Here's what it's like to be 'cancelled' for your beliefs amid trans debate

Poet Jenny Lindsay, who found herself hounded for her ‘perfectly ordinary’ gender critical views, urges people who don’t think cancel culture exists to consider the evidence laid out in a new report

What does it mean to ‘cancel’ a writer? Is a ‘culture’ of cancellation really happening? Are the numerous tales of ‘houndings’ of mainly female authors solely a problem for the individuals targeted? Or, as many have long suspected, are these new trends harming the sustainability and integrity of the wider publishing world?

Addressing such questions is the impetus behind a new report, Everyday Cancellation, commissioned by SEEN (Sex, Equality and Equity Network) in Publishing, in partnership with human rights organisation Sex Matters.

Written by researcher Matilda Gosling, the report is a shocking compendium. It details how an entire literary ecology of writers, publishers, and literary institutions have operated to effectively shut out ‘gender critical’ (GC) writers, editors, and others in publishing.

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Campaigners celebrate the recent Supreme Court ruling about the definition of the word 'woman' (Picture: Henry Nicholls) | AFP via Getty Images

Discrimination, harassment and self-censorship

It is impossible to cover the extent of its findings in a short column. But I would urge anyone insisting that ‘cancel culture doesn’t exist’ to digest it. Reading the tales of self-censorship, discriminatory policies, and internal harassment of some in various publishing houses, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that GC views are shared by the majority of the UK population.

Those views can be summarised as: women, as a category definition, are adult human females, and this definition is vital for women’s cultural and legal protections. Additionally, such writers question the speed at which the counter view, known as ‘gender identity ideology’, which views ‘woman’ as a social category rather than a fixed reality, has spread rapidly throughout society.

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The number of books pushing this controversial set of ideas in children’s publishing is a key concern highlighted in the report. Reflected back in prize lists and which writers are invited to conduct school visits, publishing houses are aiding a contested belief system being taught to young people as fact. As literary agent Matthew Hamilton says, this is clear evidence of “indoctrination”.

I am one of the case studies in Gosling’s report. Like Hamilton, and only five others, I waived my anonymity. This is not due to any particular bravery.

“For most of history, ‘Anonymous’ has been a woman,” Virginia Woolf said. I simply refuse the silence this cultural atmosphere has imposed on so many.

Open hostility in much of literary world

GC viewpoints are perfectly ordinary. They also concur with the law of the land. This was clarified with finality by the recent Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland versus Scottish ministers.

But in much of the literary world, there is open hostility against anyone who expresses them. Even if my views were not certain on this issue, I would still find the treatment meted out to GC authors unacceptable and often frightening.

I have told my own ‘hounding’ story many times; it is difficult to summarise its intensity. I first tripped the wire in 2019, setting in motion a profoundly isolating, years-long period of near-constant harassment, culminating in the loss of my entire former livelihood as a poet and literary events programmer.

What is often not realised is that my hounding has never ceased, despite my having successfully written my way through it. Like many, I grow weary of highlighting every incident – but it is an extraordinary treatment to become used to.

Ideology trumps sales

The Everyday Cancellation report outlines the scaffolding that props up a literary-sector hounding: an individual is targeted for some ‘misdemeanour’; institutions turn a blind eye or go along with it; those who hound are platformed and their targets ostracised; bystanders remain silent while self-censoring and fretting.

Meanwhile, publishers push gender-identity titles that sell about 3,000 copies while giving six-figure advances to the trans-identified authors who write them. GC writers get comparatively small advances, and tiny publicity budgets, then sell – in some cases - hundreds of thousands of copies internationally, as was the case with Helen Joyce’s Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality.

Ideological motivations are clearly trumping both the commercial interests of publishers, and the sensible programming decisions of festivals. This has long baffled those of us aware of these numbers.

The report also contains a wake-up call for those who enjoy a bit of Scottish exceptionalism. Of the highlighted areas of particular concern? “Children’s publishing”. And “Scotland”.

Sorrow for a world that could have been

Arts funding body Creative Scotland, the report concludes, “appears not to have given proper consideration to its public-sector equality duty”, by implementing priorities that are discriminatory towards GC writers.

Its stance is part of the reason that Scottish arts organisations in particular seem to be “shaped by transactivism”, given they follow Creative Scotland’s lead.

As someone so affected by this stifling cultural climate, I’ve thanks as well as sorrow for this sobering report. Thanks, because it confirms so fully what isolated and hounded authors have long known. Sorrow, as I wish for a world where it never had to be written.

In that world, the anonymous author who reports being reprimanded by his agent for having a sympathetic GC character in his submitted (and rejected) manuscript has just gained a great review for a portrayal of a realistic older female protagonist.

The unnamed fiction writer who discovered her own publicist had tried to get her deplatformed from a book festival? She’s sitting in an Author’s Yurt somewhere, signing multiple copies.

Publishers once again look for quality, sales, and not propaganda. Children are not being pushed wholly confusing views. A books world focused on quality, grappling difficult issues, and doing so with creativity.

It’s a world I once knew. I hope this report will chip away at the forces that destroyed it, and that ‘Anonymous’ can one day write freely, without such fear and punishment.

Jenny Lindsay is a writer, poet, essayist, and author of Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars