Jack Monroe quits Twitter ‘for the good of their mental health’
Jack Monroe (Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images)
Author and journalist Jack Monroe has quit Twitter, writing a lengthy post explaining their history with the platform and saying their mental health must come first.
Monroe shared the lengthy post today following a Twitter battle with a Bath Conservative Party councillor who described parents who could not feed their child for £10 a week as “indolent or dysfunctional” .
The now deleted tweet from the Twitter account of Bath Conservatives read: “Tim Warren, the leader of the council, apologised for the tweet. It read: “The reality may be indolent or dysfunctional parents or more likely parents who simply don’t know how to feed their children well.
“The reality may be indolent or dysfunctional parents or more likely parents who simply dont know how to feed their children well. If absolutely-not-a-Tory Jack Monroe @BootstrapCook could feed themself & their child for £10 a week – not easily, but adequately – most people can.”
Monroe’s popular blog ‘Cooking on a Bootstrap’ included their personal need to feed themself and their child for £10 a week in times of financial difficulty.
RELATED: Jack Monroe comes out as trans
The council later refused to reveal who sent the tweet.
In the lengthy post today, Monroe said they were quitting “for the good of their mental health”.
They wrote: “I’m really quite sad to be writing this but I have thought about it long and hard and it seems to be the best thing for my mental and physical health, so with a heavy heart and a weighty self loathing…
“I first came into the public eye in 2012 as a struggling single mum on the dole. I wrote about politics, poverty and austerity and recipes from tins and scraped up change. I have worked with the Trussell Trust, Food Chain, Magic Breakfast, Oxfam CPAG, MPs, Parliament, several political parties, in London, Manchester, Scotland, Tanzania and more. The very heart of my work is in alleviating food poverty, teaching peolpe to cook, livingin wages, cheap recipes, and survival in austerity.
“I was warned early on not to come out as gay because it would be ‘distracting and damaging’. I did it anyway. When I came out as non-binary (genderfluid/queer) it was quite unheard of in mainstream media and there was an inevitable circus around it. I gave interviews hoping it would braden understanding and give other genderqueer people a vouce. In return I lost a £30k book deal, had to crowdfund that book (a process which has completely done me in), and invited a whole word of abuse from across the political and feminist spectrums.”
“I have spent the last 2 years attempting to gently (and sometimes, less gently) defend womens rights AND trans rights (caveat – trans women are women, this is not an either/or situation), to educate, inform, support, explain, but at great personal and emotional cost. I get things wrong. I do my best. I can only speak for myself. And I get viciously pilloried on a daily basis, piled on, inundated with people who scream in their dozens about free speech while freely speaking at me that I am an atrocious person for daring to want to push outside of my ‘little woman’ box.
Continuing: “I feel the core of my work has been buried under the endless and exhausting bollocks of flamethrowing on social media. Most of the people who genuinely need my work dont have the lucury of concerning themselves with my tits or chromosomes – they need fed and housed and hope and wages, not to see me tiresomely drawn into fight after fight after fight. Every minute I spend on justifying my clothing choices or crying because 50 people are dogpilling me with personal insults is a minute I am not spending doing my most important work.
“I am and always will be a genderqueer androgynous little dyke, but I’m coming of Twitter for the good fo my mental health. I have been in enough abusive relationships are suffering as a result of what I experience on here every day.
“I’m getting back in the kitchen. I will continue to fight for womens rights, and for trans rights, and for human rights (again trans women are women), but this is not the best place for me to do it.
Ending with: “Thanks for the last few years, and goodbye.”
Monroe last year pulled out of being a candidate for MP in the 2017 general election.
RELATED: Jack Monroe: I was a victim of domestic abuse
In previous weeks, Monroe criticised Liberal Democrats leader Tim Farron, who has said being gay is not a sin, but hwas slow to answer whether or not gay sex is a sin.
Controversial columnist and broadcaster Katie Hopkins in 2017 lost her appeal over a legal battle with Jack Monroe.
Monroe won libel proceedings against Hopkins after she tweeted untrue claims about the vandalism of a war memorial.
