The “invisible committee of the righteous” has branded me a transphobe, says Suzanne Moore in The Daily Telegraph: “my standing up for women and my belief in biology makes me so”. That’s why I stopped working for The Guardian, and why Hadley Freeman has also left after 22 years there. What upsets me is “the absolute dereliction of basic journalism by the left-wing media”. The lie at the heart of it is that there is no conflict between trans rights and women’s rights. But there is. That conflict is ripping apart the SNP, whose leader Nicola Sturgeon wants to make it easier for people to change gender without a medical diagnosis. It has also divided the Greens and, in effect, ended the Women’s Equality Party. Half of Labour privately think women can’t have a penis but they “won’t say it publicly”.
The “un-reporting of truth” is “vomit inducing”. Whistleblowers have been telling us for years about the shamefully casual prescribing of cross-sex hormones at London’s Tavistock Centre, yet Hadley and I were not allowed to write about it. And it’s not opinions that are being censored, but information, be it the number of sex offenders in women’s prisons or what JK Rowling actually said to upset the trans lobby. Even worse is the self-censorship that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke of in her Reith lecture last week. As she said, what we have now is a generation who, even if they can think critically, “are afraid of becoming outcasts from their tribe”.