Rose George
{{Short description|British journalist (born 1969)}}
{{about||the first lady of Rivers State, Nigeria|Rose A. George}}
{{more footnotes needed|date=April 2018}}
{{Use British English|date=May 2016}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=June 2023}}
{{Infobox writer
| name = Rose George
| image = File:Rose George on The Big Necessity.jpg
| caption = Rose George (2010)
| birth_date = 1969
| birth_place = England
| mother =
| education = Somerville College, Oxford (BA),
University of Pennsylvania (MA)
| occupation = Author & public speaker
| notableworks = Life Removed (2004),
The Big Necessity (2008),
Deep Sea & Foreign Going/Ninety Percent of Everything (2013),
Nine Pints (2018)
| website = {{URL|https://www.rosegeorge.com/}}
}}
Rose George is a British journalist and author. She has explored topics such as refugees, sanitation and human waste, and human blood in her books.{{Cite web|url=https://www.investors.com/news/five-books-bill-gates-says-you-should-read-this-summer/|title=Five Books Bill Gates Says You Should Read This Summer|first1=Matt|last1=Krantz|date=22 Feb 2019|website=Investor's Business Daily}}
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.{{cite web |url=http://www.thouronaward.org/docs/thouron_newsletter_fall09.pdf |title=Archived copy |accessdate=23 May 2017 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20130608155539/http://www.thouronaward.org/docs/thouron_newsletter_fall09.pdf |archivedate=8 June 2013 }}
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.{{cite web |url=https://www.allamericanspeakers.com/celebritytalentbios/Rose+George/387295 |title=All American Speaker's Bureau |access-date=2023-10-04}}
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,{{cite book |last1=Roberts |first1=Jack |last2=Stacey |first2=Daniel |title=Bad Idea Anthology: The Best of Modern Storytelling |date=22 May 2008 |publisher=Anova Books |isbn=9781906032302 }} and UnHerd.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2022-08-18 |title=If Joanne Harris won't defend women, I won't support her |url=https://unherd.com/thepost/if-joanne-harris-wont-defend-women-i-wont-support-her/ |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=UnHerd}} She also served as a war correspondent in Kosovo for Condé Nast Traveler magazine and notably attended Saddam Hussein's birthday party on two occasions. George wore a burqa, which she called a "hideous concept", provided by her translator.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-01-31 |title=I have no fear nor shrinking |url=https://rosegeorge.substack.com/p/i-have-no-fear-nor-shrinking |access-date=2024-01-24 |website=Rose George: some rambling}}
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.''{{Cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/13/deep-sea-rose-george-review|title=Deep Sea and Foreign Going by Rose George – review|first1=Sukhdev|last1=Sandhu|date=13 Sep 2013|website=The Guardian}}
- The Big Necessity: the Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters (Metropolitan/Portobello 2008), which was described as the one of "best nonfiction books of the new millennium" by the New York Times.{{Cite web|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/17/books/ninety-percent-of-everything-by-rose-george.html|title=Life on Ships That Make World Go Round|first1=Dwight|last1=Garner|date=16 Oct 2013|website=The New York Times}}
- 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. George lived for five weeks aboard a shipping container ship to research her book on the shipping industry,{{Cite web|url=https://www.npr.org/2013/08/14/211981786/shipping-the-invisible-industry-that-clothes-and-feeds-you|title=Shipping: The 'Invisible Industry' That Clothes And Feeds You|first1=Terry|last1=Goss|date=14 Aug 2013|website=NPR}} and a week patrolling for pirates on a Portuguese navy frigate.
- Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood (Metropolitan Books, 2018). Her book Nine Pints was chosen by Bill Gates as one of his "Five Books... Should Read This Summer" in 2019.
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.{{Cite web |last= |first= |date=2023-09-01 |title=Prime Minister, will you stand up to violence against women? |url=https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/prime-minister-will-you-stand-up-to-violence-against-women/ |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Sex Matters}}
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.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-03-21 |title=This is a Hancock triumph |url=https://rosegeorge.substack.com/p/this-is-a-hancock-triumph |access-date=2024-01-24 |website=Rose George: some rambling}}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.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2018-03-21 |title=Why women face longer toilet queues – and how we can achieve 'potty parity' |url=https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2018/mar/21/why-women-face-longer-toilet-queues-and-how-we-can-achieve-potty-parity |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=The Guardian}} She said of transgender women as potential threats,
George has referred to trans women athletes as "mediocre men who pretend to be women"{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-12-29 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1740704513466765619 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}} and has called their achievements "female records held by men".{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-12-29 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1740704083055419902 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}} She has said only cisgender women should have access to hormone therapy, writing:
- 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.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-01-18 |title=Able Seacat |url=https://rosegeorge.substack.com/p/able-seacat |access-date=2024-01-24 |website=Rose George: some rambling}}
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.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-09-01 |title=Parrots get bored |url=https://rosegeorge.substack.com/p/parrots-get-bored |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Substack}}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.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2019-11-30 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1200820460042293249 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}} 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".{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2019-11-05 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1191763990508179458 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}} 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".{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-06-24 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1672594364038520832 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}} George has attributed transgenderism among children to "social contagion".{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-06-24 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1672630612035870720 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}}
== 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".{{Cite web |last=Bindel |first=Julie |date=2022-08-16 |title=An Open Letter to the Society of Authors re Joanne Harris |url=https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-the-society-of |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Substack}}
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".{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-12-10 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1733951512630419887 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}}
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".{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2018-11-06 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1059806027053481984 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}}
= 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.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-03-21 |title=This is a Hancock triumph |url=https://rosegeorge.substack.com/p/this-is-a-hancock-triumph |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Substack}}
= 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".{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-11-17 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1725452238586265694 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}} She has rejected the assertion that her attendance at boarding school and later at Oxford are examples of societal privilege.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-11-17 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1725513613790560405 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}}{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-11-17 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1725513090521846159 |access-date=2024-01-20}} George has called the concept of cultural appropriation "pish and tosh".{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2024-01-05 |title=Fancy that |url=https://rosegeorge.substack.com/p/fancy-that |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Substack}}
Books
- A Life Removed (Penguin Books, 2004); {{ISBN|978-0141019055}}
- The Big Necessity (Metropolitan/Portobello, 2008); {{ISBN|9780805090833}}
- Deep Sea and Foreign Going (Portobello, 2013); {{ISBN|9781846272998}}, published in the US as Ninety Percent of Everything (Metropolitan Books, 2013); {{ISBN|9780805092639}}{{Cite web |title=Ninety Percent of Everything |url=https://www.rosegeorge.com/ninety-percent-of-everything |website=RoseGeorge.com |access-date=19 July 2023}}
- Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood (Metropolitan Books, 2018); {{ISBN|9781627796378}}
Personal life
George has lived in Leeds since 2011.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-11-03 |title=The Goat |url=https://rosegeorge.substack.com/p/the-goat |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Substack}} She is a fell runner{{Cite web|url=https://www.nybooks.com/online/2020/04/10/running-alone-together/|title=Running Alone Together|first1=Rose|last1=George|date=10 April 2020|website=The New York Times Review}} and has written about suffering from severe endometriosis in a review of a book about a different topic.{{Cite web|url=https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/06/period-kate-clancy-book-review/674335/|title=Women Aren't Just Small Men|first1=Rose|last1=George|date=9 June 2023|website=The Atlantic}}
= COVID-19 controversies =
On May 1, 2022, the Guardian published an article by George about experiencing long COVID-19.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2022-05-01 |title=I was a marathon runner with killer biceps – long Covid has stopped me in my tracks |url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/01/marathon-runner-long-covid-athletes?CMP=share_btn_tw |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=The Guardian}} 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.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2022-05-02 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1521204356200108033 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}}{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2022-05-02 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1521220995276840960 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}}{{Cite web |date=2022-05-03 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/wearethe76/status/1521415218651443200 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}}{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2022-05-03 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1521421151859351552 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}} On November 8, 2023, George posted [https://rosegeorge.substack.com/p/my-angry-arms 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.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-11-08 |title=My angry arms |url=https://rosegeorge.substack.com/p/my-angry-arms |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Substack}}
= AirBnB controversy =
George rents out a French house that was once a Vichy cafe and Gestapo spy station{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-04-05 |title=Gestapo ghosts |url=https://rosegeorge.substack.com/p/gestapo-ghosts |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Substack}} on AirBnB.{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |title=Rent my house |url=https://www.rosegeorge.com/rent-my-house |access-date=2024-01-20}} 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 claiming "Air BNB does not protect hosts who behave in good faith."{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-04-05 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1643564486870040576 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}}{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-04-05 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1643564508659548161 |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=Twitter}}{{Cite web |last=George |first=Rose |date=2023-04-05 |title=Tweet |url=https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1643564511201296384 |access-date=2024-01-20|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240429202545/https://twitter.com/rosegeorge3/status/1643564486870040576 |archive-date=2024-04-29 |website=Twitter}}
References
{{reflist}}
Sources
- Rose, George. THE BIG NECESSITY. 1st edition. New York, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008.
- George, Rose.[https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/opinion/28george.html "... And Sewage, Too"], nytimes.com. 28 April 2010.
External links
- {{Official website|http://rosegeorge.com/}}
- {{TED speaker}}
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:George, Rose}}
Category:British expatriates in the United States