Playing nice hasn’t worked
by Helen Joyce, The Critic:
Even when I keep quiet about being cancelled, the censors don’t invite me back.
If you’re a writer, artist or academic who has strayed beyond the narrow bounds of approved discourse, two consequences will be intimately familiar. The first is that it becomes harder to get a hearing about anything. The second is that if you do manage to say anything publicly — especially if you talk about the silencing — it will be taken as proof that you have not been silenced.
This is the logic of witch-ducking. If a woman drowns, she isn’t a witch; if she floats, she is, and must be dispatched some other way. Either way, she ends up dead.
The only counter to this is specific examples. But censorship is usually covert: when you’re passed over to speak at a conference, exhibit in a gallery or apply for a visiting fellowship, you rarely find out. Every now and then, however, the censors tip their hands.
And so, for everyone who says I can’t have been cancelled because they can still hear me, here’s the evidence.
The first time I know I was censored was even before my book criticising trans ideology came out in mid-2021. I had been asked to talk about it on the podcast of Intelligence Squared, a media company that, according to its website, aims to “promote a global conversation”. We had booked a date and time.
But as the date approached I discovered I had been dropped. When I asked why, the response was surprisingly frank: fear of a social-media pile-on, sponsors getting cold feet and younger staff causing grief. The CEO of Intelligence Squared is a former war correspondent who has written a book about his experiences in Kosovo. But at the prospect of platforming a woman whose main message is that humans come in two sexes, his courage apparently ran out.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
