Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars

debut non-fiction book forthcoming from Polity Books (Oct 2024)

This week’s post is a little different from the one I was planning. I only just got the go-ahead to announce this, which I have been sitting on for some time! It is a good thing that Polity said to go ahead and announce, as I have not yet finished reading the book I was planning to review for this week’s essay. Dear subscribers, do excuse me as I indulge in some self-bolstering promotion instead!

I am delighted to announce that my debut non-fiction book, Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars, will be published in the UK by Polity in early October 2024 and in the States in January 2025. Read on for more about the book, as well as a splendid endorsement from the mighty Helen Joyce!

You can also pre-order here (Amazon), here (Polity) and even here (Waterstones - perhaps that may convince them to stock more of it?) and make a fantastic publisher happy. (NB: Obviously please pre-order the affordable paperback rather than the hardback, which is aimed at academic libraries!)

I really must thank Polity, and in particular commissioning editor Louise Knight, for approaching me to consider writing this book. It’s not every publisher that would risk taking on a debut writer of non-fiction who isn’t, say, a well-known columnist too. And it’s definitely not every publisher who has the courage to publish so widely across this issue either. It is lovely to feel at home with a publisher who understands the serious importance of strenuous interrogation of competing ideas.

Before I get to the official blurb, suffice to say, in common with all women who have written on this subject, I find myself in a state of anxious alertness for possible incoming abuse or other unpredictable, wholly disproportionate consequences. Nevertheless, I am trying my best to think positively about what, as a writer, should be an undeniably Good Thing (having a book published) rather than assuming the worst (see contents of said publication, which outlines all of the ‘worst’.)

As I already know from personal experience, no woman gets away with questioning the ideology or its activism without some sort of rebuke, whether a misframing, assumptions or outright lies about one’s views, mockery, slander, threats, public abuse, stalking-behaviours from activists, economic hardship, and worse. As a relatively unknown writer, a formerly big fish in the rather tiny pond of Scottish live poetry, I have so far escaped some of the worst public social harms that I outline in my book, though I have faced threats of such, namely, violence and personalised aggressive protest. (Dinnae tempt fate, ye daftie - ed.) While I have been strengthened by the many messages of support from both friends, fellow writers, feminists, and strangers over the last five years since I inadvertently found myself in this battle - in the process losing much of my livelihood - my own experiences are frankly banal compared to some of the better-known women mentioned in my book.

But this book is about the pattern of harms women are experiencing at all levels, no matter who they are, rather than a biography of individual women’s houndings. It includes the experiences of women you will never have heard of, and those better known; it includes the perspectives of women who cannot remotely afford the consequences of speaking out in their own names (notably “Lara”, the psuedonymised ‘trans widow’ who is an early focus, and “Fiona”, a struggling mother and arts worker at risk of losing her charity), as well as highlighting the demonstrable public social and democratic harms, alongside the quieter more personal ones. The main chapters of the book address the Psychological Harms, Social Harms, Economic Harms and Democratic Harms that women in the UK have been facing, preceded by a Prologue and introductory chapter that sets out our views; concluding by asking what the consequences are if hounded women are, in fact, correct in those views. Throughout, I ask not for agreement on our core beliefs, but by the conclusion I do ask a reader to consider: What If We’re Right?

The book is written for a general readership, with no assumption that a reader has prior knowledge of all of the ins and outs of this battle, nor that they will be familiar with feminist texts.

It was not an easy book to write. When I was approached to consider doing so, I wondered if I would be able to write it with the calm and compassion it required, without significant ‘triggering’ of the worst psychological effects of my own hounding. Like many women who have experienced being hounded, I find watching other women go through the profoundly discombobulating pattern of harms I outline extremely distressing. As I am not someone who has managed to ‘survive’ a hounding, in the sense of managing to get back on my feet whatsoever, I wondered if I would be able to carve out the focus to give this subject the appraisal it deserves without my own situation overwhelming me. However, oddly enough, I was approached to consider putting together a proposal for how I would approach writing such a book in the same week last year that I was discovering, to my sadness, that hiring venues to perform my last poetry-theatre show would be impossible.

I am almost embarrassed to admit that it took me far too long to accept that there was no route back for me into my former life of poetry and performance, a realisation delayed by Covid, lockdowns and, er, the Self-Employed Income Support Scheme, which for me was as much of a ‘making up for your loss of earnings from being hounded out of your sector’ as it was for Covid lockdowns shutting down the live arts scene I’d been fairly brutally ‘cancelled’ from anyway. Being fairly frugal and childless, that and the wonderful crowdfunder set up on my behalf in late 2020 meant I got to late 2022 without entire penury, though the realisation that I was in serious dire straits was never far from my mind. Suffice to say, finding any paid work has been an enormous struggle, and any I’ve had has tended to be outwith the arts, and entirely precarious. It is rather difficult to find work when one Google of one’s name results in headlines associating oneself with ‘transphobia.’ (Unlike Gillian Philip, I cannot, alas, drive, or I’d have followed her inspiring lead into the haulage industry!)

In 2023, having venues - including ones I had formerly run successful events series in - prove so difficult to deal with was the final straw, and is a major factor in my considering writing this book. Of course, though I see no real way to return to writing and performing poetry for a living, that does not mean I could ever stop writing or performing, even if there is little financial reward from it. (And it certainly won’t stop me being as much of a pain in the arse as possible via a newly unearthed love of prose …)

The only way out? It’s through. And so I submitted a proposal that was accepted and started writing Hounded in earnest in August 2023, finishing the first draft in January 2024, with edits and updates over the following few months. (God love you women who won your employment tribunals in the final week of my first draft deadline!!)

My hopes for the book are that it aids an understanding of what women who have been speaking out on this - in whatever way - actually believe, the consequences of holding those beliefs, and the reality of what they have been facing for vocalising those beliefs, none of which I think should be minimised or ignored. I do not think the reality of what women have been experiencing has as yet been fully understood and, for quite obvious reasons, many hounded women want to downplay the full extent of what has been done to them, including - perhaps especially - the very high-profile women that I include in telling this story. As I say very early on in the book, I have not shared the full details of the effects of my own hounding either. That does not change here: unlike in this personal announcement, I am not centred in the book - it is not memoir. But having gone through it and experienced its ongoing effects I hope I have used my own personal experiences to say something more universal about an extraordinarily successful movement that has targeted women almost exclusively for the worst excessives of its activism, and in the process has upended so many women’s lives.

Importantly, I argue that one does not need to agree with hounded women’s views to oppose the harms they have faced - and continue to face - when asserting a non-belief in gender identity ideology and its activism. As an endorsement from Caroline Heldman of Occidental College - who disagrees with ‘gender critical’ beliefs - says, “…we do not have to be on the same side to know that terrorizing those with differing beliefs is illiberal and dehumanizing. Hounded serves as a crucial wake-up call to the silencing impulses on the left that stifle meaningful debates, and the human cost of this silencing.”

More to follow! In the meantime, here’s my foxy cover, and the official blurb. xx

The last decade has seen countless cases of women being fired, disciplined, protested or no-platformed for their views on sex and gender. Whether high-profile celebrities or previously unknown feminists, such women’s vocal non-belief in ‘gender identity’ as a universal human condition bears a high social cost. These ‘houndings’ are often presented starkly, clinically, in headlines or fleeting social media moments, stripped of the true cost of holding such beliefs.

But what is the reality behind the headlines and noise? What are the true consequences of holding – and living with - such seemingly now-heretical thoughts?

Hounded charts the often hidden and unspoken harms women face for prioritising and defending sex-based language and rights. Outlining the often-bewildering array of tactics used by opponents against such women, as well as the resilience required to refuse to be silenced, Lindsay presents a compelling argument for recognition of the individual and social harms that are being enacted under the auspices of ‘gender identity activism.’ 

This debut non-fiction book by award-winning poet and essayist Jenny Lindsay, whose own ‘hounding’ offers a unique perspective, is a solid, sane, witty but also compassionate account about the very human cost of this extraordinary cultural and political schism.

“This passionate and beautifully written book is balm to the soul of those of us who, like the author, have suffered the distressing experience of being hounded because we dare to speak about the impact of being of the female sex. The personal and psychological cost of being one of those disagreeable women is very high. But as Lindsay makes abundantly clear, the cost of remaining silent is higher: the destruction of women's rights and of liberal democracy itself.” Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality