To those defending Joanne Harris

Our open letter criticising her leadership at the Society of Authors provoked a rebuttal. Here’s our response:

On August 16th we published, on this platform, an open letter to the Society of Authors expressing disquiet at its failure to speak out on violent threats against authors, and the lamentable behaviour of the chair of its management board, Joanne Harris. Another open letter has been written in response. It is littered with errors and misrepresentations, which we wish to correct. 

We also wish to question some aspects of Ms Harris’s personal response, but first wish to state clearly that we have no issues with her personal views. Our issue is her failure to separate those views from her role at the Society of Authors, and the way she has cast those who hold opposing views, and suffer harassment and even loss of livelihood as a response, as authors of their own misfortune. Since we published our letter we have received hundreds of supportive emails from authors and others within the publishing industry, many of whom are terrified of speaking out on any contentious issue for fear of the consequences.

Errors and misrepresentations in the letter 

“We note some of the signees of another letter to you, which condemns Ms. Harris, have, in fact, been previously suspended or banned from Twitter—the platform this latest row centers around—for violations of Twitter’s rules, which include sending abusive tweets, harassment, and what Twitter determines to ‘hateful conduct’ (Please see the Twitter Rules for a fuller description).”

Our response: Twitter does not list “sex” among its protected characteristics, and has frequently suspended and banned users, most of them women, for simply asserting that sex is real, or referring to a person’s sex in situations where sex, not gender identity, is relevant, such as sport. These users are victims of Twitter’s failure to adhere to English law, which bans discrimination in the provision of services on grounds of gender-critical belief. To treat Twitter bans as some sort of measure of “hate” is therefore a type of victim-blaming. It is using Twitter’s bias and discrimination against gender-critical women to claim that those women have acted in a biased and discriminatory fashion.

“It is also worth noting that English law recognises demonstrated hostility against, or motivated by, transgender identity as a hate crime, according to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and section 66 of the Sentencing Act 2020.”

Our response: This is false. There is no freestanding “hate crime” against transgender persons in English law. There is provision in the criminal law for crimes to be found to have been aggravated by hostility on the grounds of perceived or actual transgender status, race, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. But there has to be a crime first.

“The issue in question appears to be that Ms. Harris posted a poll about authors receiving death threats, following the attack on Salman Rushdie, which some people interpreted as both flippant, and potentially a slight regarding another author. Upon realising her words had been misinterpreted and were causing some distress, Ms. Harris removed the original post, and went on to explain that she meant no ill will to any other author by it, accepting that it was possible her words had caused some offence, however unintended.”

Our response: This is a minimising description of what Ms Harris said. The original wording of her poll was clearly mocking in its tone, asking even as Salman Rushdie lay critically ill whether authors had ever received death threats and suggesting scepticism about the seriousness of those threats by offering the four responses: “Yes”, “Hell, yes”, “No, never” and “Show me, dammit”. 

After considerable criticism, Ms Harris took this poll down and replaced it with a more neutrally worded version, saying “I felt I’d got the tone wrong”. This is some way short of “accepting that it was possible her words had caused some offence”, as the letter-writers put it – and that would anyway have been a mealy-mouthed non-apology. 

During the past three years J.K. Rowling, the UK’s most famous author, has been threatened, insulted and defamed in person and online. She has been targeted by gruesome and misogynistic fantasies of her rape and murder. People have turned up at her home and doxxed her. All this was sparked by her defence of women’s sex-based rights – and has continued on all possible occasions, including in response to her expression of sorrow at the attack on Rushdie. Various people, including Katharine Quarmby, at the time an office-holder at the SoA, asked for a public statement of solidarity with Rowling and condemnation of the attacks on her. They were rebuffed.

After all this, a dismissive response that suggests what Rowling has experienced is par for the course, or that gender-critical women like her somehow brought the abuse they experienced upon themselves, is contemptible.

“She has since had to repeat her explanation of her intentions on multiple occasions, been subject to unfounded accusations claiming that her lack of support is because of her personal disagreement with the other author’s position on trans and non-binary people, has subsequently been accused of personal bias relating to her members of her family (including the use of offensive terminology), and is now being attacked and condemned in national newspapers, despite the fact that it is neither her job, moral responsibility or civic duty to rush to the defense [sic] of a single author on Twitter when their fans take umbrage at some slight, imagined or otherwise.”

Our response: Repeating an implausible explanation of Ms Harris’s explanations of her motives does not make those explanations more plausible. If the chair of the Society of Authors does not see it as her job to speak full-throatedly for free speech and against rape and death threats, then she should consider a different job. And the phrase “take umbrage at some slight, imagined or otherwise” is an odd description of a years-long campaign of defamatory lies and threats of rape and death. By referring to it in such a minimising manner, Ms Harris’s defenders are compounding the SoA’s failure to take that campaign against Rowling seriously.

“And as our colleagues so rightly pointed out in their letter, it is clearly states [sic] in the “Where We Stand” section on the Society of Authors website that the Society opposes “in the strongest terms any attempt to stifle or control the author’s voice whether by censorship, imprisonment, execution, hate speech or trolling”. So we are at a loss to understand why the signatories of the other letter believe the Society should have any say over the contents of Ms. Harris’s tweets, why her tweets on her personal account, which existed well in advance of her appointment as Chair, should be subject to declarations and addendums which they feel are necessary, and why any of the above is grounds to call for her removal.”

Our response: As a private citizen, Ms Harris is of course entitled to exercise her free speech in support of the silencing and censorship of authors. It’s hardly admirable of her, but as the “Paradox of Tolerance” pithily expresses, those of us who support liberal values have to grapple with the way illiberal people take advantage of the freedoms we provide them to argue that those freedoms should be stripped from us. It is also Ms Harris’s right as a private citizen to block authors on Twitter for asking her straightforward questions—or sometimes for nothing at all (many of us are blocked, despite never having interacted with her).

But this sort of behaviour – failure to engage with authors, willingness to join in smear campaigns against them and unwillingness to represent their interests – is wholly incompatible with being chair of the management committee of the SoA – in other words, with leading a trade union that supposedly represents authors’ interests. 

As for whether Ms Harris has brought the society into disrepute, our opinions will have to differ.

Ms Harris’s personal response: Much attention has been given to a Twitter thread in which Ms Harris claims that the SoA, and she personally, assisted two unnamed authors in ways that demonstrate that our criticisms of her are unfounded.

We would like further details of these cases, or at a minimum confirmation that Ms Harris is not misrepresenting herself as having supported Amanda Craig or Gillian Philip, two of the signatories of our open letter. These two authors’ situations bear some similarities to those outlined by Ms Harris, but neither received any meaningful help from the society, or any at all from her personally.

Craig was sacked as a judge of the Mslexia competition in 2020 because she signed an open letter in support of J.K. Rowling. She wrote to the competition organisers demanding her fee, and before sending the letter, asked an officer of the SoA (not Ms Harris) to let her know if there was anything useful she had omitted from it. There wasn’t, so she posted it (and received the fee). Craig did not ask for her job back, and had no interaction with Ms Harris during this minimal contact with the society.

Philip was dropped by HarperCollins and Working Partners in 2020 for adding the hashtag #IStandWithJKRowling to her Twitter profile. She is seeking to take a case to the employment tribunal, alleging discrimination on grounds of gender-critical belief. She too has confirmed that she received no support or help from the SoA, or from Ms Harris.

It is possible that Ms Harris is referring to other authors—but we are at a loss to think who they might be, since she says that both the unnamed people she refers to are heavily involved in efforts to get her to step down, and obviously we know all the people involved in this campaign. 

Moreover, Ms Harris fails to mention that several other signatories have asked the society for help and not received it, or asked the society to be more active in supporting authors’ free speech and opposing the harassment that gender-critical women such as Rowling experience. To our knowledge, all have been rebuffed. We would be pleased to hear if there are gender-critical authors who have had better experiences with either the society or Ms Harris, because we do not know of any.