Ideological bias is stifling balanced coverage of trans issues at The Guardian, a former employee has claimed.
After 22 years at the paper, columnist Hadley Freeman resigned in protest over what she described as ‘bias in the progressive media on transgender ideology’.
She is the second high-profile female commentator to exit the paper over the issue in recent years, following the resignation of veteran columnist Suzanne Moore in November 2020.
Transphobic
Last week, Freeman spoke candidly on BBC Woman’s Hour about the ban on women writing about gender at The Guardian.
Freeman told Woman’s Hour presenter Emma Barnett that “there was always this imbalance”.
She explained: “I have no problem and never had any problem with The Guardian interviewing and spotlighting transactivists”, but added, “I was not allowed and nor was anyone else allowed to interview gender-critical feminists”.
‘Shut out’
Articles she had written, Freeman said, were denounced as ‘transphobic’ by an external lobby group at an in-house meeting, after which an “atmosphere of real fear” developed at the paper.
Freeman also spoke of being shunned when seeking to write about the scandal-hit group Mermaids and how feminist campaigners – such as Julie Bindel and JK Rowling – were “basically shut out of the paper”.
Welcoming the Charity Commission inquiry into Mermaids and the closure of the Tavistock clinic, she observed: “I think more and more people are looking at what this gender ideology actually means in practice rather than theory, rather than the ‘be kind’ theory.
“What does this actually mean for children and women”?
‘Dysfunctional’
In her letter of resignation to editor-in-chief Kath Viner, Freeman accused the paper of becoming “internally dysfunctional, with writers and editors alike all terrified of saying The Wrong Take”.
She also remarked: “You have said that both sides in the gender debate are equally passionate – but only one side demands censorship. It seems to me that at the Guardian that side has won.”
Suzanne Moore, who won the 2019 Orwell Prize for Journalism, quit as a columnist at The Guardian following months of bullying after she wrote an article challenging the idea that biological sex is merely a ‘social construct’.
News of Freeman’s decision to leave the newspaper broke soon after fellow Guardian columnist Owen Jones branded parents who do not affirm LGBT lifestyles as “child abusers”.
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