Suzanne Moore: ‘I was betrayed and bullied for saying that women should not be silenced’

When Suzanne Moore left her job at The Guardian, she announced the news on Twitter, accompanied by a sassy picture of Mad Men’s Peggy Olson strutting down a corridor with her belongings in a box. “I have left The Guardian. I will very much miss SOME of the people there. For now that’s all I can say,” she declared. The picture was “just a little joke,” says Moore, winner of last year’s Orwell Prize for journalism, her face half-hidden by that familiar cascade of hair as she relates the events that led up to her sensational resignation, 25 years after she joined the paper, over Zoom. She would have loved to march out Peggy-style, but the truth is she went into the office no more than once or twice a year: “I don’t fit in there and never have.” As she reflects today on some of the more absurd aspects of the row about transgender rights that has ended her time at the paper, Moore, 62, allows herself a laugh, but beneath the calm exterior she is very, very bruised. “I feel betrayed,” she says. “We are living in a world in which it is increasingly difficult to say certain things. “Almost every week now a different woman is put on the pyre: J K Rowling, Rosie Duffield, Selina Todd. It’s always a woman who is some sort of heretic and must be punished. If all this is about how trans people can have the best lives they can possibly have, how does this help them?” J K Rowling became a victim of cancel culture in June when she mocked the phrase “people who menstruate,” saying: “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” Labour MP Rosie Duffield received death threats after liking a tweet suggesting “people with a cervix” should be called women. Selina Todd, professor of modern history at Oxford, was condemned after addressing a meeting of Woman’s Place UK, a group campaigning for women to have separate spaces on the basis of biological sex. Opponents regard it as a “trans-exclusionary hate group”. Now Moore and one of Britain’s most venerable newspapers, founded in 1821, have fallen victim to the culture war that has engulfed universities and become a powder-keg issue on the Left. “It was entirely my decision to leave,” says Moore defiantly, but still she feels that she was hounded out. The drama began back in March, when Moore wrote a column lamenting the culture of cancellation and no-platforming and spoke of her sadness at the way a once-united campaign for sexual freedom – where women wanting abortion reform marched alongside men and women seeking gay rights and vice versa – has fragmented into factions, at one another’s political throats.

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