As I wrote last week, it is inherently interesting when someone loses a job. In the case of former Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore she left of her own choosing, but only under pressure from colleagues who objected to her views in the great trans debate.
Doubtless some of Moore’s critics are glad that she has exited, and I suspect Moore feels relief too. Today she has laid out the saga in UnHerd, placed within her own history in journalism.
The piece is worth reading in full, although it will take you a while. What’s notable is Moore’s sense that she is a perennial outsider, partly as a woman, partly as a gender-critical feminist, partly as a non-grad, and partly as a working class girl in a middle class world.
The central point in Moore’s break-up with the Guardian is her contention that natal females have distinct political interests from trans women. Even though I’m not a feminist this seems self-evidently true to me.
It is of course a prevailing mindset among progressives that all minorities, whether ethnic, sexual, economic or whatever else, have to band together to gang up on the white, straight rich, able-bodied men who run the country. This is sensible politics in a democratic country, but it fails when constituents in this coalition realise they disagree.
Moore’s UnHerd essay largely concerns itself with navigating the tensions between the different groups. Clearly a strain of feminism is rejecting its wholesale incorporation into what comedian Dave Chappelle calls “the alphabet people”. As he notes, each of those letters are distinct movements, with distinct interests. The same is true of natal women.
It is unfashionable to say that politics must at points have winners and losers, particularly on the left. It is also unfashionable to point out that politics is division by definition. Moore’s problem was that she stuck a crowbar into an existing fracture among progressives, one many deny exists.
