The evening of 2 June 2019 is something of a ‘sliding doors’ moment in my life. I had just read a column in a local arts magazine called The Skinny, written by a notorious gender identity activist. In it, the columnist justified violent action against lesbians at Pride marches, defending tweets in which they had written: ‘Get in their faces, make them afraid. Debate never works, so fuck them up’. He admitted he had faced some backlash for his stance from ‘Terfs’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) but he ‘stood by what [he had] said’.
It was a far cry from what I was used to reading in this magazine. I tweeted politely to The Skinny: ‘Hello! One of your commentators here advocates violence against lesbian activists at Pride. I find it extraordinary that such views are given an airing in The Skinny…’ The backlash was extraordinary. My life changed forever.
These past five years of vilification have been challenging
Back then, I was a reasonably successful if financially unstable poet, writer, and live literature promoter. My work was precarious at times, but it was also liberating. The growing dominance of gender identity ideology in the Scottish literary world had started to unsettle me. I had watched it advance, from people being forced to introduce themselves using their pronouns, to a rise in finger-wagging if an event opened with a cordial ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen!’ – considered offensive to those who identify as ‘non-binary’. By 2019, I admit I was feeling fractious. A fundamental madness seemed to be taking over.
Nicola Sturgeon’s government then began to push for legal ‘self-ID’ which, in short, would allow individuals to change their legal sex based on self-declaration alone. The legal consequences were far from clear but little debate was permitted on the matter.
I had been growing deeply alarmed, too, by the sincerity with which gender identity activists – not just extremists, but friends of mine in the poetry world – embraced this new ideology. They began to insist that ‘woman’ is a social, subjective ‘gender’ category, not a material one, and that ‘trans women ARE women’, literally. Any questioning of this was met with the label ‘Terf’ – and all the psychological, social, and economic harm that comes with it.
My debut non-fiction book, Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars, published this month by Polity, explores these harms. While identity ideology exerts an influence in many sectors, ‘elite’ areas like the arts are especially susceptible. It is a rare publisher who will take the ‘risk’ of platforming a gender-critical writer such as myself.
Back in 2019, I had no plan to move into writing non-fiction. I’d tried to express my views on gender ideology in my last poetry stage-show, This Script. It was well-reviewed and perhaps naively, I felt I’d found a way to navigate these complex discussions in a creative way. But following the backlash to my tweet, I knew I needed to address these issues more directly.
I was lucky: Gerry Cambridge, the editor of the literary journal the Dark Horse, had watched my subsequent ‘hounding’ with alarm. He commissioned me to write about it in an essay published in 2020. I was then commissioned to write Hounded, connecting my own experiences to the phenomenon more broadly.
Above all, I wanted to point out what happens to women in the arts who vocally oppose gender identity ideology, and the high social and economic costs incurred. Women face violent threats, social ostracization and often successful attempts at economic sabotage. Artistic institutions are often complicit in this marginalisation.
After my tweet, I found myself increasingly losing work I had been booked for. I lost all my chairing roles for the Edinburgh Book festival, as well as being quietly dropped from work I used to carry out regularly for other literary organisations. Unlike my detractors, who suffer no comparable cost, I’ve faced professional consequences for continuing to write and speak openly about gender identity. Colleagues and institutions now quietly exclude me.
Recently, Cheltenham Literature Festival informed its chairs they must challenge any author who expresses ‘gender critical’ views, stating such opinions ‘do not reflect the views’ of the festival. Using my book as an example, the writer Polly Clark argued that this is a blatant admission that writers such as myself don’t stand a chance of being platformed. One of my most vocal critics, who was brutal in their condemnation of me, is featured in their program.
Meanwhile, the literary world’s isolation of dissenting voices is stark. The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a bestselling political anthology from Scotland published in June, drew a thousand-strong audience for its launch, yet every literary festival and organization in Scotland ignored it.
This ongoing erasure persists despite numerous employment tribunal wins for gender-critical women, the insights from the Cass Review, and growing public awareness about the complexities within the ‘trans rights’ discourse. The literary world remains one of the last strongholds of this ideology.
A recent example from my former circles is telling: Loud Poets, a Creative Scotland-funded poetry series, ran a fundraiser in March for Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC), timed to coincide with the tribunal of former ERCC employee Roz Adams, fired for her gender-critical beliefs. The fundraiser lauded the ERCC for being ‘inclusive’ and its detractors mere bigots. But the tribunal concluded that Adams had been subjected to a ‘heresy hunt’ by the trans-identifying director of ERCC, Mridul Wadhwa, for daring to question why the centre was not offering single-sex, trauma-informed services. Loud Poets have been silent following Adams’s successful tribunal outcome.
Representatives of Creative Scotland have been more vocal about my book. Alice Tarbuck, a Creative Scotland literature officer and part-time poet had, within 24 hours of Hounded being announced for pre-orders, contacted an Edinburgh bookstore and cautioned them for putting it on sale.
A few days after the publication of the 2019 column in The Skinny, the same columnist allegedly attempted to assault Julie Bindel outside the University of Edinburgh (something he denies, claiming he had not ‘raise[d] a fist’ but had attempted to push past security to speak to Bindel face to face). So had I not spoken out at the time of my tweet, I would have done so shortly after. These past five years of vilification have been challenging. Equally, I’ve watched new networks, publications, and platforms arise in response to this suppression. It is thanks to the courage of those who stand up to this pernicious ideology that I know the harm of being hounded will not be permanent.
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