How trans activists hound female writers into silence

Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars, Scottish poet Jenny Lindsay’s new book, opens with a childhood memory. She is learning arithmetic when her teacher wrongly accuses her of making a mistake. When asked to count how many eggs are in a picture, Lindsay says there are five. But her teacher says otherwise. Lindsay relates this episode to her experiences of today’s gender wars. Like the teacher, those who think she is a ‘hateful TERF’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) expect her to believe and say something she knows not to be true.

So what are her ‘heretical’ beliefs? Lindsay argues that females are distinct from males, and that their difference from men has implications for the way society is organised. As a result, women must be free to meet and discuss the issues that affect them. So far, we might think, so unremarkable. Yet as Lindsay knows only too well, expressing such lawful, reasonable views can prompt a virulent response from trans activists and their myriad supporters.

She discovered this first-hand in June 2019. A transwoman writing for an arts magazine had written:

‘Take out the TERF trash. Get in their faces. Make them afraid. Debate never works so fuck them up.’

Lindsay tweeted her shock at this angry outburst, saying it was ‘extraordinary that such views are given an airing’. This statement was enough to nearly end her career as a poet and performer.

Without knowing it, her tweet set trans activists after her. Over the following weeks and months, she was the subject of online attacks and malicious smears. As venues were flooded with calls not to give this ‘TERF’ a platform, her work slowly dried up.

Lindsay, who describes herself as ‘an old-fashioned liberal’, retains faith in the value, and necessity, of debate. In Hounded, she analyses the ways in which women who speak out in defence of their rights are silenced.

Lindsay’s prose is delivered with scrupulous caution. Her tone is that of a mother with a cranky toddler, or a girlfriend talking round a man with a temper. She also deals with an ancient female temptation – to minimise the harms visited upon us. It wasn’t that bad, we like to tell ourselves. We’re resilient – not snowflakes.

Non-fiction has its uses, as Hounded expertly attests. But a novel – or horror film – might better convey Lindsay’s experience of being hounded. It would tell the story of activists choosing to hunt a woman down. It would show how they work in packs, organising pickets, petitions, pile-ons in an attempt to cancel her.

It could also look at how the heroine risks being consumed by anger. By grief for the friends she has lost. By the pain caused by the false accusations. It could show her struggle against her inner disbelief that, yes, she has lost her living because she believes in the reality of biological sex.

I was ‘hounded’, too – after a tweet expressing scepticism about gender-identity ideology. It cost me my job and my reputation, which counts for a lot. For each hounded woman who manages to remake herself, and re-establish her reputation, there are many more whose careers never recover.

What many people might not realise is that the hounding of women who defend sex-based rights is often secretive and surreptitious. An actual hunt, with its coats and horns, its horses and, of course, its hounds, is seen and heard. Aside from a few high-profile cancellations, the hunting down of gender-critical women is often far less visible. It is as much about what doesn’t happen as what does.

Here is one example. In 2018, academics Heather Brunskell-Evans and Michele Moore published a collection of essays, Inventing Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body. As a philosopher and a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Brunskell-Evans decided that the Friends House bookshop in London was an ideal venue for the book launch.

The plan was scuppered by the most senior employee at Friends House. The reason? The mere presence of Inventing Transgender Children and Young People in the book shop would apparently cause trans staff to feel ‘unsafe’. The launch would also attract violent protesters. Brunskell-Evans is of the generation of Friends that blockaded nuclear bases. That a Quaker might decide a book launch was dangerous seemed unbelievable.

We could dismiss this as wacky behaviour from a once-respected sect. But this skittishness and spinelessness has spread to major companies, universities and charities, too.

Take Cheltenham Literature Festival, which is currently celebrating its 75th anniversary. On the Charity Commission website, the festival asserts that its objective is ‘promote the arts… and advance education’. It has certainly done so in the past. Both Doris Lessing and Salman Rushdie have appeared there.

But it has now fallen prey to gender ideology and the censorship that comes with it. In a leaked email, the festival instructs those chairing this year’s events to disassociate the organisation from any speaker voicing ‘an opinion that could be deemed controversial’.

I’ve run similar events and concede there are times for a chair to step in. (I recall an evening with a lapsed Catholic and a new convert, who almost came to blows over a point of doctrine.) But the Cheltenham Literature Festival is not just aiming to avoid fights – it is also aiming to avoid any discussion that challenges contemporary orthodoxies or could cause controversy. So chairs are asked to step in when ‘views are expressed that may be harmful’. Seven examples of risky, taboo subjects are provided, with ‘gender-critical views’ topping the list. ‘Potentially problematic views on race, religion and ethnicity’ come in third, while ‘widely disputed conspiracy theories’ bring up the rear.

Authors, keen to keep their reputations spotless, are sure to toe the line. But is this the best way to ‘advance education’? Or does it constitute a retreat from learning? Perhaps from literacy itself?

Few of us want to be hounded. When free speech is under threat like this, our instinct is to conform, adapt. But as the young Jenny Lindsay discovered, this will not save us. Despite knowing her first answer was correct she rewrote it, saying that five eggs amounted to six. Doing so did not earn her a tick. Instead, ‘I was commanded to hold out my hands and was thwacked three times with the ruler… in front of some scared and some delighted peers.’

Like Jenny’s classmates, some may delight in the houndings of others. Many of us are certainly glad that we’re not being hit. But there comes a time when we have to stand up for what we believe is right.

Sibyl Ruth worked in the arts for three decades. In 2022, she was hounded out of the literary sector.

Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars, by Jenny Lindsay, is published by Polity Press.