How the Belfast Telegraph handled Helen Joyce
The Belfast Telegraph strung Helen Joyce along for a week, and then killed her right to reply to a journalist's smears
Below is the letter I sent to Martin Breen, editor of the Belfast Telegraph, a few minutes ago.
Dear Martin Breen,
I’m writing to you as editor of the Belfast Telegraph about the disgraceful manner in which your paper has treated Helen Joyce over the past fortnight.
Your paper published Allison Morris’s column attacking Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland as “aligned with right wing, misogynist political agitators” and falsely claimed the group was “heavily funded.” Helen Joyce was then traduced by name on BBC Radio Ulster off the back of that column. When she asked for a right to reply, your paper said only that it would “consider” 600 words. The Independent Press Standards Organisation’s Editors’ Code is explicit on this point: under Clause 1, publications must correct significant inaccuracies “promptly and with due prominence,” and under Clause 2, individuals subject to critical coverage must be given “a fair opportunity to reply to significant inaccuracies.” Your paper did the opposite. A woman falsely smeared on air by one of your own columnists had to come to you cap in hand, and that was as far as your paper’s professionalism stretched.
She wrote it anyway, because WRN NI asked her to. You told her yourself, in your email of Thursday 30 July, that you saw no significant issues with the piece and planned to run it Saturday or Monday. Then nothing. She emailed. WRN NI phoned on her behalf. Nobody replied. She and Maya Forstater flew to Belfast for an event that was cancelled, and only on the Tuesday, after the news moment had passed, after the piece could serve any purpose, did your head of content, Adrian Rutherford, finally write back to reject it. His reasoning was that the piece was “primarily focused on challenging Allison Morris’s credibility and the quality of her journalism, rather than advancing the wider debate.”
You ran the column that started this. You strung her along for a week with a “final scheduling” promise. Then you dropped the piece the moment it stopped being useful to anyone, on the grounds that it dwelt too much on the accuracy of the piece you’d already published. WRN NI is not heavily funded. It’s self-funded, run on volunteers and small donations, while Féile an Phobail, the festival that cancelled their panel, receives £800,000 a year in public money. Morris told a radio audience that JK Rowling funded WRN’s legal action and that you “couldn’t get a sheet of paper” between the group and the far right. Neither claim is true. Helen Joyce is responding to smears and lies. She is not on a personal vendetta. Responsible journalism means checking a claim before you print it, and correcting it once you know it’s false. That is not what your paper did with Morris’s column, and it is not what your paper did when Helen tried to put the record straight.
That’s a paper backing its liar over the truth, and over the woman that liar smeared.
I don’t expect you to publish this either. So I’ll be putting it on my own site, in full, along with an account of what happened to Helen Joyce and the piece the Belfast Telegraph didn’t have the nerve to run.
Graham Linehan
The piece the Belfast Telegraph rejected
On July 27th Allison Morris wrote about Féile an Phobail cancelling a panel organised by Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland because it “campaigns against rights for the Transgender community”. Morris slurred the grassroots group as “aligned with right wing, misogynist political agitators”, and falsely claimed they were “heavily funded”. Fiona McAnena, my colleague at human rights charity Sex Matters, was among the speakers.
On July 28th, when Morris and I appeared on BBC Radio Talkback, Morris doubled down. She claimed JK Rowling funded WRN’s legal action against Féile, that “you couldn’t get a sheet of paper” between me and WRN and the “far right”, and that our supporters were “the same people that were cheering on attacks on migrants”.
In fact, WRN NI self-funded its legal action. It subsists on tiny donations and volunteers’ time, while Féile receives £800,000 annually from the taxpayer. As for our “far right” position, it’s simply that humans come in two sexes, and acknowledging this matters for women’s rights.
This position is held by almost everyone: both sexes, all ages, all politics, every faith and none. Polling last year found that 72% of Northern Irish voters supported the UK Supreme Court ruling that trans identification doesn’t change a person’s legal sex, including majorities of Unionist and Sinn Fein voters.
And anyone can play guilt by association. I could point out that Morris’s position on this issue is shared by those waving banners at London Trans+ Pride on July 25th calling for Rowling to be murdered and women like me to be gassed. It’s shared by the trans-identifying man convicted in 2024 for telling me that he would love to rip my eyes out, chop my hands off and carve my face up. But I wouldn’t stoop so low.
Morris observes that most violence against women is in the home. But that’s because the home is where bad men have easiest access to women, and women are least able to escape. Thinking this means it’s safe to let men into women-only public spaces is as silly as saying that because most traffic accidents involving pedestrians happen on local and regional roads, we can all go for strolls on motorways.
Of course keeping trans-identifying men out of women’s spaces won’t stop all violence against women. But it will stop some, and I think that’s worth it. This is the position Morris misrepresents, in a parody unworthy of a serious journalist, as women like me claiming that public toilets are “the most dangerous place on earth for women, with trans predators lurking in every cubicle”.
On Talkback, Morris insisted my position requires believing that “all trans women are deviants and sex offenders”. No: just that they are men, that some men harm women and that if you make it easier for men to enter spaces where women are vulnerable, some of those who take advantage will indeed be “deviants and sex offenders”.
As Morris herself said, sex offenders are “the most devious people on earth”, befriending single mothers online and becoming priests and football coaches to gain access to victims. Why she can’t see that some will claim to be women for the same reason is a mystery to me.
I know of hundreds of cases where men who claim to be women have entered women-only spaces, from toilets and changing rooms to mental health support groups and prisons, and harmed women by exposing themselves, watching those women undress and in the worst cases, assaulting and raping women.
Morris writes that she is “baffled” by our position. I suggest she takes the time-honoured journalistic approach of sitting down with WRN NI, asking good-faith questions and listening to the answers.
Helen Joyce is a former staff journalist at The Economist, where she held many posts including Brazil correspondent, Finance editor and Britain editor. She is the author of the best-selling “Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women’s Rights” and now works for the human-rights charity Sex Matters.
Thank you, Graham, for your continued support of terfs.
As a journalist, I’m mostly ashamed of my media colleagues these days. Morris’ slurs were egregiously factually wrong. But it’s de rigeur on too many newspapers etc to not care that they published lies when it comes to genderwoo.
One bright spot in the anti-women desert of Australian media is the The Australian newspaper is now running more factual pieces exposing genderwoo.
The egregious treatment of Helen Joyce and the lies about WN NI were a disgraceful abuse. ,the Belfast Telegraph is a hotbed of activists and hacks and their ignorant twits of " bosses". SHAME ON YOU ALL, but the fact that a stupid hack of a woman was to blame is the worst if it. She us a disgrace to her sex and the safety of children and truth. That's my honest opinion