At Some Point It Has To Be Over

a resolution to set some new boundaries

On a personal level, I fully hoped it was going to be over for me in October 2020, with my The Dark Horse essay written, the truth told about exactly what happened during my initial hounding of 2019 to early 2020, and then I would be able to move on.

Any clients would surely see how silly it all was, and agree that how my hounders were acting was despicable. People would probably still disagree with my position, and sure, there was still a helluva lot of work to do to stop the avalanche of self-ID policies that were spiralling out of control, but at least the hounders would surely just leave me alone to get on with my life, right?

I was a mid-career performance poet who ran literary events and education projects, for goodness sake! I was always a stupid and egregious target for a massive cancellation campaign!

I reasoned: how can you possibly read this essay and think it’s remotely proportionate to try to stop me working? Or - even if you disagree with my views - think them so dangerous that I deserved a hounding? Also, given the success of the essay, it was clear that people weren’t on board with houndings generally, right? And surely some of those well-known writers and theatre folks in my messages would say something, RIGHT??

I’d get back to earning a living, definitely - though of course that was on hold while Covid restrictions were in place, and the arts world was largely on pause…

But it was going to be over when lockdown fully ended and the world reopened in 2021. Right?

It was definitely going to be over when Maya Forstater won her case? No??

Ok, but it was surely going to be over after the Section 35 order put an end to the legislative madness of the GRR Scotland Bill in early 2023?

It had to be over with Adam Graham/ Isla Bryson…?

It was going to be over when Rachael Meade, Jo Phoenix, and so many more women won their Employment Tribunals….?

It was definitely going to be over when Hounded was published, right??

It surely had to end with the Cass Review??

….The Sullivan Report????

ALL THE FUCKING EVIDENCE PROVING HOW MAD IT ALL IS?????????

It had to be over with the Supreme Court judgement?? Oh, come ON, it HAS to be??!!??

Sigh.

At some point, it really does have to be over, though. And some parts of it really need to be, for me, personally.

***

Like many, I’ve found the doubling-down and virtue-signalling from genderist activists seriously grim since the Supreme Court judgement. Like many women are, I remain pretty traumatised by my hounding. Realising just how little so many people care about women’s rights, never mind caring about what has been happening to the women who have fought so hard to keep them? Not nice.

Unfortunately, since the Supreme Court judgement, there have been many daily reminders of both of these things. Argh.

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Like other women in the arts, my struggles with all of this have been compounded by the fact that it was my peers - some rather old friends included - who kickstarted my hounding. Not strangers, not random anonymous people online, but people I’d known and performed with and booked for nigh-on two decades in some cases.

I’ve been particularly incensed by the many women who are so careless with women’s rights. I have spent a merry time defriending and cutting off any such foolish plums I’ve seen this past few frenetic weeks, while being frankly baffled by how many such types were still in my Facebook or Instagram followers list, including many who have actually appeared to be supportive of me these last few mental years… ARGH. It’s highly confusing.

Predictably, most such types are middle-class artsy women, whose betrayal of their foremothers should be a permanent source of shame for them. Instead, they remain grubbily smug about their position.

Yes, ‘Clara’ (a stand-in name for all such women), you’re such a nice person to support a movement that argues women shouldn’t have rights and centres male desire, you utter parsnip.

At some point, it has to be over.

The Supreme Court should have been the final death-knell for gender identity activists. It explains, fully, not just what the law is, but the why too. In rejecting the ruling, activists are quite literally saying they do not give the singlest tiny shit about women’s or lesbian’s rights.

Which is why I am so angry at them. How many times do these people need it explained to them? That women are real, we have rights on that basis, and things go very badly wrong for us when you fuck with the definition we need to have ANY RIGHTS??

Anyway, in a bid for it to be over in some way at least, I’m vowing to just stop engaging with the ‘Clara’s’ and any women like her.

Amusingly, yesterday evening, upon seeing yet another poetry fool on Facebook comparing women like me to Trump, I searched my messages with this person - a very old friend (I’d thought) - because I was quite certain she had at least at one point shared my views.

We’d lost touch recently (she doesn’t live in the UK anymore) but she was very supportive in 2019 - 2022 and had even invited me to her wedding. My three core beliefs having been steadfast and unchanging since the start of all of this, I had no inkling she had shifted her stance to now viewing those beliefs as somehow wrong or ‘bigoted’. As such, I found her post comparing women like me to Trump pretty astonishing really.

And, sure enough, I found a long message exchange where she most verily did agree with me. I hadn’t imagined it! (Being hounded really does make you doubt yourself sometimes.)

And there was something else too.

Back in 2017, a male poet in our circles kept repeatedly posting some really strange things on Facebook, asking women to donate their bras to him, and creating surveys asking women to describe things like their menstrual cycles. Yes. Really. (This man remains uncancelled, by the way, but is not at all well-known so I will continue my stance of not naming him.)

I, along with several other women, quite rightly told this strange man that he was being wildly inappropriate, and that his plan to write a stage-show about women’s periods, which he said was what was behind his repeated postings, was…. odd. At the time, some women defended this man, finding his interest in their bodies as a sign of feminist allyship.

I, of course, viewed it as anything but.

I wasn’t alone. Myself, this women who yesterday compared women like me to Trump, and two other young female poets had a group chat about this strange lad. It had been set up by one of the young female poets, who had screenshot this man’s latest missive with disgust and sent it to the three of us to express her shock. We all weighed in with how wrong we found it that EIGHTY WOMEN had indeed gifted their bras to him, along with other items of underwear.

He had claimed he was going to donate them to a charity.

The young woman said she highly doubted it. We all agreed it was creepy.

Fast forward some years and, yes, of course, this man now identifies as a trans woman…

Of the three other women in that chat, one appears to have unfriended at some point, so I am assuming she is a genderist. Another I unfriended in the early days of my hounding as she played a very small role in it. The other, the woman I thought was still friendly, I now see has been posting regular genderist content for some time, though I note that this includes during the time when she was fretting in my direct messages about how awful my hounding was, and how terrified she was to speak out publicly against it.

Of all of the things that a hounding does to you, the loss of trust is one of the worst. Do I trust the direct messages, or the public posts?

Regardless? I don’t want this in my life.

Gone from the two obvious genderists is their instinct to be wary of some of these guy’s motivations. Gone, too, is any rational judgement. (I’d say that the other young poet’s views are inconclusive and the very minor role she played in my hounding is probably forgiveable, given the terror of the times and the undoubted pressure she felt put under by our mutual peers...)

But any inkling of reconciliation with the genderist women is over. And I think I need that boundary moving forward. I have spent years now being patient, being understanding, being generous, accepting some people have a different belief system… And that still stands.

But opposing the Supreme COURT??? And daring to say that women who are relieved by the judgement are akin to TRUMP, when opposing the rule of law is, er, fucking Trumpian in the extreme?

No.

I find these women utterly callous in their disregard, utterly lacking in any sense or empathy for some of the most vulnerable women in society, and while it runs seriously counter to my nature (contrary to popular belief, I think I’m quite a decent and forgiving type for the most part) I don’t know if I can ever quite forgive them for what they’ve been part of here.

They’ve had years to understand it at this point. If only they could get back that 2017 instinct that some men’s motivations for wanting to override women’s boundaries are questionable. But they can’t. And I can’t reach them. It is too painful to even try at this point, regardless of what personal history I have with them - and me and this one woman go waaaaaaaaaaay back to the early days of my poetry career. It’s sad, but I can’t do this anymore.

Because at some point it has to be over.

For years now, ‘gender critical’ people have been made to feel as if there is something wrong, bad, or dangerous about our completely and utterly ordinary beliefs. There isn’t. We’ve been made to feel as though we should be grateful when these people don’t just cut us off, and some of them even deign to still speak to us. But do you know what? I don’t want them to. They are cruel and they are callous, and they are determined to centre male desire over women’s needs.

I’ll continue to debate anyone who wants to actually do that. Who can even remotely try to understand my position, the Supreme Court’s decision, and who actually, genuinely, wants a way through this.

But I am wholly done with the doublethinkers, the rigidly cruel, the virtue-signallers, and the hateful people who just mock and sneer and make no attempt to understand why women have felt the need to fight so very hard to stop the excesses of this ideology destroying everything we hold dear.

Enough.

It’s over. It has to be.

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