The Polari Prize, which annually honours the best books written by LGBT authors in the British isles, is the latest arts institution to be rocked by identity politics. This year’s Polari jury selected John Boyne’s Earth for its Book of the Year longlist. Controversy erupted immediately, and has since metastasised on so large a scale that it threatens not only this year’s award but the viability of the fifteen-year-old Polari Prize itself.

The problem isn’t the book, a compelling read that focuses on two football players charged with rape and accessory to rape, while touching on important themes such as social class, privilege, and institutional corruption. Rather, it’s the opinions of the author—the best-selling gay Irish novelist best known for his 2006 novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (and its 2008 film adaptation). Boyne had the temerity to publicly celebrate Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling on her sixtieth birthday. In The Irish Times, he wrote of her, “As a writer, I’m in awe of her achievements. As a reader, I love her work. And as a fellow TERF, I stand four-square behind her.”

For those unaware, “TERF” is a term of abuse—recently co-opted by those whom it’s meant to disparage—that transgender activists often use to describe anyone (such as Rowling) who points out that biological differences between men and women can’t be erased by changing one’s pronouns.

This wasn’t Boyne’s first brush with “Alphabet” infamy. In 2019, at a time when trans activism was still an ascendant force in Western nations, he wrote:

While I wholeheartedly support the rights of trans men and women, and consider them courageous pioneers, it will probably make some unhappy to know that I reject the word ‘cis,’ the term given by transgender people to their non-transgender brethren. I don’t consider myself a cis man; I consider myself a man. For while I will happily employ any term that a person feels best defines them, whether that be transgender, non-binary, or gender fluid to name but a few, I reject the notion that someone can force an unwanted term onto another.

As if this weren’t sufficiently offensive to the literary world’s ideological gatekeepers, Boyne had the effrontery to write My Brother’s Name Is Jessica, a young-adult novel written from the point of view of a teenager, Sam Waver, who’s shaken when his older brother, originally named Jason, comes out as trans. Boyne was pilloried for focusing on his protagonist’s emotional growth as he learns to love, support, and understand his trans sibling. According to activists, Boyne should have instead focused on Jessica. (Of course, if he’d written the book from a trans point of view, as his critics demanded, he’d have been attacked for literary “appropriation.”) Boyne also committed the cardinal sin of misgendering (and “deadnaming,” to boot), as the book’s very title attests.

All stories worth telling feature a main character who changes over time. And it’s hard to understand how Sam could have grown if he’d been enlightened about trans issues from the story’s beginning, nor how he could have failed to remember life before his brother became his sister. But in this puritanical subculture, the ordinary rules of art and literature (like just about everything else) are expected to give way to the dogmas of gender affirmation.

With that in mind, it’s not surprising that Boyne’s inclusion on the Polari Prize longlist created an instant backlash. American-British author Patrick Ness led the charge on Bluesky: “You can’t call yourself a prize for LGBTQ+ literature and longlist a self-proclaimed TERF. Anyone can give any prize to anyone they like, of course. But don’t pretend you’re a prize for my community when you’re platforming someone who’s actively fighting against it.” His intervention, and that of others who piled on, led trans juror Nicola Dinan—a British-Malaysian novelist whose debut novel won the Polari First Book Prize in 2023—to resign her position. Four authors longlisted for a Polari prize (there would be more) withdrew their books from consideration.

On 7 August, rather than bend the knee to the righteously offended, the Polari Prize organisers issued a statement in defence of freedom of expression and the merit principle: 

The Polari Prize was founded on the core principles of diversity and inclusion. We are committed to supporting trans rights and amplifying trans voices… The role of the prize is to discover the best LGBTQ+ books written in the UK and Ireland each year. The books are read and deliberated over by the jury, and progress through the competition stages on the merits of craft and content. The Polari prize is awarded to books in a spirit of celebration of the work and the stories they tell. We have always cherished freedom of expression in our determination to find our voice both as writers and readers. It is inevitable given the challenges we face and the diversity of the lived experience we now represent under the LGBTQ+ Polari umbrella, that even within our community, we can at times hold radically different positions on substantive issues. This is one of those times. John Boyne’s novel Earth was included on The Polari Prize longlist on merit as judged by our jury, following the process and principles stated above.

The organisers also made it clear that they “do not eliminate books based on the wider views of the writer,” and that “books are one of our best means to explore the most difficult and divisive issues, and we encourage an open dialogue across our community.” While they nodded to the importance of trans and non-binary people feeling “welcome, safe, and supported,” their refusal to be bullied was extraordinary given the radicalised state of Alphabet politics.

In response, Ness doubled down, offering the type of specious racial analogy that often gets trotted out during this kind of dispute: “The Polari Prize issued a statement saying it believes its longlistees can hold ‘different positions on substantive issues.’ This is like longlisting a racist with authors of color, then telling everyone it’s a mere ‘different position on a substantive issue.’ ”

Stirred to action, novelists Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin and Emma van Straaten started a petition for writers, editors, publishers, and booksellers demanding that the Polari Prize organisers remove Boyne from its longlist. By going after Boyne, the petition’s creators sought to enhance their own bona fides as uncompromising social-justice stalwarts. While they no doubt also hoped to humiliate and intimidate Boyne, he wasn’t their real target.

Boyne, like Rowling, is widely revered. And his multi-million sales in fifty-one languages shield him from financial and professional fallout. But less famous authors, those without his stature and financial resources, are hereby being shown that their careers can be destroyed for expressing views that are seen as taboo in the rarefied world of LGBT literature.

It’s a totalitarian impulse, of course: A literary community that polices authors’ ability to think and speak freely is no literary community at all. Yet these Puritans appear to have succeeded—at least in part. A second juror has stepped down and, as of this writing, over a dozen long-listed authors have removed their books from Polari consideration. The longlist for the Polari First Book Prize, originally featuring twelve authors, is now down to three; while the list for Book of the Year has been nearly halved.

However this turns out, this year’s awards have effectively been ruined. The winners and any other authors brave enough to remain in competition will be placed under ongoing ideological surveillance by Ness and his fellow travellers. Many such authors depend in part on small presses and grants, and are at risk of being driven out of the industry entirely if they’re seen as politically unreliable.

This campaign also puts the associated live events under a cloud. Arts Council England, the government-funded body that finances the Polari Prize, had organised a celebratory “15th Birthday Showcase.” This is supposed to feature thirty events that provide a “live platform for LGBTQ+ writers, featuring previous winners and nominees, local writers, and new emerging voices.” Even assuming the show does still go on, how much will the “celebratory” mood be compromised by the aggrieved spirit being promoted by Boyne’s cancel mob?

The best response to all this from Polari Prize officials would have been to say nothing, and simply let their original message stand as their final word. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. While Boyne (rightly) remains on the longlist—as of this writing, at least—organisers issued a new statement this week, along with a promise to “do better”:

The hurt and anger caused has been a matter of deep concern to everyone associated with the prize, for which we sincerely apologise… We will be undertaking a full review of the prize processes, consulting representatives from across the community ahead of next year’s awards, taking on board the learnings from this year.

This statement implicitly concedes that there are problems with the existing merit-based process, insofar as it failed to filter out a brilliant and popular writer who happens to have political opinions at variance with the in-house orthodoxy of the British literary set. Which is to say that “freedom of expression” is perhaps not quite so cherished as it seemed to have been just last week—and that it may not actually be possible “to hold radically different positions on substantive issues.” Given these “learnings,” it’s hard to see how next year’s jurors won’t be required to apply political considerations when curating their longlists. Given that, how will anyone be able to trust the integrity of future Polari Prize awards?

With this follow-up statement, the Polari organisers have also sold out gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and old-school transsexuals—constituencies whose members have begun to push back at the “forced teaming” that requires them to sign off on radicalised trans-activist demands in the name of LGBT solidarity.

Podcast #296: How LGB Became Estranged from T

Gay activist-turned-journalist Adam Zivo tells Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay how radicalised forms of trans and queer advocacy became a liability to the once-united LGBT movement.

QuilletteQuillette

The anti-Boyne petition states, “We want there to be a literary prize that recognises the vital importance of queer and trans stories.” Fair enough. But where does that leave those of us who reject the label “queer”? Once seen as a reclaimed word (much in the way the N-word became reclaimed by blacks), “queer” has been appropriated by straight fetishists, Alphabet ideologues, and publicity-seeking celebrities. As I’ve argued in Quillette, normie gays and lesbians know that our biology is at the root of our same-sex attraction, and fight for civil rights on that basis. Likewise, old school transsexuals know that biology is the basis of their bodily dysphoria. Increasingly, the word “queer” signifies a political rejection of both those positions, on the basis that acknowledging biological reality may undermine one’s right to unfettered self-identification.  

Mainstream culture has rejected the illiberal left excesses of the past decade—including in the UK, where even Keir Starmer’s left-of-centre Labour government has acknowledged that trans women are not actually women. But the progressive ideological excesses that originally took root in the late 2010s remain entrenched among those who purport to represent marginalised groups such as the LGB and T communities—the very same communities that, ironically, once had to fight hardest for their own free-speech rights.

Rescuing the Radicalized Discourse on Sex and Gender: Part Two of a Three-Part Series

Our choice of words affects the way we think. That’s why we spend so much time fighting over which terms to use, whether it’s “undocumented immigrants” versus “illegal aliens,” “foetuses” versus “unborn babies,” or “militants” versus “terrorists.” In recent years, the question of word choice has figured prominently

QuilletteAllan Stratton

The Polari Prize is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, of course. No doubt, many people reading this had never even heard of it before the controversy surrounding John Boyne. Nevertheless, the mob-like behaviour that the anti-Boyne faction has put on display supplies proof, for those looking for it, that the social-justice left really hasn’t learned anything from the last decade (including Donald Trump’s re-election, which many political analysts believe was won in significant part because of voter backlash on the transgender file).

The greatest threat to civil liberties in many parts of the world is now the populist right. But it’s harder to marshal resistance against illiberal conservatives when illiberal progressives keep showing the world why they alienated mainstream society so thoroughly in the first place. If your brand of politics is so extreme and uncompromising that even a celebrated gay author such as John Boyne is on your enemies list, who, pray tell, are you hoping to enlist as an ally?