"All That You Are Is a TERF"
dealing with the dehumanising attitudes of gender identity activists
I believe it was 2021 when I first saw myself written about online as if I were dead. I could check, were I motivated to do so. I’ve kept a detailed written journal of every single incident in the gender wars since 2016. These journals predate my own hounding by three years; telling a story of rising horror at what I was witnessing, slowly suffocating - as I was then - in Edinburgh’s live poetry scene, as the majority of people around me twisted themselves in knots to become gender identity believers. But the tweet - for it was, of course, a tweet - is nestling somewhere amongst the bazillion unsorted, uncropped screenshots of people saying crap and often downright cruel things about me, including ones lambasting my invented beliefs (none of them have yet articulated my actual ones) and my character. Again, this will be another thing that all hounded women will be familiar with, particularly those who had any means to get something approaching justice for their treatment in an Employment Tribunal. Should the masochism become strong, perhaps I will delve into all of mine one night for a chuckle.
By 2021, of course, my hounding was in full-swing. I was two years into ‘The Madness’ as I call it affectionately, cooing at it sometimes to take the edges off its brutality. “Ocht, ye wee Madness! Getting all roasty-toasty by the fires of hell you wish upon thine enemies!” On Twitter one day, I saw the spouse of an English poet I had periodically booked from time to time and who I believe works in academia, say, in reply to one of my hounders, something along the lines of: “I didn’t know her very well, but her demise has been both delicious and shocking to watch.” I am paraphrasing, but there was that common combination of glee and cancellation (‘demise’). And I felt thwacked in the face. I’d made this guy toast once, if I recall correctly, when he had stayed in my Edinburgh flat with his then-partner-now-wife who I had booked for a literary cabaret. Run in the days pre-funding, when the industry-standard fees I paid were offset by door money (and in the case of a loss, my teaching salary) the use of a flatmate’s room or the couch to put up guests from outside Scotland was common back then. Once I had funding, this was upgraded to Premier Inns and the like, though some poets and writers were very demanding and would insist on more luxury. But, back in 2011 or whatever it was, bed and board was sharing a flat with me, flatmates, and my grumpy rescue cat Hera. I cannot remember if she came out for these particular guests, though as she hated everyone except me it seems unlikely. (In hindsight, this is perhaps because most of my pals back then were poets…)
I didn’t know him very well, but I hadn’t realised this toast-munching gentleman would one day become the type of man who cheers on a freelance poet and events organiser’s hounding. If I had I’d have burnt his breakfast, the little squirrel that he is. But, I digress.
Given the extremity of what some other people have done and said to and about me since 2019, perhaps to a lay reader, this man’s comment isn’t one that should have stuck in my head as long as it has done. However, a ‘cancellation’ is a type of death. Certainly, there is very little that remains of the me I was before this happened. By which I mean, the me that had already worked out exactly what I wanted to do with my life and was very much doing it; had a plan worked out to keep doing it; and who had a Plan B if it didn’t work out. Both Plan A and B have been robbed by my hounding (as I will explain shortly), and as I traverse the possibilities of Plan C, I face a constant fight between “you are already dead, just accept it,” and “nope, keep going, the cats deserve nicer biscuits and FFS wouldn’t it be nice to be able to stop having panic attacks just walking to Aldi? Sort yer heid out, Lindsay, ye daftie. Oh, cooey wee Madness! Ocht, yer not that big are ye….”
I’ve no desire whatsoever to splurge the entirety of the sorry state of my mental health from time to time on to the internet, to be poked over and laughed over by those who find my “demise” “delicious.” Suffice to say, the coping mechanisms that I’d built up over years since my diagnosis, which came in my early twenties following a hospitalisation, have melted like so much butter into the toast of my enemies. Delicious, right? I have to say that I mistrust my bogstandard diagnosis of ‘chronic depression and anxiety.’ It had a fancier name, I honestly can’t remember nor really care, and after a brief period of medicalisation, which was horrendous, I’ve chosen to self-manage it; partly because I just find it quite boring, to be honest. However, given the psychological effects of a hounding, on top of this daily bloody thing anyway, it has not been fun trying to sort myself out - and it has been an utter pain in the hole for those closest to me too. The guilt that I carry due to their frustrations doesn’t help, but is nobody’s fault but my own. The Madness is small, keep it small, just keep going with only the positives allowed entry into your noggin…Works sometimes. Othertimes, well…
I am afraid that is why I made no promises to write a weekly Substack, as I knew fine well that I’d probably break that promise from time to time because when yer caught in a spiral of crying panickedly into the courgettes in aisle two, and trying to brave face it to be able to jump on a stage or attend a book launch or what-not, writing lovely little prose essays, as I had planned to, isn’t easy nor a priority. Getting the fuck out of bed and doing things you know will make things better like reading a crime novel, making peanut butter toast (and none for your enemies), or taking a long, hard walk in the Ayrshire gales, for example.
What an overreaction!What self-obsession! Someone might say this who does not understand what motivated me in my very-much-former life. It wasn’t money, though I had worked my arse off to ensure a stable enough income was possible for the life I wanted to lead. It wasn’t publishing deals. It wasn’t fame (I was a performance poet for fuck’s sake, I’d have picked a rather different art form if my own fame was something that motivated me.) What was it? Well. Plan A was contributing to a very healthy and thriving live literature scene in a city and a country I loved; including scouting new and exciting work; finding the funds to support and mentor such talent; showcasing them at events from club nights to National Theatres; small storytelling centres to the Royal Lyceum; working to ensure fairness in the opportunities and awards system of a small nation’s literary world (I was at one point on the council of the Saltire Society, attempting this mission - I failed, alas, resigning in 2020 for this reason, though promising things are happening there now I must add), and yes, creating my own poetry stage-shows to address what I felt were pertinent problems politically. As I say in my forthcoming book, however, I never had any desire to address gender identity ideology head-on in my artistic work; though my last and final show centred the material reality of being female, it artistically rather than argumentatively laboured the point.
Crucial to the life I was living was my independence. While I sometimes collaborated or was briefly engaged as a freelancer by literary institions, and while I regularly applied for public funds, my own decision-making, curations and creations had to be free from other people’s often obtuse ‘corporate values’ or ‘codes of conduct for staff members.’ I was nobody’s staff member but my own. This was important, because sometimes, those gatekeepers for funds, awards and opportunities, do not remotely enage in enough outreach. They don’t, for example, do anywhere near enough to support working-class writers and artists, and they certainly weren’t responsible for the newly invigorated live poetry scene either - that was a mutual creation of many talented and passionate grassroots and some professional, independent organisers. No cultural edict created that scene from circa 2011 - 2015; the people who built it did. From late 2014 onwards, cracks showed, and…. well, that’s another essay to be honest. Actually. (I promise the commissioners of said essay, should they be reading, that I am close to finishing! Erk.)
In my former life, I did hours and hours of unpaid mentoring of those wanting to pursue funding; hours and hours helping emerging poets chase fees they were owed; hours of informal mentoring of other people’s work. And I did so willingly and grateful to be getting out of bed every morning knowing what I was doing and wanting to. Not everyone ever gets that, even briefly, and I was always aware of its precarity. But, goodness, how free I was for a time! I had also become a bit of a ‘talking heid’ for columnists and political panel shows, having been involved in the Scottish independence referendum’s grassroots cultural campaign. (What happened there is another thing entirely, but I note that my ability to entirely understand the opposite sides views and totally respect them was something that used to be rather praised. Again, I digress…)
Of course, as I wrote regularly in my 2016 - 2023 journals, the massive push by The Madness (ocht, ye wee scone) to make certain views mandatory was always going to come along to ‘demise’ me in time. But for years, I programmed, mentored and supported those with, and those without, gender identity beliefs, including those who identify as ‘cis’ and those who identify as ‘trans’ in its various definitions. I neither hid my own beliefs or forced them on others; and I really didn’t use social media for much other than promoting my events. The opposite is true of those with gender identity beliefs and that is precisely what brought me into the battle publicly. The violence and the rhetoric of the activists was, to me, utterly terrifying, particularly if left unchecked. What on earth was going to happen, I wondered, in those years before I ‘spoke out’ publicly, if we allowed the authoritarianism of mandated beliefs in somewhere that is supposed to be free, namely, the literary world? I do, of course, know precisely what is going to happen because it is happening for all to see, and for some to continue to ignore. A curse on yer toast, ye minimisers and justifiers! I jest. Unlike some of my houndlings, I don’t write curse poems…
I have been pondering all of this as I watch a ‘demise’ of the passionate bookseller and ‘Book-Tocker’ (no, I don’t really know either - apparently they’re very influential though) and former Waterstones employee ‘Tilly’, which was brought to my attention via a now-viral online video she posted after her firing by the company for threatening to destroy the books of already cancelled fiction writer Christina Dalcher, in response to Dalcher highlighting the, to me, extremely insane response from many in the books world to the launch of the SEEN in publishing network. In Tilly’s video she is sobbing to camera, so that, she says, people can see the effects of her cancellation. She is “devastated” by the loss of her weekend job at Waterstones. (For their own part, Waterstones have since put out a public statement saying their employee was fired for breaking company policy. “This has nothing to do with transgender rights.” Well, of course not. No hounding of a woman actually does have anything to do with ‘trans rights'.’)
I will come back to Tilly, but in my own experience, when I lost my sanity briefly in 2020 while packing up my flat to leave Edinburgh and a righteous wee squirrel was trying to get me cancelled from a literary conference, I tweeted at one of my hounders to please stop as my hounding had made me suicidal (a truth, but I dearly wish I’d kept it to myself.) I was greeted with mocking and blocking and, from one delightful charmer I don’t even know, accusations of using my “white woman’s tears” against my righteous demise-lovers - a comment ‘liked’ by several including a rising star of the Scottish poetry scene and a bestie of one of my now very, VERY former best friends. If nowt else, chaps, when you get hounded, you very much find out who your friends actually are, I can tell ye…
Now look: there are different degrees of hounder, just as there are different degrees of gender identity ideology believers. All contribute to the hellish landscape we’re in, but it is important to recognise the differences between them.
Some I remain on quite friendly - if occasionally fraught, and ordinarily rather private - good terms with. Such gender identity believers will have their pronouns displayed, wish people ‘Happy Pride!’ and occasionally tweet out ‘Trans rights are human rights! Love to my trans pals today!’ Relatively harmless, the ones I remain friends with, crucially, abhor houndings. It is something of a red line for me for obvious reasons. To them, this entire issue would be solved with ‘kindness’ and us all just ‘sitting down together,’ as if that is not exactly what I had been attempting for years myself, and other women who get hounded have also. I can get quite frustrated by this fence-sitting, and worry for the skelfs that The Madness is causing in their behinds from all of that squirming, but look: I’d at times like to bloody live in their world, where they are at zero risk of cancellation, and are able to ignore things that I simply cannot, like the harms to young people, the violence and sexual aggression of some trans-identifying males (some of whom end up housed in women’s prisons) and, particularly in America, trans-identifying males ruining the careers of what would have been that country’s top female swimmers and track runners. I cannot ignore such things - I find it impossible to, frankly - but I cannot demand they see it and care about it. We can still break bread though. Most genuinely do think they are doing the right thing here.
The problem is, that many graduate into the next level of hounder. I have spent years watching this happen to many. Having successfully convinced themselves that this could be solved with ‘kindness’, it is a small step from that to saying ‘Oh. My trans friends and their allies are telling me that the TERF people are unkind. Well that must be stopped, mustn’t it?’ And so they’ll thwack their names on an Open Letter without really thinking about it, and then perhaps also get into a bit of a ding-dong with some women online; their views will entrench (no online pile-on is pleasant except for the truly masochistic) and never speak of it online again themselves, but start retweeting the worst gender identity activist takes around, slowly convincing themselves that, actually, yes, the TERF people might be evil after-all. The mask grows to fit the face, as Orwell and other anti-authoritarian writers have long noted.
Which brings us to Tilly. I am willing to believe that she truly is passionate about selling books she likes by authors she likes (or, at least, those whose gender critical views she is unaware of). That is clear from one glance at her Instagram account. But Tilly is also someone who has graduated through the ranks to become one of the worst types of hounder: someone who genuinely thinks that utterly destroying an assigned “TERF’” or (having graduated through the ranks of closed-mindedness and brainwashing at the heart of this) an assigned “bigot” is a righteous cause. There are many layers upon layers of groupthink evident in the utterances Tilly made in her video - and having written an entire book on the subject I will not repeat myself here - but what is evident in the responses to her from fellow gender identity activists (not mere believers, or pretenders, or those still working on reframing their knowledge of both sex and ‘gender’ to convince themselves those bloody Terven deserve everything they get) is that they think she did nothing wrong. ‘Gender critical’ people are evil. Get the evil away. Rip up its books; throw shit at its windows; ‘stamp it out’, as the activists at Arts Council England said of Denise Fahmy ahead of her successful claim of harassment. Little Terven cockroaches, eh? Need a fumigation. I hope a reader has enough historical knowledge to recognise exactly who is being dehumanised here and by whom.
I nevertheless hope Tilly has a Plan B she is able to follow. She appears to be on the look out for a new bookselling post, but the only one I know of as I am not in the Brighton area she lives in is Lighthouse Books in Edinburgh, which very proudly displays its hatred of assigned TERFs on a regular basis. It’s very unfortunate that so many Scottish literary organisations partner with them so regularly, but whatever got in the water in the Edinburgh academic and literary worlds in circa 2015 has made such organisations unwilling or unable to see the discrimination. On a personal level, I am a little tired of having to point such things out to these organisations that I was formerly highly reliant on for my former life, though I remain pleased I still have the independence to do so. Because, unfortunately, I think my Plan C will have to include that, for my Plan B is probably not remotely possible.
Part of my former life, and that part I perhaps miss more than anything, was the very regular youth projects I ran or was hired to run in schools, youth theatres and other educational establishments. I was bloody good at it too, which is possibly why it is the only part of my former livelihood I have not entirely lost. (Not that I wasn’t good at the rest of it, ha!) I am a former high school teacher of Modern Studies (for those outside Scotland, this is a Scotland-only subject that involves teaching UK, Scottish and international politics alongside social issues such as health and wealth inequalities) a job I also loved, was good at, and left behind to follow my Plan A dreams in the literary world in May 2014, when such a life seemed possible. I’d reached the end of a temporary two-year contract, but a permanent one soon came on the cards. Making the decision not to apply for a post I was sure to get caused me nights of tears and panic. It was the best job I had ever had, I loved the school I was in, and hey. Security, man. And it was due to walking away from that kind of life that spurred me on to create the one I chose, because it was a bloody big gamble with little to fall back on - no rich spouse, no super-wealthy family. And in that choosing, I was sure to never, ever assume an entitlement to a massive income. I chose that life, after-all. And, if I failed? Well. I could go back to the classroom.
I’ll not link to the Employment Tribunals. Nor show you what happens when you Google my name. You can probably fill in the blanks yourself for why my Plan B is probably unlikely to happen and why any hiring Headteacher would have a hernia even contemplating it. Alas, all of my skills, passion, and talent for teaching, alongside my skills as a freelance, independent events curator, live literature programmer, and writer of poetry stage-shows has crumbled in the face of that spiky little insult. “TERF.” “Bigot.” Those labels do precisely the damage they are supposed to. For a movement that talks constantly of ‘erasing my right to exist’ or ‘don’t reduce women to their body parts,’ the casualness and hatred of those labels reduce the woman assigned them to nothing but those labels. “You’ve not been cancelled. You’ve faced the consequences of your actions. You are nothing but a TERF.” Who amongst the hounded hasn’t filed away similar screenshots, spat not by anonymous online trolls, but by her peers?
So, what is Plan C? Well. Plan C is at least in part surrounding myself with people who do not think any of this is justifiable. Who do not find someone’s metaphorical death “delicious.” Of course, some gender identity activist’s response to the literal death of gender critical women is similarly disturbing, which all of those witnessing the crowing and celebration and posthumous smearing that Magdalen Berns has continued to receive from her most obsessive hounders knows. For those unaware, she was a very early, vocal critic of gender identity ideology and a popular YouTuber, who died of a glioblastoma in late 2019. While it was not my main response to the sad news that she had died, witnessing some people I actually knew - who I had broken bread with, if not made toast - post disgusting comments in celebration, reducing a multi-layered person to just one spiky initialism, while her closest people were raw with grief and could both see, read and sometimes were tagged into such responses, was utterly disgusting. I registered, in a small way, that such people would be exactly the same about me.
“I didn’t know her well. But…”
I could go on. But I will wrap this up with a plea for those still sidelining all of this mess to recognise that it really is just one side that is seeking to utterly destroy its enemy, and they are doing so while asserting that this is kind, as if destroying ‘the TERFS’ is akin to smothering the fox by the side of the road that has been hit by their own fucking car, because that’s what is best for the sad creature deliciously demising, rather than it trying to cling on.
To the rest of you, wonderful supporters and subscribers: I’ll make sure my next post doesn’t take so long! I hope you will stay with me as I traverse the possibilities of Plan C.
The only way out? It’s through. Keep going. I very plan to. Onwards! xx