Suzanne Moore

Suzanne Lynn Moore (born 17 July 1958) is an English journalist who has written for The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph/Telegraph.co.uk website.

Quotes

2011–2014

• Reasonably sitting around waiting for equality while empowering oneself with some silicone implants does not really seem to have worked wonders, does it ladeez? Postfeminism – as personified by the Sex and the City generation – basically confused sexual liberation with shopping: a mistaken strategy even within its own market-driven terms. So we live on a permanent diet of crumbs from the table. A woman over 50 gets to be on TV! Whoopdiwhoop! It's a victory, sure, but is that all there is? It's time to wake up and smell the skinny latte.
  A woman is murdered in Bristol and the response is to tell women to stay at home?! For their own safety. Though no one thinks it's a woman doing the murdering. A curfew on men would be considered a monstrous idea, even though most women live with internalised curfews anyway.
• Or take comfort from Gideon's [George Osborne] "We are all in this together"? The last election was the most regressive for women I can remember. Women appeared as trophy wives, or not at all. The consequences of that are that this government – this new way of doing politics – is hitting women and children the hardest. Women are suffering most from the cuts that men are making. Just look at the figures.
  This makes me very angry indeed. Which I know may increase "visible signs of ageing", but it's way too late now. Feminism has been dumbed down into politeness and party-political promises for far too long.
  • "It's time to get angry", The Guardian (15 January 2011)

• The sight of the hard left coalescing around Julian Assange is indeed sore. Yet again, those most vociferous about human rights seem somehow not to see women's rights as part of the same conversation.
  • "Seeing red: the power of female anger", New Statesman (8 January 2013)
  • Article originally published in Cathy Galvin (ed.) Red, The Waterstones Anthology

• They say he has made the mistake of demanding the impossible – and they are right. He has demanded the impossible. But it wasn't a mistake.
  • "Russell Brand’s revolution or a meaningless two-party system? Politics should be about more than this", The Guardian (6 November 2013)
  • At this stage, the comedian Russell Brand had guest edited an issue of the w:New Statesman magazine and been interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight

• [On Russell Brand a year later] [T]he Jesus Clown is pilloried for being a dreadful influence on young people. If the youth don't vote, then policies that continue to punish them will be waved through by our decrepit politicians. Actually, the Jesus Clown is not what I call a young person, Lydon isn't, and I am certainly not, but the Clown has a reach, that's for sure. My 13-year-old adores him, and the part of me that is for ever 13 gets why. A lot of what he says is sub-Chomskyian woo, but these frustrations with existing political structures – they exist. Somehow it is always assumed that young people are naive idealists who, when they grow up and understand how things really work or don’t work at all, will buckle down and do the right thing. The right thing here means voting Labour.
  • "Russell Brand’s revolution or a meaningless two-party system? Politics should be about more than this", The Guardian (15 October 2014)
  • Brand's Revolution had just been published. Moore's article was amended at the end of the month. It originally stated: "A lot of what he says is ghostwritten sub-Chomskyian woo"; Moore had received a legal letter threatening libel action. It had been speculated the (disgraced) journalist Johann Hari had been involved in writing it; Hari had acted as Brand's researcher.

2020–2023

• 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. The materiality of having a female body may mean rape or it may mean childbirth – but we still seek liberation from gender. In some transgender ideology, we are told the opposite: gender is material and therefore can be possessed by whoever claims it, and it is sex as a category that is a social construction. Thus, sex-based rights, protected in law, can be done away with.
  I know from personal experience the consequences of being deemed transphobic by an invisible committee on social media. It has meant death and rape threats for me and my children, and police involvement. I also know that the most vicious stuff takes place online and not in real life. Still, I can’t stand by. As Roman Polanski was being rewarded for his latest film at the César awards, Todd was being silenced.
• If the idea of women organising autonomously is transphobic you are walking into a cul-de-sac, which absolutely traps people in boxes that benefit the patriarchy. Because there is nothing the patriarchy fears more than women who no longer rely on male authority.
• Most people want the tiny percentage of the population who are trans to have the best lives they can. Living your best life would be one free of male violence. 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.
  • "Women must have the right to organise. We will not be silenced" The Guardian (2 March 2020).
  • Following the disinvitation of Professor Selina Todd from an event commemorating the 50th anniversary at Ruskin College’s National Women’s Liberation Conference which was held in 1970. Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford, researches feminist history, but has been called a transphobe for her advocacy of women-only spaces.

• The emails then came pouring in from people who wished they could say what I had said. I wished people would stop calling me brave. Columnists are meant to be made of titanium; I felt more like papier-mâché. But the orthodoxy which demands that Mary Beard must refer to an ancient statue with a little penis as "assigned male at birth" is powerful. The no-platforming of feminist warriors like Kathleen Stock and Julie Bindel is abhorrent. I like freaks. I like fluidity. I just don’t like one set of rules being replaced by another. I was hurt that so many of my 'colleagues' denounced me, but I suppose everyone needs a hobby.
  • "I was hurt that so many of my 'colleagues' denounced me", The Spectator (14 March 2020).
  • Signed by 338 members of staff, a letter to the editor-in-chief of The Guardian Katharine Viner objected to the publication of "transphobic content" by the newspaper, which was perceived as a response to Moore's article dated 2 March 2020.

• Everyone pays lip service to diversity, and the idea of a female leader, but the position of women in the party continues to be that they can be deputies, lovely assistants to the main act. Labour brought in women’s shortlists, overnight upping female representation, but how that would happen now I don't know – as they have tied themselves in ever more ridiculous knots by being unable to define what a woman is in order to appeal to their activists. They are confused about who has a cervix and whether womanhood is biological or just a feeling in someone’s head. At this stage we can surely define "woman" fairly easily: someone who can never be actual leader of the Labour Party.
  • "Labour’s old boys club still has a woman problem" The Telegraph (1 September 2022)
  • Published shortly before Liz Truss became the third female Conservative party leader and Prime Minister.

• Stonewall had successfully captured every organisation and rewarded it for being "trans inclusive." What did this mean? Believing that womanhood was a feeling in a man’s head? Rewriting equality law so that people with male genitalia could now be in female prisons and rape crisis centres? Bad statistics were bandied about concerning suicide - all wrong and based on one tiny study. What has been censored on the Left is actual information, not opinions: information about puberty blockers, information about the number of sex offenders who claim to be women in prison, information about what JK Rowling actually said, information about trans athletes who have gone through male puberty, information about public attitudes. Most people are liberal and sympathetic to trans people, as we should be. When told most trans women retain male genitalia, they become more uncomfortable about females sharing intimate spaces with them.
  • "The Guardian is hiding the truth about trans" The Telegraph (6 September 2022)

• Before he died in 2018, a long-term user of the NHS who had motor neurone disease warned against insurance systems run by private companies. Stephen Hawking, for it was he, said the fairest way to deliver healthcare was the NHS.
• Should you wind up in a car crash, private medicine will be as useful to you as homoeopathy.
  • "This NHS crisis is a political choice" The Telegraph (10 January 2023)
  • The British National Health Service provides Accident & Emergency care, unlike private health providers.

• I regularly ask these people a few questions. What is gender identity? When was it invented? At what age does it come into being? How is it different from stereotyped gender roles? How much money is to be made through surgery and lifelong hormones? What is the need for men who identify as women to make women feel uncomfortable? What happens when you want to have a child if you have been made infertile or in fact don’t have a womb? Do you just hire one? Is surrogacy the next phase of dehumanising women? I have yet to receive answers.
  The sheer anger of certain trans activists puts me in mind of men’s rights activists; they want what women have and that means access to us all. In response, there is still huge cowardice. The fear of being called transphobic means silence. Silence = Death, as we used to say when we were campaigning around Aids.
  • "Trans activists are giving men even more power over women" The Telegraph (24 January 2023)

• When I raised the question of the competing rights between biological women and trans women in the paper I then worked for, The Guardian, my world went bonkers for a while. A trans person who worked at the paper (I never went into the office) who had already resigned earlier, resigned again and 338 staff signed an anonymous letter about transphobia in that organisation. I was not named except the person that the letter was leaked to indicated it was clearly about me.
  It all ended up with me choosing to leave a good job because I could no longer say what I wanted to say there. This is not a sob story. I was welcomed at the Daily Telegraph, who have honoured their promise that I would not be censored.
  • "I left my job at The Guardian because I was no longer allowed to say what I wanted to say", Evening Standard (8 August 2023)
  • Suzanne Moore resigned from The Guardian in November 2020.

• At my former newspaper, there was a range of subjects that I and other mostly female journalists were not allowed to write about: what was going on at the Gender Identity Development Service clinic at the Tavistock, the scandal of Mermaids, the takeover of public institutions by Stonewall, the erasing of the word women from public language.
  In short, instead of having a debate about gender ideology or the attack on women’s rights that some trans activism involved, The Guardian just put its fingers in its ears and for some time refused any discussion.
  How did The Guardian enforce such censorship? Not by explicitly banning anything but by omission. It simply did not report on stories that ran contrary to its world view.
  • "I would not be doing my job if I kept quiet about any Abu Dhabi-backed takeover of The Telegraph", The Telegraph (5 December 2023)

• The Greens have suspended senior members who were writing a Green women’s declaration which understands that women's rights are based on biological sex. The rejection of biology or indeed reality by those who want to slow down climate change is frankly barmy.
  But then so is the promotion of fetishistic men in wigs who only recently were in fact Tory candidates. I am talking about Melissa Poulton, Bromsgrove Green Party candidate, formerly Matthew Viner, now declaring "herself" to be a proud lesbian and a purveyor of sissy porn (don't ask). Is Ms Poulton a true trans woman? I cannot possibly say as I don't have the forensic skills necessary. But I can make the comment that what I see is a blatant opportunist.
  • "Why can't people accept that some trans women are just conmen?", The Telegraph (12 December 2023)

2024–present

• There is no women's space or activity, from bathrooms to prisons to rape refuges to sports, that some male-bodied people are not lobbying to enter.
  The reverse, I note, is not happening. Male spaces remain sacrosanct.
• All evidence shows that there is a pattern of male-style offending in transwomen. This does not mean that all trans people are predatory, but this is not a fact women can ignore.
  • "I won't sacrifice my safety just so a trans woman feels validated", The Telegraph (5 March 2024).

• I am under no illusion about the Tories' own record. Austerity hit women and children the hardest. We had two more female prime ministers – a win for equality, if only one that proved women can be equally as useless as men.
  The problem with Labour people though is that they see themselves as anti-sexist, not to mention morally superior, and think they should be considered upstanding feminists even though they actually do nothing to advance the cause of women's rights.
  • "Keir's right, Labour's record on women speaks for itself – that's the problem", The Telegraph (25 June 2024).
  • Published during the 2024 general election campaign.

• That we well understand how difficult it is to grow up in a porn-saturated world where the selfie is more valued than actual selfhood?
  • "Wes Streeting will suffer unhinged abuse simply for protecting children", The Telegraph (16 July 2024)

• Is there anything that women can have for ourselves alone that certain men do not want to take away from us? Or get access to? Anything at all?
  • "Roxanne Tickle proves that trans rights now trump women's rights", The Telegraph (26 August 2024)
  • On the successful discrimination claim in Australia brought against Sall Grover (the founder of a social media app for biological women) by a transwoman.

• Security issues, it appears, are more important to Western countries than women’s rights. What matters is that the region is more stable and opium production is down.
  This, though, is another insane situation. We pay Turkey to grow poppies. Where do you think codeine and diamorphine come from? It is possible to move from illicit to legal trade and without it Afghanistan will remain cripplingly poor. The other people who see the openings here, of course, are the Chinese who have built roads into the country and want to mine the lithium there.
  • "The Taliban has silenced Afghanistan’s women – and the world watched it happen", The Telegraph (3 September 2024)
  • In late August 2024, the Taliban introduced new laws under which women in public spaces must completely veil their entire body at all times. Female voices are forbidden from being heard in public, including being heard from the street when at home. In addition, women in Afghanistan cannot look directly at men to whom they are not related by family or marriage.

About Moore

• Her writing is unafraid to challenge groupthink or ridicule tribes. It can often be infuriating, partly because she's so damn good at it. I have disagreed with many of her opinions over the years. Suzanne, 62, even once had the audacity to make a minor criticism of a book I'd written.
• Like my detractors, The Guardian‍'‍s letter-writers did not explain why Suzanne was mistaken. That poses a worrying question for democracy that neither universities nor The Guardian seem interested in discussing: who gets to decide who is no-platformed or silenced in the supposed interests of "inclusion"? Disagreement isn't tantamount to discrimination: Suzanne was clear she wanted trans people to have the right to "live the best lives they can".
  • Selina Todd "Suzanne Moore defended my views on sex and identity. Now it’s my turn to stand up for her" The Sunday Times (21 November 2021)
  • Published shortly after Moore's resignation from The Guardian and referring to the letter signed by 338 staff members sent to editor-in-chief Katharine Viner shortly after an article they disagreed with on transgender issues.