British journalist (born 1969)
Rosemary George is a British journalist and author. She has explored topics such as refugees, sanitation and human waste, and human blood in her books.[1]
Education
In 1992, George earned a First-Class Honours BA in Modern Languages from Somerville College, Oxford, followed by an MA in international politics in 1994 at the University of Pennsylvania, as a Thouron Scholar and Fulbright Fellow.[2]
Career
In 1994, she embarked on her writing career as an intern at The Nation magazine in New York City. Subsequently, she assumed the roles of senior editor and writer at COLORS magazine, a bilingual publication published by the Benetton clothing company. It focused on "local cultures with global reach," which was distributed in eighty countries. The magazine was initially based in Rome, later relocating to Paris and then Venice.[3]
In 1999, she moved to London to freelance. She has contributed her writing to publications including the Independent on Sunday, Arena, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Details, Bad Idea,[4] and UnHerd.[5] She also served as a war correspondent in Kosovo for Condé Nast Traveler magazine and notably attended Saddam Hussein's birthday party[3] on two occasions. George wore a burqa, which she called a "hideous concept," provided by her translator.[6]
Until 2010, she held the position of senior editor at large for Tank, a London-based quarterly magazine covering fashion, art, reportage, and culture.
She has written four non-fiction books:
- A Life Removed (Penguin 2004), which explores the daily reality of refugees and displaced people in and from Liberia.[7]
- The Big Necessity: the Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters (Metropolitan/Portobello 2008),[7] which was described as the one of "best nonfiction books of the new millennium" by the New York Times.[8]
- Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate, which was released in August 2013. The UK title is Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry the Brings you 90% of Everything; it was also released August 2013.[8] George lived for five weeks aboard a shipping container ship to research her book on the shipping industry,[9][7] and a week patrolling for pirates on a Portuguese navy frigate.[8]
- Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood (Metropolitan Books, 2018).[1] Her book Nine Pints was chosen by Bill Gates as one of his "Five Books... Should Read This Summer" in 2019.[1]
Political Views
Gender critical opinions
George has been vocally critical of the transgender community. In September 2023, she signed an open letter from the organization Sex Matters urging UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to "lead the fightback" against what the organization characterized as attacks on gender critical individuals.[10]
George ended a Substack post criticizing UK politicians Matt Hancock and Suella Braverman by writing:
And I wonder whether the current gender fluid trans nonsense and its accompanying violence and lack of debate is because being trans is something to cling to, and when you hold tight to something, you get violent in its defence. I’m not talking here about the men who have co-opted trans rights into the women-silencing misogyny that has captured so many institutions. They will get their reckoning, one day. I mean instead the young girls and young women, mostly, who cling to the new cult because it is accessible and makes a certain sense, and they are led willingly by adults who should know better into surgery and hormones that can wreck lives.[11]
George has characterized transgender women's access to public bathrooms as "letting intact men into women’s toilets," adding, "Yes, not all men. But yes, some men. Those some men who will take any chink in security to exploit it, to be a predator. George is against unisex public toilets.[12] She said of transgender women as potential threats,
- Not all trans people are predators.
- Hardly any trans people are predators.
- But a predator can get a long way with his predation by pretending to be a trans woman. No better place to commit a crime than at sea; no better way to abuse women and girls probably with impunity than to be a man who notices how useful it is to pretend to be a woman. See, prisoners, often in for sexual assault, suddenly finding that they are women after all and being put in women’s prisons. Men in women’s refuges. Don’t get me started on men in women’s sports.[13]
George has referred to transwomen athletes as "mediocre men who pretend to be women"[14] and has called their achievements "female records held by men."[15] She has said only cisgender women should have access to hormone therapy, writing:
I wish that men who decide they’d like to pretend to be women did not need to use our precious HRT supplies to do that. I was told recently that HRT is being exchanged on a kind of black market by men experimenting with taking hormones. Experimenting? When these drugs are in some cases actually life-saving for menopausal women? How dare you.[16]
George criticized The Guardian for allowing a trans woman to take part in a blind date as part of a series without disclosing to her date that she was transgender.[17] She has characterized the accusation of transphobia as one that's "constantly lobbed at anyone who thinks biology is binary or that women and girls are entitled to single sex changing rooms/sports categories/prisons/refuges etc. It's nothing to do with trans folk, but just the delightful new woman-silencing misogyny."[18] George wrote that her 10-year-old niece reported she had classmates identifying as cats, adding, "She’s a level-headed youngster. So, not nonsense."[19] George has attributed transgenderism among children to "social contagion."[20]
Attacks on individuals and organizations
In 2018, Twitter required George to remove posts deadnaming transgender woman Jessica Yaniv. George posted screenshots of these posts after removing them; Twitter has required her to remove those as well. In 2022, she signed a letter to the Society of Authors calling for the removal of its Board of Management Chair over a perceived "sideswipe at JK Rowling."[21]
In December 2023, George retweeted a BBC post featuring trans Green Party candidate Melissa Poulton with the comment, "This is a man being a man in a mannish way."[22]
George supports Graham Linehan's stances on transgender issues, telling one critic, "If you think Graham an 'utter shitebag' then you will have to call me the same, as I agree with him and think his exposure of woman-silencing bullies is careful and reasonable. Unlike the people who hide behind so-called trans activism to bully & erase & abuse women."[23]
Religious beliefs
George's father, a vicar, died when she was 5 years old. George wrote of her father:
I have a box of his sermons that I keep meaning to read, and I’ve been thinking about him this week not just because of the anniversary of his death, or the fact that he so objected to the Americanization of Mothering Sunday into Mother’s Day that he wrote a sermon about it, but because I have been thinking about codes, and morality, and having an anchor in your life. I don’t believe in God, but I can see that God is a heck of an anchor.[24]
Other views
The Church of England paid for George to attend boarding school as a child. George has characterized the other education options available to her as "awful."[25] She has rejected the assertion that her attendance at boarding school and later at Oxford are examples of societal privilege.[26][27] George has called the concept of cultural appropriation "pish and tosh."[28]
Personal life
George has lived in Leeds since 2011.[30] She is a fell runner[31] and has written about suffering from severe endometriosis in a review of a book about a different topic.[32]
COVID-19 controversies
On May 1, 2022, the Guardian published an article by George about experiencing long COVID-19.[33] Some online readers took issue with the line, "My long Covid is suspected by my GP, since I never actually tested positive ..." George defended herself on Twitter by engaging with critics directly.[34][35][36][37] On November 8, 2023, George posted another account of her experience with COVID. She wrote that she believes she had COVID-19 despite having taken a test that produced a negative result.[38]
AirBnB controversy
George rents out a French house that was once a Vichy cafe and Gestapo spy station[39] on AirBnB.[40] In April 2023, after a renter secured a refund because the home lacked electricity, George detailed the incident publicly, referring to the renter as "a liar who had no evidence" and concluding, Air BNB does not protect hosts who behave in good faith."[41][42][43]
