Prologue

Writers are often encouraged to imagine their ‘ideal reader’. A reader who will love what is written, engage with it wholeheartedly, reaching the concluding chapter with no criticism whatsoever. Given the provocation of my concluding chapter (‘What If We’re Right?’) it may be assumed that my ‘ideal reader’ is someone who belongs to that ‘we’. Given the blunt title of the book, ‘Hounded’, a reader may conclude that the ‘we’ are women who have had that experience.

My subtitle gives a clue about one of my motivations for writing this book. I have skin in the game, so to speak. Though neither famous, wealthy, nor a powerful, influential legislator, I am one of the countless number of women who have been negatively affected to the point of harm due to speaking out against gender identity ideology and activism. In my case, the hounding started in earnest in June 2019 after I strongly and publicly criticized the justifications made by a local activist for violence against women they deem ‘TERFs’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).1 The consequences of ‘cancel culture’, the illdefined but useful shorthand phrase for what songwriter Nick Cave has described as ‘mercy’s antithesis’, is something I have been living through for – at the time of writing – more than four years.2 From the summer of 2019 to the Covid-induced lockdown of 2020, I went from being a well-respected, financially precarious but reasonably successful poet, performer and freelance live literature events programmer to feeling forced out of my then home city of Edinburgh, a city whose cultural sector I had been contributing to for most of my adult life.

I have written an extensive account of my own experiences elsewhere, first in an essay for The Dark Horse, an international poetry and literary magazine, and then in a follow-up essay for the Daily Mail in 2023.3 In my essay for The Dark Horse, which is more than 8,000 words long, I start the third part of the account with the words ‘There is a very human cost to this …’. It is a sentence that is doing a great deal of work.

Like many women who gain some level of prominence in their specific sector or community when they become a target of gender identity activists, I have not spoken publicly about everything that has happened to me since I first spoke out in 2019. Suffice to say, many of the harms I recount in this book are ones I have personally experienced – to varying extents. I have no wish to centre myself and my own story in this volume, though it is inevitable that it will feature throughout. It would be disingenuous, however, for me to give the impression to my readers that I am not at least partly motivated by a sense of injustice at what I have experienced. I have empathy for women in this battle based on far more than mere agreement, where I do agree, with their specific views. I know the very ‘human cost’ of what they have faced.

Since the 2010s I have watched with growing unease as gender identity ideology mainstreamed, bringing with it extreme harms in itself but also baffling, disproportionate consequences for women who oppose it. I knew that the costs of speaking out could be high – personally, professionally and otherwise. Like others, I was nevertheless hopeful that people would trust that my motivations were grounded in genuine concern, and, like for so many others, those hopes have often been dashed. However, when clear-eyed and not befuddled by the psychological, social and economic consequences of experiencing what I call a ‘hounding’, it is possible to note the pattern of harm women such as myself face. Every woman faces treatment that is strikingly similar, though, depending on circumstances, it can differ in terms of visibility, survivability and scale.

I must state at the outset, to address possible criticism, that it would be impossible to recount the hounding, by name, in full detail, of every single woman who has been affected in the gender wars. When making a list of such women from around the world, I reached more than two hundred names – women whose cases I was already familiar with – before realizing that I must narrow the focus. My aim here is to highlight the pattern of harms being experienced. In the main, I will focus on women in the UK, dubbed, as it has been, ‘TERF Island’. I will also focus primarily on Scotland in my final chapter, ‘Democratic Harms’, as it is a useful case study in how ‘houndings’ are perpetuated due to the push for legislative reforms where the dominant political leadership takes a ‘No Debate’ standpoint on the controversial issue of ‘self-ID’.

Though my personal experience is of the way this battle has played out in the UK – particularly in the arts – this is a global issue: both the harms to women and the consequences of pushing back against self-ID in law and culture are replicated in country after country. Wherever gender identity ideology is mainstreamed, enshrined in law and thus resisted, the activist tactics of attempted silencing and reputational damage are the same whether one is a French bar owner, a Spanish politician, a Canadian feminist, a Norwegian lesbian filmmaker, or the most famous children’s writer in the world.4

The title of my Conclusion is inspired by J.K. Rowling’s comments on the podcast series ‘The Witch Trials of JK Rowling’, hosted by The Free Press. Rowling has become something of a lightning rod for the excesses of online gender identity activism, something she was aware would happen when she entered this battle in late 2019. The final episode of the podcast series is titled ‘What If You’re Wrong?’, which host Megan Phelps-Roper asserts is the most important question someone should ask themselves if they find themselves unquestioningly following any ideology or belief-system. A former member of the Westboro Baptist Church, whose tactics have included picketing dead soldiers’ funerals with anti-gay religious propaganda, Phelps-Roper is well placed to question people who speak with certainty about ideological issues.5 Rowling’s reply to being asked the question, in reference to those who malign her, was: ‘If I’m wrong? Honestly? Hallelujah. If I’m wrong? Great. People aren’t being harmed. But if you are wrong … you have created a climate, quite a threatening climate, in which whistleblowers and young people themselves are being intimidated out of raising concerns.’6

This book’s ideal reader is anyone willing to consider that they might be wrong. It is for anyone willing to consider that women hounded as, variously, ‘TERFs’, ‘bigots’ or even ‘fascists’, for views I will argue are perfectly rational, might just be, at least partly, right. It is for people who have become caught up in this battle – on all sides – and it is particularly written for those who simply have no idea what on earth is happening but who are curious, perhaps disquieted, by the fraught nature of this debate. It is also written for those countless women whose stories don’t tend to make the news, who lack the cultural or political power to find redress.

I write on the assumption that readers have a basic level of knowledge of this arena – at the very least that there is a cultural and legislative battle happening – but I have tried to write with the hopeful belief that some readers will not be familiar with all aspects of the topic; perhaps unfamiliar with the names and experiences of even some of the very high-profile women (to feminists and gender activists) whose cases illuminate the harms that I argue are being inflicted. Other readers will be very familiar with these stories; for them, I hope that condensing all these experiences together outlines a pattern that has been crystallized into a useful package for analysis.

While there are notable examples of men facing similar harms for opposing gender identity ideology, I justify my decision to focus specifically on the harms to women given the existential nature of this debate. Simply put, definitions of ‘female’ and ‘woman’ are not trivial matters. Women as a class are paying a far higher price than men for opposing gender identity ideology because it is our very category definition whose boundaries are being blurred. Our boundaries have had to be defended by generation after generation of women. The continuing societal problem of male violence against women is not something that has somehow been solved, and it is precisely as a protection from this that most ‘safe spaces’ for females – and females only – were created.

Women are harmed on three levels by gender identity ideology and its activism: by the demands of the ideology itself, and then for speaking out about it. On top of that, they are further punished for highlighting what activists do to them after they speak out, in an attempt to silence them on both counts. It is a heady experience for all women subjected to it.

Those who are most affected by the push to blur the definition of ‘woman’ include lesbians, working-class women, female prisoners, women working in, or requiring, rape crisis and domestic violence services, and disabled women who require intimate care.7 However, some of the most well-known...