunt]

She tries to put on a straight face and claims that she was never part of the posh, privately educated, upper-class Guardian employees that were her colleagues. But it rings as hollow as her constant pleas that she's just a put-upon discriminated woman by the patriarchy.

People like her always want more money and power.

Random time codes:

• 14:00 – the editors didn’t stand by her when her colleagues were lunging for her throat. It's customary for editorial to stand by its writers, regardless if they agree with them or not
• 18:00 – she claims the public sector, BBC and The Guardian are captured institutions
• 22:40 – she claims that the new office culture was inherited from the American division of The Guardian (rofl), and that The Guardian was taking money from George Soros/Open Society. (Oh, the irony of blaming George Soros. :') )
• 26:00 somewhere – she's complaining about not being consulted over her new description as a 'cis woman'
• 28:00 – general threat of dissenters losing jobs, including lesbians and feminists
• 32:00 – repeats she has a blue-collar background
• 40:00 – some talk about the ridiculous trans talking point: "debate is literal violence"

She has some good points, but it's still hilarious coming from her.