What do we make of Margaret Atwood's free speech intervention?

[RoyalCorgi]

Robust article from Atwood on free speech, in the wake of the Rushdie attack:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/15/salman-rushdie-free-speech-tyranny-satanic-verses

But she's also been supportive of the trans madness in the past. Does she understand the extent to which trans activists want to silence dissenters?

She… is confused or just feeding the crocodile.

Pass the sick bag.

Let’s face it, most people chiming in mean “free speech for all! Except on this one issue where you’re a hateful bigot if you say pretty mild stuff such as women are adult human females!”.

I must admit I’ve got more tolerant due to being GC because it’s really forced me to examine what I meant by free speech. And I’ve realised I have to allow people to sometimes say things I personally really dislike, because the cost of them not being able to say those things is more than I’m prepared to bear. Lots of people aren’t there, and won’t ever be there, I suspect, but are still happy to leap on the free speech bandwagon.

I've just read it and i literally feel dizzy, I think I've got vicarious cognitive dissonance.

It’s good.

‘Suddenly, they owe him another one. He has long defended freedom of artistic expression against all comers.’

Against all comers. This is the key issue. You can’t maintain that Martin Luther had the right to contradict the Pope, or that Julian Assange is a political prisoner, or that Rushdie has the right to satirise Islam, while insisting JK Rowling doesn’t have the right to say a person born with a penis who is no longer a child is a man.

And you, Margaret, as past president of PEN Canada, are going to introduce him,” I was told. Gulp. “Oh, OK,” I said. And so I did. It was a money-where-your-mouth-is moment.

Well, either she’s got cowardly in her old age, or she’s happy to be brave as long as she’s loudly applauded for it, or Canadian TRAs are scarier than jihadis. Probably the second one, the applause.

I also noticed the anecdote about ballet seemed irrelevant and jarring, for such a gifted writer. I think it might have been dragged in there as a kind of “I’m still a LGBQT ally even though I’m talking about free speech! Please don’t shoot me!” signal.

So if your idea of ‘free speech’ is just people going to Pride or saying ‘Free Palestine’, and not ‘abortion is wrong’ or ‘no, not everyone is a racist’, you’ve accepted a distorted view of what free speech is, and why it’s important. The concept really isn’t a social justice concept, it’s an individualistic one. It’s about the right of one person to say ‘I think they made up the Big Bang’ or ‘I think EDI is a pile of shit’.

Didn't she get condemned and told to educate herself, when she shared an article about womans rights , then issue a grovelling apology , maybe she has realise no matter what she does it will never be enough

I thought Margaret Atwood disagreed with JK Rowling but had defended her right to express her opinion. Have I got that wrong?

Hadley freeman did an interview with her, they disagreed about tra stuff, then had a conversation by email afterwards which was off the record... but Hadley implied she was interested to hear her position.
So although obviously not putting head above the parapet, she may have shifted from earlier position 🤞

She shared a rather GC article on twitter and got piled on iirc

It's a good article.
The interview with Hadley Freeman is well worth a read if you haven't.
MA is a thoughtful person and the interview suggests more nuance to her position on certain subjects.

Here:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4379188-Margaret-Atwood

I always think of Mary Beth Tinkler and her defence of free speech.

"But when our class discussion turned to the present, the mood changed. Students insisted that schools and universities should prohibit hate speech, which hurts innocent people. Mary Beth Tinker was fighting the good fight, against the war in Vietnam. But racists and sexists and homophobes and transphobes are different, my students said. They cause harm, offense, and even trauma in their victims. We need to shut them down.

Tinker wasn’t having it. At her middle school in Des Moines, she said, there were students who had fathers, uncles, and brothers who were fighting in Southeast Asia. Don’t you think they were offended and hurt by a snot-nosed kid whose armband suggested that their loved ones were risking their lives for a lie?

Of course they were. Speech hurts, which is why censors across time have tried to stamp it out. So if you’re going to bar speech that hurts someone, well, forget about Tinker’s armband. Forget about free speech, period.

My students took this in, and then they tried another tack. Wasn’t free speech really just a tool of the powerful? That’s why white men like it so much, of course. It lets them have their say while it harms (there’s that word again) people with less status and influence in society.

Mary Beth Tinker wasn’t having that, either. In 1965, she told the class, she was a 13-year-old girl. Free speech was the only power she had! Take that away, and she would have nothing at all."

heterodoxacademy.org/blog/why-free-speech/

Free speech is a fine example of competing, irreconcilable goods. I don't know where I am on some topics but the last few years have been living reminders of why adherence only to one principle, that of harm/avoiding offence, can never resolve difficult issues. The unfettered application of the harm principle will restrict and silence almost any topic. It's not clear to me that a claim to/apprehension of internal psychological harm can ever be validated independently (why, yes, I may be considering non-crime hate incidents as were/are).

Yeah tbf I don’t remember her being particularly anti anyone actually speaking, she just wasn’t GC (or hadn’t connected certain dots, I don’t think her position was well thought out). It was bizarre to me that she didn’t ‘get it’.

You can’t maintain that Martin Luther had the right to contradict the Pope, or that Julian Assange is a political prisoner, or that Rushdie has the right to satirise Islam, while insisting JK Rowling doesn’t have the right to say a person born with a penis who is no longer a child is a man

Exactly.

Atwood doesn't get the issues with gender ideology, at all, but I have never seen her suggest that people shouldn't be able to talk about it. She's been prettu consistent about free speech.

As far as gender ideology, she speaks like a sheltered Canadian liberal, which is to say she reads the CBC and maybe the BBC and thinks transwomen are mainly gay men with sex dysphoria who have had surgery.

In general Canadians are way behind the English in terms of their understanding of the issues.

Atwood and Pullman. Both wrote books about the State advocating the crushing of free speech and couldn't/can't relate this to the trans activist ideology? I don't think so. Both are cowards.

Free speech! No not that kind of free speech!

There is a particular problem is when threats of violence or actual violence are used as a tool to silence.

Its a shame there's a political blind spot going on there. Some might call it hypocrisy.

Please could someone link to where Atwood has said JK Rowling shouldn't express her opinion? I know she (Atwood) has supported gender ideology and on that point, she disagrees with JK Rowling but I've never seen her attack her right to speak.

I don't think she has. My concern is that she has allied herself with a group of people who are opposed to free speech to the extent that they will issue death threats and get women removed from their jobs. Not long after JK Rowling made her initial comments in support of women, she signed a letter of solidarity with trans people, clearly designed as an attack on Rowling:

www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/09/stephen-king-margaret-atwood-roxane-gay-champion-trans-rights-open-letter-jk-rowling

Thanks Corgi. I'm out of this thread then because, much as I disagree with Atwood on gender ideology, I'm not comfortable with the 'adjacent' / 'allied with' argument. I don't like it used against me, and I don't like it any more when it's used against someone else.

I don’t think she’s argued against other people’s free speech, but she has bowed down and issued abject apologies for her own ventures into TERFy wrongthinking when scolded by TRAs.

IMO that makes this article seem slightly absurd, especially given the part where she pats herself on the back for taking the risk of introducing Rushdie as a speaker one time. It’s bordering on stolen valour.

The tactics of TRAs were as clear as crystal. They used it everywhere to silence people. Clearly Atwood must have been happy with the tactic to let it go unremarked. How is it possible she didn't know the toxic methods people on one side of the debate used? Many authors lost their livelihoods and not in a remote whataboutary way. No they lost their livelihoods as a direct result of opposing gender ideology. Atwood knew. Her silence was approval.