Suzanne Moore, the disliked ex-witch of the "Guardian"

[Hilda and Jesse]

This British columnist, feminist and accustomed to controversy,
is the latest journalist to resign from a prestigious English
left-wing newspaper, against a backdrop of tensions with her
“woke” colleagues. She explained it in a long and fascinating
testimony.

On November 25 the UK site Unherd published a long essay –
nearly 40,000 characters long – titled “Why I Had to Leave The
Guardian”. This testimony is disturbing but not devoid of black
humor (like its author Suzanne Moore), and has an air of déjà
vu: it recalls the text of Bari Weiss, another “controversial”
journalist who resigned from a major English-speaking left-wing
media, and who slammed the door of The New York Times this
summer. In both cases, the journalists say they have been the
target of attacks from their “woke” colleagues, outraged by
their positions deemed unacceptable in the columns of their
respective newspapers. Moore had announced her departure from
the newspaper ten days earlier, via a tweet referring to the Mad
Men series, before specifying that this departure was a choice
on her part, and not a constraint.

I have left The Guardian. I will very much miss SOME of the
people there. For now thats all I can say.
pic.twitter.com/tUb123CnId

— suzanne moore (@suzanne_moore) November 16, 2020
Moore, 62, is of a different generation than Weiss, 36. As a
feminist, she followed, for example, both as a journalist and as
an activist, the fight against a homophobic law proposed in the
UK under Thatcher at the end of the 80’s. An editor that worked
with several British newspapers (Daily Mail, The Independent,
etc.), this 2019 winner of the Orwell Prize for several of her
political columns published in the Guardian was at the center of
a controversy last March. It was not her first scandal – she had
already resorted to police protection due to threats made
against her – but it is the cause of her recent departure from
the newspaper. Her column “Women have the right to organise. We
will not be silenced” was the spark which ignited the fire.

Cancellation and accusations of transphobia
A little background: a few days before its publication, the
English historian Selina Todd was excluded from an event planned
at the University of Oxford during which she was to give a short
speech. This cancellation was motivated by Todd’s links with the
feminist organization Woman’s Place UK, deemed “transphobic” by
various LGBTQ + activists for having notably called for the
maintenance of single-sex places reserved for women in public
spaces. An a priori harmless complaint, but not that much given
that a bill in the UK on gender identity was conceived to allow
any man to self-identify as a woman, without prior justification
(subject already mentioned on our site in the article which
recounted the torments of another British journalist accused of
transphobia – Helen Lewis).


Written in support of Selina Todd, the text by Suzanne Moore
published on March 2, 2020, argued that “sex is not a feeling”
and that “female is a biological classification that applies to
all living species”. And to clarify that:

“Female oppression is innately connected to our ability to
reproduce. Women have made progress by talking about biology,
menstruation, childbirth and menopause. We won’t now have our
bodies or voices written out of the script”.

Further on, Moore – who does not declare any animosity towards
transgender people – adds:

“It is not feminists who murder trans people, although this
might be the impression you would be left with if you relied
solely on Twitter for your information”.

The letter from indignant colleagues
What she wrote once again earned her a flood of insults on
Twitter, and also accusations of being a TERF (trans-
exclusionary radical feminist), but it is within her own
newspaper that Moore triggered the most hostile reactions.

As Buzzfeed later revealed shortly after the publication of her
column, an open letter signed by more than 300 collaborators of
the venerable British media, addressed to its editor-in-chief,
alarmed that “the repeated publication of transphobic content is
an obstacle to our work and augments our reputation as a media
hostile to trans rights and transgender employees”. Even though
Suzanne Moore’s name is not explicitly cited, the letter is a
reaction to her essay, accused of having resulted in the
resignation of a trans employee (who had, according to Moore,
already resigned a few weeks earlier).

The sending of this letter followed a stormy meeting within the
newspaper – in the absence of Moore who, due to her freelance
status, never went to the London editorial office – during which
employees would have declared themselves “unsafe” following the
publication of such comments in their newspaper. It will be
noted that this notion of “danger” following the publication of
remarks in a media was also put forward by ex-colleagues of Bari
Weiss in the New York Times after the controversy of a tribune
deemed racist during the full return of the Black Lives Matter
movement following the death of Georges Floyd in the summer of
2020.

In a video interview accompanying the posting of her long
testimony this week, and visible below, Moore returns to this
notion of “feeling unsafe”: “We must listen to people when they
say they feel unsafe, we must not put that aside, but when I
hear that, I think more of behaviours than written words. As far
as I’m concerned, culturally, whether in music, literature or
cinema, my favorite works may have aspects that put me in danger
as a woman, but I don’t want a sanitised culture”.

And she continues :

“If unsafe means making uncomfortable, one can make this word
say anything (…) If my writings really had this power, it would
make me a witch capable of casting spells. I mean, it would be
bloody brilliant! ”.“If I could actually write something that
causes this, I would be happy, I’d do it tomorrow. But I don’t
think words themselves are unsafe”.

The journalist also emphasises that, in the past, such reasoning
was at the origin of the burning of books deemed too dangerous.

The left targeted, the right benefits
In her testimony, Moore denounces the “sectarian” aspect of a
certain British left – in particular the pro-Corbyn, the former
Labor leader recently suspended from the Labor Party after
allegations of anti-Semitism – and laments the lack of support
from his hierarchy after the letter fiasco:

“This to me was utter cowardice. Shouldn’t you stand by your
writers? But on this issue, the Guardian has run scared. I
suspect this is partly because of Guardian US sensitivities, and
partly because the paper receives sponsorship from the Open
Society Foundation, which promotes trans rights”.

Suzanne Moore’s essay (she has just announced her upcoming
departure from Twitter) was widely relayed on social networks,
in particular by the Reuters Institute research center and the
influential pro-freedom of expression NGO Index On Censorship :


On the French side, even though the feminist and member of
Charlie Hebdo, Inna Shevchenko, shared the text and
congratulated its author, we only notice – for now – one review
in the media: in the very right-wing Valeurs Actuelles, the same
day that two deputies from the Les Républicains party asked the
President of the National Assembly to create a mission of
information around the cancel culture in university circles.

This preemption of the subject by the right and the far-right –
often out of opportunism to tackle ideological opponents – seems
to echo the criticisms from the left that dot Suzanne Moore’s
essay: “lately it has been hard to define what the left consists
of beyond smug affirmation ”, “I have been censored more by the
left than the right and it gives me no pleasure to say that”.

However, it would be wrong to paint her as a neo-conservative,
reading this passage towards the end of her testimony:

“Sure I understand the clichéd trajectory that as one grows
older, one moves from Left to Right. Actually, I would say in my
case this is not so: class politics becomes ever more pertinent
to me, not less. In these fearful reactionary times, I will not
be fearful and I will not be reactionary, but I will centre
women and children and the possibility of freedom, as I always
have, at the heart of my work”.

In this article: GUARDIAN, JOURNALISM, MEDIA, SUZANNE MOORE, WOKE

Suzanne Moore is a Ex-Guardian columnist. A progressive liberal
whore who hates men and feels she is better than you.

https://ctrlzmag.com/suzanne-moore-the-disliked-ex-witch-of-the-
guardian/