Boylan’s own record on freedom of expression is a rather spotty one. In July 2020, the activist was a signatory of the Harper’s Magazine “Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, which declared that “[t]he free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted” and warned that a creeping culture of “censoriousness […] will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time.” In short, a promising outing for a future president of PEN America. 

Unfortunately, the NYT columnist withdrew as a signatory just a few hours after the letter’s publication, tweeting an apology that was more grovelling than what Boylan acknowledged was a “well-meaning, if vague, message” ought to warrant. It turns out the new PEN president felt uncomfortable sharing space with certain other signatories, among them the author J.K. Rowling. “I did not know who else had signed that letter […] I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company,” Boylan tweeted. “The consequences are mine to bear. I am so sorry.” 

In other words, our new free speech champion “read the room” and slunk away from a common-sense position supporting free and open debate. 

Just one month earlier, Rowling had issued a public statement clarifying her views on sex and gender identity — namely that gender identity isn’t sex and that there are times and places where this difference matters. 

Boylan, who identifies as a transwoman, responded with a bad-faith refusal to engage — accusing Rowling of debating Boylan’s “right to exist” — and a rather ham-fisted attempt at public shaming (“I’m in a house with two 20-somethings who are sobbing uncontrollably. They grew up with your books. You could have been a beacon of hope. Instead, you did this.”) 

Boylan’s tenure at GLAAD, which has taken a hard turn towards censorship since shifting from the LGB to the T circa 2015, is not particularly encouraging either. Boylan and GLAAD seem to share a fondness for the shameless exertion of peer pressure to shut down uncomfortable conversations about the conflicts surrounding gender identity. 

Perhaps PEN’s new president would prefer to do the talking. “Has my experience of womanhood been identical to that of other women my age?” Boylan asked, in a 2019 Times column that drew a questionable parallel between transition and immigration. “Of course not. I speak, sometimes, with a hint of a foreign accent, a vestigial trace of the country where I was born.” 

This column was apparently inspired by the 30-hour detention of a nine-year-old schoolchild at the US border, an injustice Boylan compared to the “accost[ing]” (read: misgendering and criticising) of a fellow trans activist, Sarah McBride, by two feminists on Capitol Hill. Boylan characterised this incident as “den[ying] the humanity of transgender people”. 

“On the surface, it might seem as if the detention of Julia and the cruelty of transphobes is unrelated,” Boylan wrote. “But both hatreds, in fact, rise from the same dark spring.” 

Forgive me, but one of these things doesn’t seem like the other, and Boylan’s track record of wildly misrepresenting critics with dissenting views on gender doesn’t bode well.  

As the letter Boylan signed and then unsigned concluded: “If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.” 

Will PEN America?

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Eliza Mondegreen is a researcher and freelance writer.

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