Wakkerlands: the column that should be a column

Last Tuesday was the weekly language section wakeland by Jan Kuitenbrouwer not in the newspaper. Readers had to guess why, but whoever hung out on Twitter was more informed. There, Kuitenbrouwer himself let it be known that his column had encountered objections: ‘Piece rejected. Was about the word ‘womb’ and was deemed by the editorial board to be contrary to modern gender orthodoxy,” he wrote that first Tuesday.

The following Friday, he also published the unpublished column itself on Twitter. That put the matter on edge, because according to the editor-in-chief the text had not been explicitly rejected and it was nonsense that it should fit into what Kuitenbrouwer calls ‘modern gender orthodoxy’. There was, however, a discussion about editorial adjustments. And that took a very long time. Also appeared last Tuesday wakeland not in de Volkskrant and subsequently Kuitenbrouwer and the editor-in-chief did not agree on a compromise to continue the column. According to the editor-in-chief, a ‘final editorial dispute’ is wrongly translated into an ideological issue. ‘That makes further cooperation difficult, no matter how annoying we find it on both sides.’

wakeland was on the frontline of language. The name is a nod to woke language with which activists want to raise awareness about social injustice against minorities. Including the minority of transgender people that this column was about. Just like six previous columns, by the way. In this language battle, Kuitenbrouwer sees ‘orthodoxy’ that also makes victims, and against which he repeatedly goes to war. He did, in my eyes, with some sarcasm in wakeland and uninhibited in a similar column in the magazine HP†

A handful of readers have complained about this before. My answer was always that columnists simply have the freedom to express themselves indiscriminately, as the Volkskrant protocol also mentions. The editors themselves have always been nuanced about the emancipation of transgender people and the newspaper’s Style Book has quite progressive rules about the language used with regard to this group.

After the open quarrel on Twitter, other readers complained: why on earth should the word ‘womb’ not be used? de Volkskrant be allowed to? Another said he found it a relief to ‘read the newspaper without that weekly piece of dung’. Different opinions, agree. But they don’t have to end in the ending of a rubric. What went wrong?

Temporary section

The decision on the intended termination of wakeland was announced to the author months ago and has been extensively communicated with the author. It was never intended to be an endless series and conversations about the content were separate from it, according to the editors in chief. However, the author suspects the opposite, because especially with regard to gender issues, the debate was indeed about tone and content. But he does discuss the language aspects of culture wars. The battle in which key words such as ‘he’ and ‘she’ and ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are discussed is an important part of this. “If I couldn’t write about it regularly, it’s like a football columnist shouldn’t be allowed to write about Ajax.”

He acknowledges that his explicit position on this in another journal (HP) can seem difficult, so that readers no longer believe in a balanced approach. ‘But in HP I write about the ideology while the Volkskrant column is about the words. I’m professional enough to know that I have to separate those roles.’

The last column was not disapproved because of the word ‘womb’, everyone agrees on that. This is also apparent from the draft article with comments and suggestions from the deputy editor-in-chief, which shows a substantive discussion on essential points. Are all the facts correct? Is the fair to suggest with extreme examples that they form the daily discussion about transgender language struggle? The deputy editor-in-chief sees ‘a beleaguered group such as that of transgenders consistently portrayed in a shrill and mocking manner’. Kuitenbrouwer does not think the trans movement is such a beleaguered group at all and refuses to adopt the ‘deceptive rhetoric of its radical wing’. To make it even more complicated: without mentioning her name, the column indirectly debates with Volkskrantcolumnist Asha ten Broeke with whom Kuitenbrouwer has been at loggerheads for some time. The question is whether the reader understands what that is about.

Styling aids

I think all these discussion points are reasonable and understand that an editor-in-chief raises them in conversation with an author. But should such an in-depth debate be conducted on a column in which the author has a lot of freedom? It was therefore not a column but a section, says the editor-in-chief. That is an important distinction. Columnists do not have to adhere to rules for balanced reporting. ‘Styli such as exaggerating and deliberately one-sided messages are then permitted’, the protocol reports. In a section, someone can play loosely with the subject, but the author adheres to the journalistic rules and the Style Book.

Should Kuitenbrouwer consider himself a columnist? I understand the readers who thought he was. I thought so myself when I answered complaints from readers earlier. I saw only subtle difference between the critical word analyst in de Volkskrant and the fierce columnist in HP† The author did not often hear objections about other subjects on which he wrote with equal opinion. He was also part of the annual Volkskrant ‘columnist marathon’ in which 49 columnists and six cartoonists are united.

The fact that someone is a columnist does not mean that the editor-in-chief may not set limits or refuse articles. The newspaper is responsible for the publication and the editor-in-chief must be able to defend it. For what it’s worth, I’d rather read a column about gender-neutral language than a column. There are already so many opinions. I’d rather read a good research article that addresses Kuitenbrouwer’s sincere fear that young people can also become seriously confused by the ideology that gender is a choice.

Finally: this industrial accident is not unexpected. Shortly after my start as Ombudsman, I already informed the editor-in-chief that the status of many columnists is unclear. The line: ‘If there’s no column above, it is not a column’, does not hold in any case. Then, for example, Max Pam and Teun van der Keuken would not be columnists and one writing general practitioner would be and the other would not. The promise is now being made on this clarity.