We Need Real, Substantive Change in The SoA

By LoobyLou Dino aka Frightened Romance Author

Firstly, let me state categorically that I defend Joanne Harris’s right to say and believe whatever she likes, even when those views/beliefs are diametrically opposed to my own. I don’t know her. I’ve never met her or interacted with her. All I know is how she presents herself on Twitter, on which she is prolific.

I also want to state that I have great admiration for the work the Society of Authors undertakes on behalf of its members. Its successful campaigns, such as having ebooks made exempt from VAT, have benefited all authors, not just its members. When it comes to free speech though and its willingness to stand up for authors with views that run against current fashion, I’m afraid my confidence is zero for reasons which I will explain.

I started my @LoobyLouDino twitter account in May so I could speak freely about the issues that matter to me without fear of losing my career. My first twitter thread explaining why I had to be anonymous went viral. I was contacted by scores of other authors who, like me, were worried and afraid. Afraid to speak out and make our voices heard on issues that matter to us. Afraid to even ask questions of certain orthodoxies.

Until the attempted murder of Sir Salman Rushdie, the Society of Authors had never spoken out on the horrendous abuse suffered by JK Rowling, a lifetime member of the Society’s council, not even when asked to by a member of its own management committee.

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It also failed to speak out about the authors hounded out of the publishing industry BY authors.

I’m glad that the SoA finally addressed the threats JK Rowling has suffered in its statement of the 17th of August, and I understand why it doesn’t want to become involved in Twitter disputes between authors. However, I fail to understand how this extends to not condemning authors who deliberately and openly set out to destroy a fellow author’s career. Yes, authors have, for a number of years, been using social media to act in packs, setting their sights on writers who fail to tow the approved line. Who decides the approved line on a particular issue? The pack. If an author dissents from this approved line then they can expect, at the very least, for the pack to call for their books to be boycotted and at the worst for their publishers and agents to fire them. In the cases of Gillian Philip, Kate Clanchy and many others, the pack won. The Society of Authors remained publicly silent. Not a single word of condemnation.

I’m not talking about the SoA naming and shaming authors. I wouldn’t want or expect that. All it needed to do was put out a simple statement along the lines of:

‘We remind all authors of our Dignity and Respect policy: The Society of Authors is committed to promoting professional behaviour throughout all its activities, and to tackling and preventing bullying, harassment and racism in all their forms.’

On top of this statement that I would have published had I been running the SoA, I would also have added to it by making another appeal directly to agents and publishers reminding them of the importance of free speech and condemning any who don’t stand by their own authors’ exercise of it. But I don’t run the Society. I don’t even dare join the management committee. And why? The same reason I’m writing this under my alter-ego. Because I’m scared for my livelihood. Because I know the Chair and some other committee members will brand me transphobic simply because I believe in material reality – that there are only two sexes and in certain scenarios and situations, the differences between them matter.

How do I know the Chair will think me a ‘transphobe?’ Her own words. She has long been fierce in her support of transgender rights and contemptuous of authors who don’t subscribe to her ideology – contemptuous of authors like me, in other words, people who don’t think ‘gender identity’ can replace the reality of biological sex – but on the 22ndof August she posted a letter of her own and finally put into words what many of us have long known. She thinks gender critical people are transphobes.

Here are a couple of screenshots of her post. I’ve deliberately kept the context in out of fairness to her. Before I go any further though, I state categorically that I condemn all death threats and other abusive tweets made to Joanne Harris. They are sickening and abhorrent. No person should ever have to endure such poison.

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I don’t believe acknowledging that sex is real makes me a ‘transphobe.’ I don’t believe having grave concerns about the dangers of gender ideology with regards to child safeguarding and women’s sports, prisons and other safe and private spaces, aka being someone who’s gender critical (or as I prefer to call myself, a sex realist), makes me transphobic either. But Joanne Harris does. That I wish transgender people nothing but the best in their lives counts for nothing. That I can’t believe in an ideology that goes against all laws of human biology and legal law makes me a bigot.

She thinks either I’ve been weaponised or that I’m part of the ‘Right.”

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But the open letter was not about pitting trans advocates against gender critics, it was about freedom of speech, which includes the freedom to dissent. To disagree and not be punished for it. So to say that myself and the other 250 authors and counting who signed the open letter of the 16th of August calling for her resignation, along with the growing number of readers concerned for freedom of speech who’ve taken the time to sign it too, are ‘nearly all transphobes’ is a manipulative falsehood. I know because I’m one of the authors who helped create the letter and I’ve seen the emails that have flooded in off the back of it. To say ‘Many are not even authors’ is another falsehood and an attempt at a circumstantial ad hominem whereby the signatories are not ‘true’ authors or involved in the industry. This assertion is easily proved false. Every single person who signed the industry side of the letter is a writer or, in the case of a handful of signatories, agents or editors who are as deeply worried about the SoA’s inertia when it comes to dealing with these issues as the rest of us.

In the course of verifying the signatures, many authors confided how they had previously written to the SoA as members asking it to speak out on the proliferating abuse and harassment of gender critical authors. The sheer number of unrelated authors confiding the same story was shocking. Many told us how they complained directly to the SoA about Joanne Harris’s behaviour on twitter too. A significant number have resigned their membership over the issue and the SoA’s refusal to do anything about it. The responses from the CEO, many of which I have seen, were practically identical, essentially signposting to areas of the SoA’s website and then setting out all the good things the SoA does, and always exonerating Joanne Harris of any wrong doing. I wrote to the SoA as a member too, months ago, begging it to please speak out and publicly reiterate its stance on Freedom of Expression under the Where We Stand section of its website, which states:

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, and a central tenet of an author's work and livelihood. We work to protect free speech, and to create an environment where all are afforded an equal voice.

We oppose in the strongest terms any attempt to stifle or control the author's voice whether by censorship, imprisonment, execution, hate speech or inappropriate trolling.

If demanding authors’ agents and publishers drop them for wrong-think isn’t a form of censorship then what is it? And for those who say freedom of speech doesn’t come without freedom of consequences, I remind them that legally held beliefs are just that – legal. Those beliefs might be offensive to some but quite frankly, so what? Since when has being offensive been illegal in this country (the UK)? What’s offensive to one isn’t offensive to another. Punishing words for the sole reason that they give offense to someone else’s feelings, whether for their beliefs or political views or just because, creates a climate of fear and leads to self-censorship. When freedom of expression is stripped of all meaning, honest debate becomes impossible and a nation slides inexorably towards totalitarianism.

What we are not trying to do, as she claims, is silence Joanne Harris or anyone else. This fight is for everyone’s right to speak freely, without fear or self-censorship, because freedom of speech is a fundamental right that belongs to everyone. The Society of Authors is an organisation that represents thousands of people with contrary views and political beliefs, and what makes her unfit in my view to be its Chair is her open contempt for authors whose views differ from her own. This has led to her seeming to condone cancel culture when the person being cancelled is someone whose views she dislikes. She is also partial to making statements in defence of cancel culture, dismissing it entirely on occasion and, on other occasions, taking glee in it:

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Along with the above, she isn’t, despite her denials, above joining in the harassment of other authors:

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I’m sure there’s a lot of linguistics that could be put into play about these tweets to make them sound innocuous. A retweet might not be an endorsement but when it comes from the Chair of the Management Committee of the Society of Authors, it carries weight amongst her followers. Her position in the SoA means all her tweets carry weight. Whether she admits it or not, her role confers power.

I could take the belittling, the condescension, the contempt, the dismissiveness, along with the glee with which she’s taken to Twitter since this whole thing erupted last week if not for her position within the Society of Authors. I would simply ignore her. But her position means I can’t. Screenshot 17 below shows how she dismissed Rachel Rooney, one of the authors subjected to a virulent hounding by fellow authors (and which Joanne Harris joined in with by retweeting screenshots 14-16) that included calls for her publisher to drop her; swatting her away as if she were an irritating fly.

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The post Rachel responded to, along with Screenshot 18 came during the height of one of the many twitter storms JK Rowling has endured. Joanne Harris has never acknowledged the posts she wrote were about JK Rowling, but I could write a whole book on how she always manages to pop up with innocent tweets that just happen to look as if she’s having a dig at JKR. I do find the tweet (screenshot 17) about power being loud ironic considering the power Joanne Harris herself enjoys in the publishing world.

While I’m thinking about it, if anyone can show me proof that Joanne Harris ever spoke up about the hate and threats JKR received before the attempted assassination of Sir Salman Rushdie, I would be grateful. She’s spoken out many times against the abuse that authors receive as a collective but I’ve found no proof that she ever specifically spoke out against the threats and abuse to JKR.

For all the heartfelt statements the SoA has posted in recent days, and for all Joanne Harris’s vehement assertions that she’s on the side of freedom of speech, I’m afraid I don’t trust her, not when it comes to authors she believes are hateful… but I do think she believes it. Because she’s right that she has spoken out in the past in favour of free expression. Maybe I would believe her if her own words and behaviour didn’t run contrary to it. And maybe I would have more faith in the SoA too.

Under her watch, the Society of Authors has fobbed off author complaints and pleas. It has liked tweets calling authors terfs and then denied that terf is even a slur – the denial came two years after a high court judge in a high profile case for freedom of speech against the police, was widely reported as saying:

“I have become familiar with the term TERF. It is a derogatory term used by those who seek to de-platform those who hold different views”

If a high court judge gets it then it can’t be beyond the realm of credulity for the Society of Authors of all organisations to get it too.

The following screenshots are tweets the SoA liked last September about the author Jane Harris, who goes under the handle @blablafishcakes, and a sample of the SoAs response when she complained. See Jane’s feed for a more detailed thread.

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Whether the SoA felt at odds with Jane Harris is irrelevant – it is a professional organisation and should behave like one, and that includes on social media. Possibly it’s just coincidence that it liked these particular tweets, ones using slurs that just happen to chime with the Chair of the organisation’s own views. Joanne Harris chairs the Management Committee, which in turn governs the direction the SoA takes. In the current absence of a president, she is also its public face. Her views within the organisation carry a great deal of weight.

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As for the SoA’s tweet on the 22nd August that authors should ‘play nicely,’ I would remind it that we don’t play, we work, and in any case, we have played nicely. Numerous authors acting independently, unaware until recent days that others had done the same, went through the proper channels and were politely fobbed off. In her response to my concerns raised all those months ago, the CEO replied to me with the same line many other authors received: Please, keep telling us when we get things wrong. Challenge us to be better.

We have told you. We have challenged you. We were ignored. If you’d taken our concerns seriously, the SoA might not be engulfed in the mess it’s in now. But at least the SoA as an organisation now appears to be trying. Time will tell if its current statements are only lip service, but for now, I give it the benefit of the doubt.

On the other hand, Joanne Harris’s reaction to the firestorm and the complaints made against her shows no sign of reflection whatsoever. No possibility that maybe, just maybe, the people speaking out might have a point about the detrimental effect of her behaviour.

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Instead, her response has been to dig in. To laugh about it. To dismiss us. To insult us. To defame us. To continue taking seemingly deniable pot-shots at JKR and other authors such as Kate Clanchy. To make it seem that the pesky authors who’ve been begging for help from the Society that she leads and is the figurehead of, who’ve been pleading for it to stand up and speak out against the bullies, to follow its own policies, are nothing but a mass co-ordinated group of bigoted transphobes who hate her for her transgender advocacy. How does this help defuse tensions when many of the emails we received as a result of the open letter were from authors begging us to keep their identities anonymous because they were terrified for their careers? I don’t blame those authors – I’m one of them and I’m scared too. Instead of reaching out to diffuse the situation Joanne Harris has dug her heels in and added fuel to the atmosphere of distrust.

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There were dozens of other screenshots I could have added. For my final one, number 32, the author being referred to, Amanda Craig, signed a letter with a plethora of other distinguished authors standing with JK Rowling against hate. First, here is the letter from the 27th of September 2020.

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For signing her name to this letter, Amanda was dropped from a judging panel for a writing competition. In Joanne Harris’s quest to prove that she and the SoA have always stuck up for gender critical authors, she posted this:

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Amanda Craig never asked to be reinstated. All she wanted was the fee which she was legally owed. She wrote a letter asking for exactly that and asked the SoA to cast an eye over it before she sent it. That was the extent of the SoA’s involvement in the matter. She was asked to keep its brief involvement discreet. In fairness to the SoA, it has said its CEO called the organisers of the competition too.

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I believe this tweet encapsulates everything in this letter. Joanne Harris had the opportunity here to speak out and deny the author is transphobic and therefore hateful but she didn’t; she didn’t because she believes it to be true. She’s empowered her followers and fellow authors to openly abuse, threaten and defame writers. To defame people who don’t subscribe to her own ideology and way of thinking. She has never, to my knowledge, called out or condemned those who have, in their support of her, harassed and threatened.

At its last AGM, the Society of Authors listed Freedom of Expression as one of its five overarching campaigns for 2022. It is now time for it to put into place a meaningful framework to support this for all authors, and to stand by them when others would have their voices silenced.

Joanne Harris is as entitled to her opinions as I am to mine and entitled to express them as freely as I wish to express mine. The open letter didn’t call for her silence and none of the authors who responded to it called for that either. If I heard any person, author or not, try to silence her for her beliefs or political views in any way, shape or form, I would be by her side in a heartbeat. I just wish I could believe she’d be by my side too, and it’s because I and so many other authors have no confidence that she would that I think she should do the honourable thing and resign.

I leave the final words of this letter to the great Sir Salman Rushdie.

The open letter of the 16th August 2022

An Open Letter to the Society of Authors re Joanne Harris