JK Rowling, Margaret Atwood among 150 authors and academics united over fear for free speech

Despite being on opposite sides of the transgender row, they are among 150 leading minds to voice concern about public debate.

JK Rowling and Margaret Atwood have united to voice concern over the deterioration of public debate despite finding themselves on opposite sides of the transgender row.

They are among 150 leading authors, academics and thinkers who signed a letter published on Tuesday that condemns “cancel culture” for stifling freedom of expression in higher education, journalism, philanthropy and the arts.

Along with Noam Chomsky and Sir Salman Rushdie, they warned that a “stifling atmosphere” was restricting the “exchange of information and ideas” and public debate.

Noam Chomsky. Picture: Sam Mooy

Atwood, 80, who has twice won the Booker Prize, has expressed support for transgender campaigners, saying “biology doesn’t deal in sealed either/or compartments”.

Rowling, 54, has angered trans rights activists, most recently by describing hormone treatment as a “new kind of conversion therapy for young gay people”.

Earlier, she took issue with the use of the phrase “people who menstruate” to describe females, and wrote an essay clarifying her fears that women risk being degraded as a political and biological class. Rowling’s position has divided the literary world. The cast of the Harry Potter films and some fan sites have distanced themselves from her.

Atwood tweeted a link to a YouTube video “addressing what was said by JK Rowling in her essay”, adding: “Gender and sex are two different things.”

Tuesday’s letter in Harper’s magazine reads: “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”

It continues: “It is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.

Sir Salman Rushdie. Picture: AFP

“Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organisations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.”

The Times