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October 4, 2024 - 4:30pm
It’s less than 20 years since the offence of blasphemy was abolished in most of the UK. So why has one of the country’s leading literary festivals taken fright at the prospect of authors expressing “potentially problematic views” on religion? Not just religion, either. Chairs of sessions at this year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival have been sent “new guidance” on how to handle a long list of subjects, including “migration, sexuality, gender and military action”.
The email from festival organisers declares: “If, during any of your events, a speaker shares an opinion that could be deemed controversial, please reinforce that everyone is entitled to express an opinion, however Cheltenham Festivals does not endorse the views shared on stage.” By “controversial”, the festival means views “that may be harmful to an individual or group of people, particularly those who have been historically marginalised or oppressed”.
It’s familiar, weaselly language, revealing the extreme jitters felt by organisers of literary festivals. Earlier this year, two of the biggest, Hay and Edinburgh, ended deals with longtime sponsors Baillie Gifford following pressure from a little-known activist group calling itself Fossil Free Books. Sponsorship and how to pay for the arts are subjects that might well be debated at festivals, but there is a terror of controversy in the literary world.
Events that should be a bastion of free speech now exist in fear of drawing the ire of people who have no commitment to it. You won’t be surprised to learn that Cheltenham’s number one source of anxiety is not campaigners against climate change but authors with “gender critical views”. The priority is revealing: there are far fewer transgender individuals than women, but “misogyny” only comes in at number two on the list of concerns.
By the festival’s own admission, the purpose of the guidance is not so much to avoid upsetting audiences as heading off trouble — “to protect […] the charity from complaints”. Trans activists are currently the group most likely to raise a stink, and they have plenty of supporters who are ready to amplify their claims. Some authors argue that such tactics have already been successful, pointing out how rarely gender-critical writers feature in festival programmes.
In Western countries, it’s clear that women currently have more to fear from the self-styled “most oppressed” group in society than from religion. But religious intolerance is on the rise in the UK, demonstrated by the fact that a teacher at a school in Yorkshire has been in hiding for more than three years after he showed a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed in class. Since then, we have seen open support expressed for an Islamist terror group, Hamas, at demonstrations in London and other British cities.
It’s hard to imagine a worse moment for a literary festival to promote the slur that the free expression of controversial ideas is “harmful”. We live in an increasingly intolerant society, in which saying the wrong thing — criticism of strict forms of Islam or gender ideology — carries an unacceptable risk. The people who shout loudest are rarely right, and the literary world needs to stand up against the activists’ veto.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.
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SubscribeIt’s a strange place, the literary world, or publishing. A wild place masquerading as a civilized, whose rules are unnatural selection and you must conform or go heavily camouflaged if you are to survive.
I used to enjoy the Hay Festival in the days when it was about literature. Like so much now the literature is a mere tool for delivering a set of beliefs, some of which I highly destructive.
The West has devolved from fighting Nazis, communists, and assorted tyrants into a quivering heap that is frightened of words.
By “controversial”, the festival means views “that may be harmful to an individual or group of people, particularly those who have been historically marginalised or oppressed”. ——-> The festival, no doubt run by people who would never consider themselves oppressed or marginalized, does what people like this do – reduce minorities into something less than human. These people continue to suck the fun out of everything that used to be enjoyable.
I’m not quite sure this has much directly to do with the Baillie Gifford situation. In that case, the activist group were pressuring the organisers to cut ties with an investment firm unless the firm devested from fossil fuels. The organisers didn’t but Baillie Gifford understandably decided it wasn’t worth the bad publicity and pulled out.
The equivalents for gender controversies would be if there was some organisation sponsoring the festival with real or perceived Gender Critical views (which is kinda rare, given the vast majority of companies avoid taking a position on the subject), and pro-transgender activists were pressuring the festival to cut ties.
The point here is that demands weren’t coming from the corporate sponsors, they were coming from the activists.
I think Baillie Gifford only had 2 or 3% of their portfolio invested in fossil fuel companies having significantly divested in that sector. I suspect it withdrew from funding Lit festivals at least in part because it was disgusted at the behaviour of the festivals craven management and rightly thought other causes might be more appreciative.
I’m surprised that PEN-International hasn’t said anything. PEN-America has been busy with book banning in schools. Quite a few are books are about race (black people) and LGBTs. Also books that have a scene with characters innocently mentioning sex. Weirdly, books about art and classical music have been banned in one school district in Missouri. Anyway, banning books because the writer is gender critical or whatever, is dangerous. Bookstores that hid or didn’t order Helen Joyce’s book Trans were banning a book that was compassionate about trans people. Most of the people who tried to ban the book didn’t read it. PEN-International needs to be very loud about what’s happening in Britain. These book festivals are frequented by adults . If they are offended or having a breakdown because of a book, stop reading it. Or start reading children’s books. Kimberly
To be clear, bookstores that hide or don’t order a book aren’t banning that book. Do you mean that in some bookstores, management orders books like Trans, but then clerks hide the book because they don’t like it? Or do you mean that some bookstores don’t stock the title?
The first sounds sad and infuriating to me, but it’s not the store banning the book.
The second isn’t banning either. Bookstores get to stock whatever they want to. My local Chapters fills up the entire center of its store with Christmas ornaments and scarf displays and trendy candles, alas, and I wish they’d carry a complete selection of all the current sf instead, so I don’t have to drive downtown to the science fiction bookshop. But it’s not book-banning.
I’d use the term Jesuitical for your first argument that clerks hiding books isn’t banning them, but I fear I would fall afoul of current literary festival guidelines regarding marginalized groups. Then again it is the Catholic Church being referenced, so probably OK.
In any event, a clerk hiding a book so that casual browsers do not see it, may not technically be banning the book (it’s still in the store! in the back! if you ask for it! and the clerk feels like telling you it is there when you ask!) But it is denying the book a platform the store normally affords other books, isn’t it? So, rather stacking the deck against sales of that book is it not?
Yes, it is. Was I Jesuitical? Nothing so grand; I dislike using the wrong words, though.
Thanks for the heads-up. Taken off my list of potential events to attend for the next decade until these loons come to their senses.
This sort of thing is in its odd way quite useful. It concentrates a group of people you really don’t want to meet in a place you can easily avoid and means you don’t risk wasting your time. It’s just a shame it needs censorship to get there. And that these people no longer want to talk or listen to the rest of us. More fool them.
The only reason I can think to attend is if you’re an aspiring British Matt Walsh.
Cheltenham Literature Festival. Where the elite frolic on the rights of all the rest of us.
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Reading this makes my hair hurt.
“pointing out how rarely gender-critical writers feature in festival programmes”
I expect, and hope, that isn’t true.
1 the term should be gender realist not gender critical
2.I expect that large numbers attend but they are just too frightened or nervous to make their views known.
‘Gender truth-telling’.
Yet the “gender critical” exists solely for the purpose of affirming and advancing lies about gender which they selfishly love.
Like Grey’s lie below that, “women who dispute the possibility that a man can become a woman”, has anything to do with it.
“but they are just too frightened or nervous to make their views known”
GOOD! All who otherwise would should fear to put on their hoods, or, their hakenkreuz or hammer and sickle armbands, in full view of all. That they do so in their closets to listen to those who broadcast from private venues provides sufficient lexical ammunition by those not hostis humani generis, to lexically suppress those like you who are hostis humani generis . . .
I long for the day when these tired simpering tyrannosaurus again get dunked in rivers and streams by their normal schoolgoing peers. They can then spend the rest of their lives annoying a psychiatrist instead of the general sane population. I no longer go to literary bedlams to be in the land of the strange whose samesorts survive either on benefits or trust funds finding offence. At least one can choose one’s company in online groups.
The festival hasn’t said that people with particular views should be prohibited from attending. And the festival hasn’t said that people with particular views should be prohibited from expressing them.
What the festival has said is that session chairs should accept views without endorsing them on behalf of the festival. This is what all organisers of symposia, conferences and festivals do. It’s designed to protect the organisers from being sued, and/or harassed on social media, because some zealot claims they were defamed or cancelled.
Incidentally, permitting the expression of opinions without endorsing them is exactly what the UnHerd website does. No doubt there’s a disclaimer somewhere on the site saying that UnHerd isn’t responsible for below-the-line commenters’ opinions.
And Ms Smith is clearly in error in thinking that one person’s view can’t be “harmful” to someone else, at least in the sense that sneering and abuse can be emotionally distressing. Again, there’s plenty of those on the UnHerd website.
I appreciate what you have said, it may all be true, probably is, but the main problem for all of us as a society lies in your final paragraph, that “sneering” and “abuse” (strong terms) “can be emotionally distressing”, and must be guarded against.
Unfortunately, on the ground, in reality, this seems only to apply to the feelings of ‘people of colour’, ‘trans’ and a certain religion, whereas Jewish people, Christians, and women who dispute the possibility that a man can become a woman, are not given the same protection.
Either protect the feelings of everyone or no one, otherwise you/we are reinforcing prejudice and division.
It’s not entirely clear whose feelings the festival is specifically protecting, as Ms Smith only gives the top two items of what is evidently a list.
Personally, I’m “gender-critical,” though I think it’s a silly term.
Presume you mean being a realist about sex – gender seems now to be a wishful thinking exercise for the confused…and is socially and institutionally enforced by self-interested ‘trans activists’ and a tranche of women who say they only want to ‘be kind’ while being surprisingly vicious and destructive towards other women who have a different view. Unfortunate all round really – perhaps the festival attendees might be reading too much of Judith Butler?
Biology determines a lot of things. I’m a man, of English-Irish descent. If I understand some “trans activists” correctly, they’d accept me as a woman if I said I was. But I doubt that they’d accept me as an Australian Aborigine if I said I was.
What does “gender-critical” mean? I ask seriously and not in the least to rebuff your comment because I’m sure the term has some currency. These compressed abstract terms are bandied about like shuttlecocks, but it’s often impossible to understand them without context because their abstraction has emptied them of meaning and they are opaque when used alone. Does the term mean that one disagrees with the trans craze? With feminism generally? Something else?
The belief there even is a “trans craze” other than the stupid, as always baseless moral moral panic about a “trans craze”, is gender critical.
The verbal expression of a view can never be harmful, by definition. Not even the weaselly one you’ve just expressed above.
I agree, but, to many, “silence is violence” and “speech is action.” Accept these premises and you’ll never stop them. It’s like trying to catch a greased pig.
I was thinking of online pile-ons, demonstrators chanting slogans in people’s faces, and similar phenomena. Strictly speaking, those are “mere verbal expression[s] of a view,” but they’re often intended as intimidatory, and sometimes succeed in being so.
I was reading just yesterday how no one reads books anymore, let alone literature. The literary festival has all of the cultural significance of a Star Trek convention.
More tyranny and repression of free speech. More pathetic representation of minority mentally retarded morons being given free rein to dominate the majority. Call this civilisation, it’s insanity and if we don’t speak out now , then that’s what we voted for….
“ Events that should be a bastion of free speech” since when have Literary Festivals been that…? The cover picture of this article says it all
Why not just print a disclaimer on the tickets which reads:
“This is a literature festival. You may hear things you don’t agree with. If you find that prospect too upsetting, then perhaps literature festivals aren’t for you.”
How is that different from what Smith decries?
I disagree with Joan Smith on one point. The literary world isn’t terrified of controversy. They are terrified of diverting from the progressive consensus and risking their livelihoods.
No, Smith is only decrying that her gender critical bigotries are denied celebration, by those who owe her no fidelity.
Needlessly gratuitous comment.
When needful accuracy is thought gratuitous, those who think so are fatuous.
I cannot now see any value in these literary festivals if they do not promote free speech for all. I will not lament their passing.
Therein, hilariously, The UnHerd endorses cancel culture.
“It’s hard to imagine a worse moment for a literary festival to promote the slur that the free expression of controversial ideas is “harmful”.”
Of course, all should celebrate not only without detraction but with equal and affimrative support, the expression of the idea the “Whites Only” signs should go back up — as when someone is saying, no, they should not.*
*That was sarcasm, but is what The UnHerd is expressing with Smith’s piece — as long as, instead of racist bigotry, it is the gender critical bigotry The UnHerd and its Herd favor.
Nowadays it is the bounden duty of anyone with serious literary pretensions to do their utmost to offend the woke scum as much as possible.
How can you start a world of discussion by refusing to discuss things ?
To describe normal folk who believe in two genders as “gender Critical” was a smart move by the Trans lobby. They turned reality into fiction.
No- I am not critical of Gender(s) . I understand male and female. If you disagree with that it is you who are gender critical.
I’m just glad I’m getting on in years. Britain has totally lost its way.
I saw that Lionel Shriver was booked to appear, then wasn’t. CANCELLED read the page. Maybe it was an innocent double-booking but I can but wonder.