As far as I was concerned when I spoke those words, I was offering my own perspective as a woman — but also saying something that every woman on this planet has always known, and that feminists have repeated for decades. We really must be wary of men because the problem of sexual violence is overwhelmingly a male problem. In France, 99% of rapes are committed by men. Women know. 

According to the three LGBTQ+ organizations who brought criminal proceedings against me — Mousse, SOS Homophobie and ADHEOS, all of which receive funding by French taxpayers, by the way — my words amounted to incitement to transphobic hatred. On Wednesday, the judge delivered his verdict that, yes, I was guilty of committing a “public injury towards a person or a group because of their sex, their sexual orientation or their gender identity”. On top of paying €1,000 to the French state, I’m also liable for various other costs. All told, I’m obliged to pay €4,754. 

Of course, what matters here is not money but principle. Apparently it is now against the law for women to tell other women to be wary of the opposite sex. Naturally, my lawyers and I intend to appeal this Orwellian verdict, all the way to the highest court in France if necessary, since it marks a worrying shift in French freedom of expression — quite beyond the specifics of my own rather absurd trial. It seems to me basically unacceptable that a woman should be condemned for having expressed her misgivings about the safety of women and the reality of biological sex. This represents narrowing of permissible speech in France, the judicialization of ideological disagreement — and the growing influence of gender politics on a country that once prided itself on intellectual honesty. 

I uttered the fateful phrase in October 2023. In my work as a feminist writer and activist, I have long argued that allowing men to change their legal sex and be recognized as women has real implications in various areas, from medicine to law to parenting to sport — and that these merit discussion. I co-founded the feminist NGO Femelliste, and later co-authored a book investigating the excesses and consequences of modern gender ideology. 

When I was invited onto the France 2 show Quelle époque, hosted by the prominent TV journalist Léa Salamé, I hoped it would be a chance to have an open, honest and respectful discussion. I would be appearing alongside France’s first-ever transgender mayor, Marie Cau, then-head of the small northern village of Tilloy-Les-Marchiennes. 

In the event, the debate felt more like an ambush. I was accused of being part of the “far-Right sphere”, which could not be further from the truth. Then the contentious moment arrived when Salamé asked me what I, as a feminist, thought transgender demands might take away from women. I answered that these issues should not simply be opposed — “we must find common ground”. I then raised specific areas where conflicts arise, notably around sport and prison policy. 

In relation to prisons, I referred to documented cases in the United States and the United Kingdom, where male prisoners convicted of violence against women had self-identified as female and been transferred to women’s prisons — where they subsequently sexually assaulted female inmates. It was in this specific context that I said: “I am not saying that all trans people do this, far from it, but as women, we are obliged to be wary of people with penises.” 

Two months later, I received a complaint from Mousse, SOS Homophobie and ADHEOS. The associations cited several of my statements in the program, including one in which I said that, in my view, Marie Cau was a “transfeminine man”.  This was framed as a “transphobic insult”. More broadly, the document portrayed me as someone who contributed to a climate of hostility, even suggesting that my words could be linked to the suffering or suicide of trans-identifying individuals. 

So the initial complaint was not narrowly constructed. It was an attempt, rather, to build a case around a series of statements that, taken together, characterized me not just as someone who had said something controversial: but as someone engaged in a broader pattern of harmful speech. This strategy did not survive legal scrutiny. Before the trial began, my lawyers Richard Malka and Marine Viegas challenged the admissibility and legal qualification of several statements. A significant portion of the complaint was dismissed on procedural and technical grounds; what remained was not the full set of accusations, but that single sentence — “As women, we are obliged to be wary of people with penises”. 

Note that the sentence had become curiously detached from its preceding qualification: “I am not saying that all trans people do this, far from it, but…” Indeed, I was speaking about a concrete category of risk — in other words, doing the opposite of generalizing. This did not prevent the complaint from accusing me of “abusive generalization”. This was the first lesson of the case: once a statement has been ideologically re-coded, context ceases to matter. 

At the hearing, the court returned obsessively to two things: the phrase “people with penises”, and the verb se mefier de — which might be rendered as “to be cautious of”, “to be wary of” or “to watch out for”. The prosecutor argued that my words were doubly discriminatory: first, because they implied that all men are dangerous; and second, because they targeted trans women, recast as “women with penises”, as objects of suspicion. The prosecutor even requested that I be sentenced not only to a fine, but to a so-called “citizenship training course” — a faintly comic euphemism for ideological re-education.

The court’s questioning suggested that my phrase “to be wary of” had to be understood as a hostile generalization. It was treated not as the language of female self-protection, but as a form of exhortation. The word “obliged” made it worse, the prosecutor argued. It transformed caution into an injunction. 

Then there was the phrase “people with penises”. The judge suggested that it sounded like a punchline, a provocation. I explained that I was in fact using a term that is deemed by many progressives to be more inclusive than merely “men” (since as we now know, not all men have penises). Indeed, “people with penises” comes from the same discursive universe as “people with uteruses”, “people who menstruate”, “sex assigned at birth”, and so on. However, it seems that when linguistic logic is applied in the wrong direction, it suddenly becomes indecent. 

The judge then pressed me, several times, on whether I believed all men were dangerous — attempting to force me into either caricature or capitulation. Did I think literally all men were rapists? Really? Every single one? At one point, I was momentarily thrown off balance by this insistence. My lawyer Richard Malka intervened and reframed the point. Not all men are violent, obviously, but the overwhelming majority of rapists are men. That is the social fact women live with, and it is what underlies female caution. It was a necessary intervention as the hearing repeatedly tried to re-code rational female behaviors as forms of ideological extremism. 

But as I learned, this new moral grammar has rendered lived experience all but illegible. Like all women, I have learned from childhood to assess risk. Do not walk alone too late. Watch your drink. Be careful with men you don’t know. Trust your instincts. These are all things we learn as we navigate a social world structured by asymmetrical risk. In court, though, the female habit of caution was recast as criminal suspicion. For this, ordinary reality had to be denied. 

I chose Richard Malka to represent me for a particular reason. His name is not just associated with technical legal expertise — but with some of the most consequential free speech cases of the past two decades. He was the lawyer for newspaper Charlie Hebdo, before and after the terrorist attack on its offices. Malka defended the newspaper’s right to publish caricatures of religion even though they were offensive. That case was about whether a society accepts that certain expressions must remain lawful even when they provoke outrage or worse. Freedom of expression, Malka argued, does not exist only for consensual speech, nor for ideas that flatter prevailing moral sentiments. It exists precisely for what shocks, disturbs, contradicts.

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Malka later represented Mila, a 16-year-old girl subjected to an extraordinary wave of threats and harassment after she criticized Islam in a social media post. The girl had committed no crime, Malka argued, and yet she had effectively been purged from civil society. “I can’t get over the fact that she lives as a recluse,” he told the court. “Imagine her life, she can no longer walk peacefully, she can no longer do internships, all doors are closed to her.”  In this instance, it was those issuing the death threats who were on trial, but the case raised the same underlying question: does the right to free speech remain protected irrespective of the sensitivities of whoever may be offended by it? Or does the concept of harm expand if the identity group is sufficiently sensitive to offense?

In both cases, Malka defended a strict, almost classical understanding of free speech: the law does not exist to protect people from being offended, but to protect the conditions of open debate. It is increasingly rare to find people who defend this position, even in France, which is why I had contacted Malka years before my trial — when I had already begun to face professional consequences for stating that, in my view, being a woman refers to biological reality. For years I had been targeted by activists openly calling for violence against me, even for my death, all while promising legal defense funds for those willing to attack me. When the complaint was eventually filed, I knew who to call. 

In principle, French law still distinguishes between opinion and incitement. The offense at issue — provocation to discrimination, hatred or violence — traditionally requires something more than a harsh statement. It requires an actual call to hostility or exclusion. Marka’s colleague, Marine Viegas, made precisely this point: “I will not fall into the trap set by the civil parties,” she told the court. “For or against trans people? For or against gender identity? That is not what this case is about. The only question is whether, today, in a democratic society — ours — it is still permissible to debate this subject, the ideology it has produced, its excesses, and its taboos.” 

Viegas argued that my words did not target trans people as such, but a category of individuals defined by specific acts and circumstances — in other words men who exploit loose self-identification rules to enter women’s spaces and harm women. In French law, that distinction matters. It is not an offense to criticize people for their conduct. Viegas also pointed out what should have been obvious: there was no call to hatred in my words, no exhortation to attack, expel, discriminate against. At most, she said, it was “a measured recommendation”, rooted in documented facts and limited circumstances. As she concluded: “Forgive us for having dared to say that women should be cautious of rapists.” 

Viegas also made the peculiar inversion of victim and accusers central to the defense. She reminded the court that the associations prosecuting me claimed to act in the name of tolerance and protection, while aligning themselves, explicitly or implicitly, with people who had subjected me to sustained intimidation. She cited messages calling for me to be “burned alive”, “crushed”, or “destroyed”. Those same actors, she argued, had now come before a criminal court to demand the policing of a single phrase. When you “attack everything and everyone”, as she put it, you lose the ability to distinguish between hatred and disagreement. 

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That, indeed, is exactly what I believe this bizarre case illustrates. Asymmetry is now structural. Explicit threats can be minimized, contextualized, or ignored, provided they come from the “right” side of any given moral divide. But a statement grounded in observable reality becomes suspect, actionable, even prosecutable if it disrupts the dominant narrative. The legitimacy of the act becomes secondary to the identity of the speaker. Once that shift is complete, the law ceases to regulate behavior. Instead, it regulates who is allowed to speak and who must be silenced. 

Perhaps the most revealing move by the prosecution was the implication that I had dredged up some bizarre, malicious fantasy — that my worries about male offenders exploiting self-identification rules to enter women’s prisons was the lurid invention of a woman obsessed with discrediting trans people. But as my defense made absolutely clear, the prison issue was real and documented — and these people were not being criticized for being trans but for being violent criminals. 

That was my point, and it remains my point now. Not all trans-identified prisoners are dangerous. Perhaps the vast majority aren’t. But some are, and women should be able to discuss the consequences without being accused of hatred. 

What is particularly dismaying about all this is that France has long imagined itself as intellectually distinct from the Anglosphere — where these debates have been raging for a long time. The Republican tradition is, at least in theory, universalist. French citizens are treated as individuals, not as members of identity groups, and public debate can be abrasive, even confrontational, without automatically becoming a legal matter. This is now beginning to shift. What is being imported is not so much Anglo-American law, but Anglo-American ways of interpreting speech, in which disagreement is reframed as endangerment and criticism as a form of violence. 

In court, I was told that statements like mine could contribute to suicides among trans-identifying individuals. Such reasoning does not belong to traditional French legal culture. It belongs to a broader cultural shift, visible across parts of the Anglosphere, where the boundary between speech and harm has been progressively blurred in public discourse. 

This was also a central point in the defense. Marine Viegas insisted that my case was not a marginal provocation emerging from the “far Right”, but part of a wide and ongoing debate with implications for many sectors of French society. And yet the language used to police it is distinctly un-French. We have imported a distinctly alien cultural reflex. In her closing statement, Marine Viegas asked the question the court should have asked from the beginning: by what right should the French public be deprived of this debate? I believe it is the right question. 

In the end, my case is not about whether my sentence was elegant, diplomatic, or gentle. It is about whether women are still permitted to speak plainly about sex, risk, and bodily reality: when those realities conflict with the demands of gender ideology. If a woman can be prosecuted for saying something that basically all women know to be true, then free speech in France does not exist. It is being conditionally tolerated, and only so long as it does not disturb the reigning moral consensus. For that reason, if nothing else, we will appeal — for I cannot accept that women have no right to speak our truths.

But you might struggle to make the same case for Graham Linehan, the comedy writer most famous for Father Ted. Yet there he was, apprehended by five armed police officers after landing at Heathrow Airport on Tuesday, as though he were a gangster of the most feral kind. His crime? Posting a handful of tweets that caused some offense.

As for those tweets: on 19 April, he posted an image of a transactivist protest in London along with the caption “a photo you can smell”. When challenged by a user for the “unnecessary comment”, he replied: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.” The third was posted on 20 April, and in it Graham wrote: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Those of us accustomed to the churn and clatter of social media have become adept at explaining the obvious to the congenitally literal-minded. And so, with infinite patience, Graham outlined the thinking behind this comment on his Substack, saying that it “was about the height difference between men and women, the bollocks being closer to punch level for a woman defending her rights and certainly not a call to violence”. In any case, as the lawyer Sarah Phillimore pointed out, there is nothing illegal about tweeting advice that any father would have said to their daughters about how to handle a men encroaching on their personal space. “If you want to arrest my dad for this,” she writes, “he’s in a jar on the dresser.”

For Graham, this is only the latest act in an ongoing circus of persecution: one with multiple ringmasters. He was first contacted by the police back in October 2018, when he was given a verbal warning for “deadnaming” and “misgendering” trans activist Stephanie Hayden. A later police visit was prompted by a complaint about Graham’s tweets by Adrian Harrop, a doctor whose license to practice medicine was temporarily suspended for “insulting” online conduct. “This was the visit that really shocked my wife and frightened her”, Graham told me. “It’s one of the main reasons we broke up”.

There has, over the years, been a concerted effort by trans activists to weaponize the police against their victims, aided by the their capture of law enforcement. Consider the different standards at play here. It is now commonplace for trans activists to threaten violence and rape against their adversaries, and yet police rarely investigate. After two SNP politicians were photographed at a trans rally in Glasgow in front of “decapitate TERFS” placard, complete with guillotine, no arrests were made. Compare this with the routine hounding of feminists by police simply for expressing their gender-critical views. Perhaps the police might wish to refresh their memory about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on sex in the Equality Act, and its implications for the rights of women and gay people.

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The misuse of police powers has been bad enough, but it has been accompanied by Graham’s broader cancellation by the very industry that once feted him. Unable to make a living in television since 2018 — due to his vocal opposition to gender ideology and the threat it poses to women’s rights — he had no choice but to relocate to Arizona where he has been working on a sitcom for Friendly Fire Studios, with me and a new company we have established with actor and comedian Rob Schneider and writer and producer Martin Gourlay. A full draft of the series has already been written and, if we can successfully put it into production, it will be the sharpest riposte to those activists who have tried to ensure that Graham never writes again.

The farce of Graham’s arrest at Heathrow has already garnered worldwide attention. J.K. Rowling has described it as “totalitarianism”. Joyce Carol Oates has cited it as proof that “the UK is, or has become, an authoritarian government”. Perhaps sensing that the UK is fast becoming an international laughing stock, even Keir Starmer has weighed in, his spokesperson making clear that the police should be focusing on issues that “matter most to their communities”. Given his party’s appalling track record on free speech, this is almost as funny as a line from Father Ted.

But as absurd as it sounds, the arrest of a comedy writer at an airport is by no means the most egregious example of state overreach in recent years. We have seen journalists visited by police for wrongthink; citizens imprisoned for posting memes; prosecutions for controversial Halloween costumes; teenagers convicted and jailed for offensive jokes. Freedom of Information requests by The Times revealed that over 12,000 people are arrested each year for offensive comments posted online, and an estimated quarter of a million of us have been logged by police as perpetrators of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs), mostly without being informed.

In spite of all this, there has been no serious effort among the political class to actually change things. There have been occasional overtures: the shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, has called for the abolition of NCHIs, while previous Home Secretaries have explicitly instructed the College of Policing to end the practice. But all have been ignored. The Court of Appeal has ruled that NCHIs are “plainly an interference with freedom of expression”. Yet nothing has changed, because the activists deeply embedded in the system believe they know best.

There is, though, plenty that our elective representatives could do to address Britain’s totalitarian spiral, if only they could grow a spine. For starters, Parliament should abolish the College of Policing; its activist influence, long apparent, has led to inconsistent and arguably unlawful behavior by officers trained to believe that it is their job to audit the speech and emotions of the public they serve.

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Parliament should further abolish all “hate speech” legislation. Given that no two governments can agree on a definition of “hate”, these nebulous laws are routinely exploited to chill free speech. Section 18 of the Public Order Act 1986 explicitly outlaws ‘“threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior” if it is intended “to stir up racial hatred”. Quite apart from the liberal principle that the state should not be attempting to intuit our private motivations, the charge of “racism” is so often misapplied that the law is effectively rendered useless.

Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 proscribe the sending of material that is deemed “grossly offensive”: a hopelessly subjective notion. The Communications Act further prohibits words that cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”. If every person who posted such messages on social media were convicted tomorrow, the prison population would exceed the number of law-abiding citizens. Either way, these laws are clearly both draconian and incoherent.

Moreover, the very concept of “protected characteristics” makes a nonsense of the principle of equality before the law. Few would object to protections against discrimination on the basis of immutable qualities in the workplace. but there is no sound reason to create differential tiers of law enforcement. In all “hate crime” guidance, “perception of the victim” is the determining factor, as a 2019 report from the Home Office made clear. No actual evidence is required for someone to be recorded as a hate criminal.

Finally, we should introduce sensible laws on “incitement to violence”. The Lucy Connolly case has drawn international attention to the folly of our present laws, in which a nasty but hastily deleted tweet by someone with no influence whatsoever resulted in a 31-month prison sentence. The US standard, known as the “Brandenburg Test”, offers a model of best practice. It makes clear that the speech in question must be deliberately aimed at inciting violence, likely to do so, and that any impact should be imminent. If the UK had an equivalent on the statute books, police would no longer be wasting so much time and money on offensive tweets and memes.

There can no longer be any doubt that free speech is under life-support in Britain, and to keep ignoring the sheer weight of evidence is a labor of perversely Herculean proportions. Many commentators are claiming that the arrest of Graham Linehan could be a tipping point, but this will only be true if the public’s rising frustration can be directed into action. It has been grotesque to witness the state’s ongoing harassment of an acclaimed comedy writer, but perhaps one consolation is that it might finally jolt Westminster out of its complacency.

BBC reports don’t name the site for fear of directing people there, but I found it anyway. And it is roughly as you might expect: namely, every loving parent’s nightmare. Instead of swapping relationship anecdotes or cookery tips, members pour out their pain, discuss the pros and cons of various approaches to death in great depth, and affirm each other in the desire to die. Many users are obviously young. Biographies under made-up names say things like “Autistic and heartbroken”, “Trapped in the suffering”, and “Eating disordered junkie”, but there are a lot of people who just write “Student”.

Like other chat sites with which we are more familiar, it forms its own cultural ecosystem. Here, too, there are unspoken club rules, recurrent personalities, and dramatic story arcs. Despite — or perhaps because of — posters’ grim intentions and feelings of mental isolation, most are friendly and solicitous towards one another, apparently searching for a welcoming tribe. This juxtaposition of gregarious form and nihilistic content feels surreal, though I expect regulars get used to it.

On the top of every page, there is now an official response to the Ofcom announcement, talking about “a clear and unprecedented overreach by a foreign regulator against a US-based platform”. Owners say they “reject this interference and will be defending the site’s existence and mission”. There are also new threads from concerned users. Reads one: “I live in the UK and we’re very anti suicide and I don’t want… this website to be connected to my death in any way in case the authorities do some investigation.”

Such forums test the limits of many stalwarts about free expression, mine included. Like the BBC, I choose not to mention the site in question’s name here, and to be vague about other details. Indeed, its existence is a difficult thing to write about at all. It is not that suicidal ideation can be conjured out of the blue in a casual passer-by; the worry is about what finding the site might do to someone already in the throes. I can see how prolonged contact with the enveloping atmosphere of helpful, judgment-free camaraderie — part-cosy and part-bleak — could easily speed up a person’s desire to die, as well as giving them new information about available means. Even Mumsnet users worry about what their favorite site does to their mental health. Quite frankly, this one seems a lot worse.

The Samaritans stresses that “Suicidal behavior is extremely complex and can rarely, if ever, be attributed to a single cause”. This is obviously true; human suffering tends to sprawl messily over several issues at once, and depression often can’t tell the difference between a boulder and pebble. This fact gives the lie to attempts to politically weaponize particular suicides by depicting them in simplistic terms, whether they be by trans-identified children or teachers inspected by Ofsted.

But it is also true that in a complex causal chain leading up to an event, we can identify significant precipitating factors. During the Reformation, the suicide rate rose in both England and Germany, arguably due to the increased emphasis on personal moral responsibility. In 1860s St Petersburg, there was a vogue for suicide due to “civic grief” at deplorable societal conditions. Explanations of why some particular person takes his own life can cite large-scale events and trends like these; but also include small-scale events like a fateful meeting with a particular person, or even with a text. After publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, depicting the hero’s suicide as a merciful release from the tragedies of life, there was a spate of copycat deaths among romantic-minded student readers. Why not then a chance meeting with a website; or even with an article that writes about a website?

In fact, society has long been reticent to talk a lot about suicide for fear that it sets a spark going in already parched psychic tinder. Medieval chroniclers and coroners would write in euphemisms, describing people dying “of an excess of grief”, or drowning “by the temptation of the Devil”. The 13th-century prior Caesarius of Heisterbach skirts around the matter of attempted suicides in his writings on miracles: “I would tell you many recent examples of this sort of depression, but I fear it would endanger weaker souls to hear or read such things.” Even on forums dedicated to suicide, such as the one Ofcom is presently looking at, some users can’t quite bring themselves to mention the word. They write of their longing to “CTB” or “catch the bus” instead.

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But reticence to name suicide, as such, is not just due to worries about inadvertent participation in other people’s tragedies. Historically, it was also a response to feelings of shame associated with the deed — and therefore the word — made vivid by the perception that deliberate self-destruction was a grave offense against God. For failed attempts, there could be draconian retribution from Christian authorities. Almost unbelievably, jailing people for attempts continued in England until the end of the Fifties. And even in today’s secular society, feelings of shame are reported among survivors, not just for having failed but also for having tried at all. Ostensibly worried about stigma, in recent months pro-assisted dying MPs such as Kim Leadbeater have strongly objected to the word “suicide” for the deliberate self-killing of people “already dying”, apparently unaware that it would follow you couldn’t murder a terminally ill person either.

In a sense, then, pro-suicide sites can be seen as a deformed but intelligible response to residual religious associations of shame: a kind of proud and unabashed reclaiming of the right to self-annihilation. Viewed in that light, they are of a piece with the 18th-century Romantic view that suicide could be a positive grasping of one’s autonomy, demonstrating independence from religion and even from nature itself. German has a literary word for it: a Freitod (“free death”), as opposed to Selbstmord (“self-murder”) or Selbsttötung (“self-killing”). Dostoevsky satirizes this idea in Demons with the engineer Kirillov, a character enslaved by his obsessive desire to kill himself as a means of asserting self-government: “If God exists, then all will is his, and I can’t escape his will. If he does not exist, then all will is mine… I am killing myself in order to show my independence and my new terrible freedom.”

Modern day Kirillov-types, monomaniacally focused upon freedom, will presumably leap to the defense of pro-suicide sites in order to protect both the word and the deed from outside interference. They will deny there is ever such a thing as having the better part of your mind taken over by hostile forces. It is always you who is ultimately in charge, for better or worse; even in the throes of depression and loneliness, enticed by the warm words of fake friends, on an apparently welcoming website. At the other end of the scale we find people like Leadbeater, trying to get the word banned for what are technically still suicides, on the spurious grounds that death is not deliberately chosen at all in such cases, but is already happening anyway.

Both stances involve self-serving fictions: one of total responsibility, the other of none. Somewhere in the middle is the truth: that the common good requires the use of clear, unambiguous language about the nature of suicide; but also to avoid glamorizing and validating it, for fear of who might get caught up. Indeed, these are two sides of the same coin. There’s neither shame nor glory in any suicide; but making pro-suicide websites is nothing to be proud of.

www.samaritans.org

When Sala was first arrested, the Iranian authorities could only offer a bland statement that she had “violated the laws of the Islamic Republic.” In the past, they would have trotted out the usual accusations, of espionage and conspiracies to overthrow the system. This time around, though, the judiciary assured the world that it was meticulously examining the Italian’s case — and her release came soon after.

“She gave voice to Iranian women fighting against the obligation to wear the veil, of course, but also to members of the establishment,” says Luciana Borsatti, the former ANSA bureau chief in Tehran, noting that Sala also interviewed figures like Hossein Kanani Moghaddam, one of the founders of the Revolutionary Guards. But Sala’s coverage of Iran was notably subtle: it gave voice to those Iranians who oppose the current system but also reject the kinds of strict sanctions encouraged in the diaspora. She was eager to report fairly on Iran, and had been accused by hardcore exiles of not being sufficiently critical of the regime. Yet even she found herself detained, held in solitary confinement over Christmas.

In theory, the Islamic Republic’s constitution protects free expression. Borrowed from the French Fifth Republic, it states that nobody should be interrogated for holding an opinion, that nobody can be deprived of the right to peaceful assembly, and that journalists are free to publish materials unless they threaten the tenets of Islam or violate public rights. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in 2018 that whoever claims they’re discriminated for their views is just “lying” — a shameless lie in itself, but revealing about the way the prickly way the regime deals with criticism.

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Nor does the Islamic Republic seem much more self-confident when it comes to foreign journalists. Granted visas lasting a mere eight days, even as they’re subject to strict surveillance, the best most correspondents can do is report on what they see. There’s certainly plenty to cover. Inflation is skyrocketing and people cannot afford groceries. Iran is sitting on the second largest natural gas reserves in the world, but can’t heat up people’s homes. In a country where the number of female university students has long surpassed that of their male counterparts, women are still being dragged through the streets, and verbally abused for strands of hair sticking out their headscarves.

For describing all this, Sala found herself in jail, even as unabashed anti-regime activists can apparently outwit the intelligence services with ease. One excellent example here is Catherine Perez-Shakdam, a French Jew who posed as a friend of the Islamic Republic before securing an audience with the ayatollah himself. It all speaks to the essentially arbitrary nature of reporting in Iran — foreign correspondents have little idea whether they’ll make it home safe, let alone secure a decent scoop for their troubles. That’s even as reporters risk becoming pawns in broader geopolitical games. As Sala discovered, she was detained in Iran for hijinks in Milan: not because of anything she actually did, but because of the flag on her passport.

So why do reporters come? Part of the answer surely involves basic journalistic principles of honesty and truth. For Sala herself, an attachment to Iran clearly matters too — even if not everyone is quite so thoughtful. The truth is that much foreign journalism on Iran condemns the country to stereotype. Much outside reporting is so cliched, in fact, that millions of Westerners were lately astounded to discover that, far from being an Arabian Nights fantasy, it actually snows in Iran. If you ask Iranians, they’ll acknowledge having long felt dehumanised that a country they cherish, for its heritage, arts, culture and food, is merely framed as a vast missile factory, where people wake up fantasising about yellow cake and go to bed dreaming of enriched uranium.

These challenges aside, it’s testament to the strength of feeling here that even foreigners caught up in Iran’s capricious security state want reporting to continue: albeit with proper safeguards. Kylie Moore-Gilbert, formerly a University of Melbourne lecturer, was invited to visit Iran in 2018. She was there to attend a conference, but soon found herself arrested and imprisoned for over two years. Despite her experiences, Moore-Gilbert is forthright. “There is no substitute for in-depth, on-the-ground coverage,” she tells me. “I do not believe any journalist can truly understand a country or its people if reporting only from abroad.”

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So how can Iran’s story be told? Perhaps local journalists could take up the slack: some routine reporting on human rights or the economy could be done by Iranians themselves, but published by media organisations abroad anonymously. But it’s not that simple. Moore-Gilbert puts it this way: “I think there is a real risk that the chilling effect of Cecilia and other journalists’ arrests inside Iran will lead to less informed coverage on this country at a critical time in the country’s domestic and global political standing.”

It’s a fair point. After the Sala fiasco, foreign correspondents encouraged to visit Iran after the election of the centrist President Masoud Pezeshkian may reconsider their plans. Journalist colleagues in Europe and America have said as much. One French friend said she dreamt of living in Tehran, but has to forget that now. Another contact, a British charity worker, says it’s a shame she can visit every country in the region: except Iran.

There is no easy solution here. The people of Iran are condescendingly told, both by the international community and their fellow Iranians in exile, that they should keep fighting for their freedoms. I doubt courageous young Iranians would disagree — it’s just a shame a dwindling number of Western journalists are willing to write by their sides.

To clarify: the purpose of PEN is to defend freedom of speech and to protect writers from political oppression and persecution. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that a significant cadre of its membership would seek to stifle freedom of speech and engage in political oppression and persecution. Or: we’re all for free speech so long as you say what we tell you. These folks are athletes. It requires considerable intellectual acrobatics for Writers Against the War on Gaza to regard the shutting down of events to advance free expression as “a win for free expression”. Presumably, the fact that a number of withdrawals from both occasions were motivated by fear of being attacked by a mob of pro-Palestinian zealots is also “a win for free expression”. PEN itself stated its concern “about any circumstance in which writers tell us they feel shut down, or that speaking their minds bears too much risk”.

PEN is by its nature a big tent. It represents not only Muslim writers but Jewish ones too, some of whom might just support the existence of Israel, might just regard Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza as justified, and might just find alliance with genuinely genocidal terrorists whose unembarrassed aim is to wipe Israel and the Jewish people off the map as a teeny tiny bit obnoxious. While one PEN member decries the non-profit’s “both-sidesing”, the truth is that PEN has no business taking a position on this issue whatsoever.

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Unfortunately, the Left has successfully installed the expectation that, regardless of their established purpose, all institutions — companies, museums, theatres, universities, charities, you name it — must proclaim their fealty to the “right” (which is to say Left) position on a host of inflammatory issues of the day. This hyper-politicisation of entities that ought sensibly to remain politically neutral has been systematically debauching everything from the National Trust to the NHS, from Anheuser-Busch to the Chicago Art Museum. First, all such outfits were required to fly Black Lives Matter flags, then garishly incoherent Pride flags, and now these banners have all to be swapped out for Palestinian flags, never mind what constituency or customer base might be alienated by this gratuitously partisan branding. Thus, an organisation established for the defence of free speech of every sort — including the overtly Zionist kind — is necessarily obliged to openly advocate for Hamas, a murderous, cheerfully antisemitic cult whose interest in free speech on its home turf would fit in a thimble.

Of course, PEN’s membership has form when it comes to hypocrisy. In 2015, under armed security, PEN awarded its Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Six writers withdrew from participating in the proceedings to protest the magazine’s ostensibly offensive printing of cartoons that depicted Mohammed. Yet funnily enough, what your average normal person found offensive was the vicious massacre of 12 of the publication’s employees, most of them journalists, for neglecting to adhere to one religion’s hysterical blasphemy laws in a secular country that famously celebrates “liberté”. Yet over 200 writers — including, to my astonishment, the likes of Joyce Carol Oates — signed an open letter to PEN criticising the Charlie Hebdo award. For these authors, defence of free speech, promotion of tolerance, and opposition to violent political oppression — the very purpose of PEN — counted for nothing when weighed against any injury to the delicate feelings of fundamentalist Muslims.

Much has been written about the unholy and in some ways hilarious alliance developing between the progressive Left and Islam (Lesbians for Palestine, etc). But for Western writers to embrace a restrictive, prescriptive, and stifling culture isn’t merely ironic or comical; it’s self-defeating. One needn’t consult a professor of Middle Eastern Studies to conclude that these fair-weather friends in Gaza may welcome useful idiocy, but the permissive ethos of the Anglo-Left is diametrically at odds with despotic Islamic theology. Moreover, for American writers to express increasingly shrill and little-disguised hostility to Jews is to disavow a substantial chunk of the country’s distinguished literary canon: Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Elie Weisel just for starters.

But then, the past 15 years have demonstrated with depressing clarity that writers, along with artists of every stripe, aren’t special. Although our occupation is more at risk from censorship than most, we’re all too capable of perversely embracing suppressive viewpoints that violate our own interest. We’re paid not only to write but to think, yet we don’t think; we listen keenly for whatever tune is playing in our fellow travellers’ AirPods and whistle along. Apparently, we’re no more creative than the average bear, and as soon as the memo goes out, we’ll chant along with the kiddies camped at Columbia University, “From the river to the sea!” whatever that means. We’ll obediently switch out one cause for another whenever we’re told, as nimbly as using “find and replace” in Microsoft Word.

We’re cowards, conformists, and copycats. Real freedom of expression is too scary; we’d rather hide in a crowd whose keffiyeh-masked members all shout the same thing. PEN has a laudable history of advocating for writers who’ve been persecuted for their opinions in repressive polities — polities much like the contemporary United States. But too many of its members would have the non-profit corrupt its global mission to protect free speech across the board so long as they can bully its leadership into pointless partisan posturing for progressives’ acrid flavour of the month.

But Musk isn’t the only tech baron causing people to worry about freedom of thought. Before Neuralink’s “brain-reading” technology works out how to decode thoughts from neurons, Artificial Intelligence might be able to read our minds simply by observing our behaviour. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, recently warned that it might observe our internet browsing history or what we’ve liked on social media in order to manipulate us with persuasive tailored messages.

Yet all this fretting about futuristic mind-reading technologies distracts from the reality that the biggest threats to freethinking today come from carbon, not silicon. Corporate influence is one such menace. Not only can companies control, block or obfuscate our thinking, but employers can also fire people for holding the wrong opinions. Bertrand Russell pointed out the danger of this a century ago. And today, in an age of mobs, online and offline, Left and Right, how many people dare form opinions?

In the UK, we are protected from being discriminated against for our “philosophical beliefs” by the Equality Act 2010. And a series of recent employment tribunal cases have decided that this means people cannot be fired for holding gender-critical beliefs. But, to count as a “philosophical belief”, specific criteria must be met. The thought in question must be “a belief” rather than merely an “opinion or viewpoint”, and one which is “worthy of respect in a democratic society” in a judge’s view. This leaves our more tentative, exploratory ideas — in short, the process of thinking itself — unprotected. But being kept in mental solitary confinement until we have fully formed “philosophical beliefs” is not conducive to thought.

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You could object that employers are firing employees for what they say, not what they think. But there is an overlap between thought and speech that the law doesn’t recognise. If we start believing that thought only happens inside our heads, then the battle for free thought is already lost. Thought is very much a social process; we think with each other. And in many situations, a group thinking together is more likely to get to the truth than if each individual has only their own mental biases to rely on. Thought should be regarded as both private and social, internal and external.

We also think externally with technologies: in our diaries, drafting documents on a computer, or googling something on an iPhone. And as technology is increasingly pervasive, we think externally more than ever before. Yet widespread online surveillance, and the ability of law enforcement to access our devices, means that the more we use these technologies, the more we expose our thinking to punishment. And those technologies may yet be turned against us.

So does the law protect such external thinking? While our right to freedom of thought is more than 75 years old, we are only deciding now what it means in practice. There’s a good chance that the legal profession will adjudge that thinking only happens inside our heads, in our “forum internum”. But a right to freedom of thought that does not protect external thinking is not worthy of the name. We should not put up with such crumbs from the high table of law.

Which leaves us with an even more fundamental threat to free thought: ourselves. Whereas free speech is never out of the headlines, freedom of thought rarely features in the national conversation. An alien observer would probably conclude that humans are more concerned with the liberties of their tongues than their minds.

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The truth is that firing off opinions is often a far more pleasant pastime than thinking. Thinking is hard and anxiety provoking, and one can get through life quite well, perhaps best, without ever doing it. As one psychologist argued, evolution has encouraged us to make decisions using the least possible energy, leading us to become “cognitive misers” who are “as stupid as we can get away with”. We will do anything to distract from our thoughts. A 2014 study found that when students were left in a room for 15 minutes with the choice of either thinking or giving themselves electric shocks, two-thirds of men and a quarter of women electrocuted themselves.

It has never been easier to drown out our inner thoughts. Increasingly, we flood the spaces where thought was once possible, such as when washing-up, walking or weeding the garden, with other people’s thoughts. We gorge on podcasts, YouTube, Spotify playlists — anything to stop us having to sit with the anxiety of thought. We have become addicted to digital benzos.

We also steer away from freethinking because it can threaten our sense of belonging. The more you believe the falsehoods of your particular political tribe, the better a member you are. And so it’s easier to not think about anything too much. As the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue, “most people make their party choices based on who they are, not what they think” and act based on “emotional attachments that transcend thinking”. We then become more loyal to our party than to reality. Especially since, ultimately, we want to act more than we want to think. If someone offers us an idea or cause that will justify our actions, we will love them for it.

These feelings are exacerbated in a democracy, where, in order to be taken seriously, one must have an opinion to-hand on every topic. What matters is to be able to loudly articulate this opinion, rather than its truth. Democracy encourages us to feel as though we’re thinking when forming these opinions — when most often, we are not. We keep happily banging our own podiums like millions of sweaty Khrushchevs.

If we truly want to protect the right to think freely, we need to radically reorganise society: governments must support freethought; corporations can neither be allowed to monopolise information flows nor make earning a living dependent on our opinions. And, most important, we must start to value thinking far more highly. Then, when the machines come, as they inevitably will, we will clearly see both how they threaten freethought as well as how they can support it. Musk may have proclaimed himself a “free speech absolutist” — but whether Neuralink technology will uphold his principles remains to be seen. I have a feeling we might not like it.

Republican senator Tom Cotton has called for those who express support for Hamas to be deported, and Donald Trump has promised to do so if re-elected. In France, Emmanuel Macron has outlawed pro-Palestine rallies on the grounds of maintaining public order, although his decree has been largely ignored. Closer to home, a pro-Palestinian protest has been scheduled in London for Armistice Day, a tactic surely intended to generate as much outrage and attention as possible.

In that respect, it has already succeeded. Rishi Sunak has stopped short of a ban, but has called on the Met Police to make “robust use” of its powers to prevent the Remembrance events being disrupted. In this, he is out of kilter with the majority of the country: only 18% believe it “should be allowed to go ahead”.

Liberalism has always been a tricky prospect, cherishing personal autonomy and freedom of speech up to the point where our behaviour encroaches on the rights of others. To ideologues, it is a poison, because it rejects their insistence that we ought to follow a preordained set of rules. Some even claim that liberalism is itself an ideology, though I see it as the precise opposite: it is the repudiation of ideological thinking — because it refuses to accept oversimplified interpretations of reality, or to outsource our decision-making capacities to an already established creed. This is why there are liberals on the Left, the Right, and everywhere in between.

Yet it has been dispiriting to see our commitment to Enlightenment values being assaulted on multiple fronts. There are theocratic extremists who oppose free speech and would happily see blasphemers and apostates executed. There are Western activists intoxicated by the moonshine of intersectional identity politics calling for censorship and other restrictions. And now, we have those who once considered themselves to be “liberal” pronouncing that there should be limitations to freedom of speech and assembly.

Even those who have previously decried “cancel culture” appear to be relishing its impact on their opponents. A lecture at Liverpool Hope University by Professor Avi Shlaim, a critic of Israel, was cancelled out of concern for the “safety and wellbeing” of students; Michael Eisen, a geneticist at UC Berkeley, was fired as editor-in-chief of eLife magazine for sharing a satirical article from The Onion which took a pro-Palestine stance. Eisen, some have pointed out, had previously questioned whether cancellation really exists. But while a degree of schadenfreude is understandable, it is hardly helpful.

That there are no rulebooks to consult is liberalism’s major appeal to those of a free-thinking disposition, but it is also the source of its instability. The authoritarian has no need to engage with his detractors; he can simply have them eliminated. By contrast, the liberal must find a way to coexist with those who yearn to see his freedoms quashed, to somehow reconcile himself to the multiplicity of human outlooks and their inherent incommensurability. But how can you run a marketplace of ideas while there are hooligans trying to overturn the tables?

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This essential vulnerability is always tested in moments of crisis. Governments enact “emergency powers” when at war because short-term authoritarianism seems preferable to the alternative. So when protesters at pro-Palestine marches in London are holding signs that openly celebrate the slaughter, rape and kidnapping of civilians, and an official advisor to the Met police is filmed leading a chant of “from the river to the sea”, there will always be pressure from a justifiably incensed public to resort to authoritarian remedies.

Even in peacetime, liberalism is susceptible to changing trends within the nation state. What happens, for instance, when the majority of any given population rejects the liberal values upon which their society is based? What if a government has implemented reckless migration policies that grant citizenship to those who do not recognise the value of individual freedoms? In such circumstances, the principle of democracy could be its own undoing.

Sweden is often considered to be a case in point. According to its national police chief, the rapid surge in migration over the past decade has led to an “unprecedented” rise in gang warfare between those who do not respect the rule of law. On a recent trip to Stockholm, I found myself discussing the implications with a group of residents. One woman expressed the view that Swedish people tended to take liberalism for granted, and that they had assumed newcomers would be eager to adopt the values of the nation that had welcomed them. Now many fear that this was warm-hearted naivety, and that the government had not done enough to ensure widespread integration.

Liberal countries acknowledge their moral responsibility to offer asylum for those in need, and typically take a compassionate view towards foreigners seeking a more prosperous life. At the same time, there must be a degree of societal consensus for the ethos of these nations to survive at all. For where such a consensus is jeopardised, either through mass immigration or radical domestic political movements, the temptation to dispense with liberal values is inevitable. But to call for the deportation of citizens who actively seek the demolition of our culture is to surrender our principles to the very people who oppose them. It is to resign oneself to authoritarianism in a perverse effort to defeat it.

Inevitably, one thinks of Karl Popper’s famous paradox that “in the name of tolerance” we should claim “the right not to tolerate the intolerant”. This is often invoked by activists to defend censorship of their opponents, typically in the form of a well-known cartoon meme that decontextualises and misreads Popper’s formulation:

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

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Popper’s next sentence is often omitted, in which he emphasises that so long as public opinion and rational argument can “keep them in check”, suppression of intolerant views would be “most unwise”. Protesters who take to the streets to celebrate murder fall into this category because they are self-discrediting. They are impervious to reason, but their sentiments are so essentially rebarbative that there is no risk of public opinion shifting in their favour.

But, some might respond, if liberalism is so delicate and continually under threat, why bother with it at all? In short: because it works. For all the claims by identitarian activists that the Western world is a racist hellhole, few living in the era of Jim Crow could have conceived of the advances we have made since then. The triumph of social liberalism is evident in multiple studies that show how Western societies are the most tolerant and diverse to have ever existed. It is no coincidence that all of the major civil rights movements — for black emancipation, feminism and gay rights — have traditionally been underpinned by a commitment to free speech and liberal ideals.

Of course, it is only natural that our patience is wearing thin. Having already witnessed pro-Palestine protesters in London throwing fireworks at police, and chanting in support of “Intifada” on the Tube, there can be no guarantees that such behaviour won’t be repeated on Saturday. The timing seems not only calculated to maximise publicity, but also as a declaration of contempt for British values and history.

But even if unruly and disrespectful, it would be self-defeating to ban the protest, or to insist on deportations for the worst offenders. Taking action against direct incitement to violence is one thing, but compromising on our key values is another. If we renege on our principles at the very moment when they are most imperilled, we risk undermining the very foundations upon which our civilisation is built. The authoritarian instinct may be a human constant but, with vigilance, it can be forestalled.