On Friday 9th August at 13:45, I will be joining rapper, social commentator and Orwell-prizewinning author, Darren ‘Loki’ McGarvey, as part of his Fringe show ‘The Trauma Industrial Complex: Trauma and Oversharing in the Age of Lived Experience.’ Tickets are available here. This is the blurb below:
Trauma is everywhere. Central to its salience is the notion of telling one’s story. Culture demands the authentic testimony of those with 'lived experience' of trauma, but what happens after you put it all out there? Deconstructing the adversity which brought him to wider public attention – growing up in an alcoholic home before descending into addiction himself – McGarvey explores the role personal narratives play in both hurting and healing, and examines the risks involved in telling your story publicly.
I could probably talk and write endlessly about my thoughts on every sentence in this blurb, but the title of Friday’s event is ‘So, You’ve Been Publicly Shamed?’ - a nod to the 2015 book by Jon Ronson, which outlines the offline effects experienced by some early victims of online ‘cancel culture.’ These cases are quite unlike my own experiences, in that the recipients of the online mobbing deeply regret their actions, usually a single careless tweet, or an accidental slip-up, which is then relentlessly shared, its composer mocked, in many cases ruining someone’s life in the process. “Could this happen to me? you ask yourself over and over as you turn its miserable, humiliation-filled pages,” wrote reviewer Rachel Cooke in her 2015 coverage of the book for The Guardian. As we all know, many years into the era of social media, abso-friggin-lutely it could. And often, for the most foundationally insane of reasons.
I do not regret entering the ‘gender wars’ which, as readers of this site will know, started publicly on the 2nd of June 2019 with a sole tweet opposing violent gender identity activism. However, I have faced exactly the same types of treatment as experienced by these early victims of ‘cancel culture,’ a phrase I have always found too slight for what actually happens when you are targeted both psychololgically, socially, and economically, by zealous activists. I have been told on more than one occasion that I should feel shame for holding the beliefs I do, and certainly, such views seem to be deemed so abhorrent that people have, amongst other things, tried to have my forthcoming book de-stocked by book shops; contacted small arts orgs to try to get them to drop me from running my very popular workshops, amongst the many varied and often-wild things that have happened over the last five years. (For the sake of brevity for newbie readers, those three beliefs are: women are materially definable; legislatively and culturally important on that basis; women should have unfettered right to freedom of speech and assembly, particularly on issues that affect them profoundly. That really is it.)
A sympathetic journalist recently said to me that he didn’t know how I was “still standing” given the real strength of opposition and/or ostracisation of me by my literary peers, some of whom used to be close friends of mine. I was glad to have given the impression that I am. In truth, like everyone else on the public platforms of social media, I curate as much of an illusion of perfect health as everyone else tries to who is facing calls for their destruction. As I wrote in my essay All That You Are Is A TERF, I do not want to delight people who wish me harm by showing that they have already caused it. But, having an emotional range of ordinary human proportions, of course it gets to me. Of course there have been nights and days where I’ve sobbed into my journal over how much I miss my former life and livelihood. And of course, I’ve used very stupid coping-mechanisms like malbec and pizza to drown and feed my sorrows, instead of going for a bloody jog like I should do. Like many women hounded in the gender wars, I sob also for the life I had wanted, because though I do not regret entering this sorry cultural schism, I’d really have preferred none of it to be happening in the first place.
Writing about my hounding, and other women’s houndings, has been tricky. But my former life as a performance poet, who often used my own personal experiences or, in modern parlance, “lived experience” in my work, gave me a good training in doing so. Being hounded is, afterall, always deeply personal, but the pattern I outline in my forthcoming book is a universal tale as old as time in many ways. Using one’s personal experience to try to say something more universal is precisely what I was attempting with my last stage-show and poetry collection This Script, as I’ll explain below.
But doing so - telling one’s story - does not necessarily mean you have to ‘lay it all out there,’ and I suspect that perhaps Darren and I’s conversation will explore this quite delicately, potentially with some disagreement. As I always teach in my workshops, wanting to write something truthful does not mean that you must address your particular experiences in a ‘warts and all’ manner, and you should always be mindful, too, of whether you are ready to ‘tell your story’ in the first place. When you write it, it ceases to be yours, and people can very much exploit that for their own purposes, for both good and ill.
One of the reasons I was so lucky to have the marvellous Gerry Cambridge of The Dark Horse editing my 2020 essay, is because writing about something traumatic while it is still happening is extremely fraught with difficulties. Writing that essay almost broke me - not least compiling the seven pages of screenshots, references, and evidence to back up every single sentence, all while watching the online response to a rather famous children’s author who had just published her own reasons for entering the gender wars. As I wrote in a 2023 essay for The Daily Mail “if I had any sense of self-preservation left,” I might well have thrown in the towel. I sincerely felt no choice but to write that essay. I was being ‘cancelled’ anyway. I at least wanted people to know a) what my views actually were, b) what was actually behind the vague headlines about ‘transphobia’ rocking the Scottish poetry world, and c) what my own hounding indicated about the health of the literary sector that I loved more broadly. I had no idea what might come of it, but I genuinely had hoped I could somehow find a way back to at least some of my former life. Oh, sweet summer child that I was!
There is much that happened in 2019/2020 that is not in that essay, either because it would make a hounder too identifiable (it is with gritted teeth that I have never named them), or because I had no concrete proof of certain things that others told me were happening. In my first draft, I had been a bit too ‘warts and all’ in one section. It was crucial, Gerry pointed out, not to be. Why? Because the story’s insanity was clear from just writing the bare bones of it, stripping it of my own personal emotion. Readers did not need to know about the sobbing and the suicidal ideation; they did not need to be told of the disastrous things that a hounding does to one’s noggin. They could infer. (Though as I say in my forthcoming book, the line “There is a very human cost to this…” is doing a hell of a lot of work in that essay…)
My last work in my former life was a stage-show, poetry collection, and film-poem project called This Script. It took me twenty-one years to work out how to write about the experience that is at the heart of it. Though billed as a poetic memoir journeying through the schisms of feminism and as a response to the #MeToo movement, the ‘spark’ was actually my early experience of male sexual violence as a young teenager, and reflecting on that in the wake of that problematic hashtag campaign. While that experience way back in 1996 did not ‘ruin’ my life, it certainly shaped it, as did the response of everyone around me when I told them about it. I had never addressed this in any of my writing, but that experience had also led me to feminism.
My experience in 1996 is therefore what shapes those beliefs that my hounders find so shocking today, and dealing with that has been fairly horrendous at times. I know that women are materially definable, legislatively and culturally important on that basis, and that we need to be able to meet and speak freely about the reality of our lives, because it is precisely that which saved me from the perilous self-destruction I entered in my twenties, directly because of feeling a shamefulness about being a ‘victim.’ It is possible I may address that self-destruction in fiction at some point, but it is a common story I share with many other women who tried to regain power that had been robbed of them by male violence. Thanks, the Noughties false-narratives about “empowerment”…
Speaking out about being hounded in the gender wars shares so many similarities with what happened back in 1996. But ‘the that’ (the precise details of what happened) is not for public consumption. When writing from ‘lived experience’ it is important to keep some things private. When I set out to plan This Script, I split a piece of paper into three columns, with the headings Private/ Personal/Universal. I’ll probably expand on this crucial split in a future essay, but essentially, you want to use your personal experience to say something wider because really, none of us are all that interesting really, and we cannot demand an audience or readership find us so. This is something that Darren navigated well in his book Poverty Safari, and with his BBC Scotland series on class and addiction. (I apologise, I have not yet read Darren’s second book, something I will rectify!)
It may amuse readers to know that in the ‘Private’ column, ie, the things that I would absolutely NOT be revealing or even touching on in This Script, would be a) what actually happened in 1996, and b) the gender identity versus materialist feminist schism. It was hinted at, playfully, at times, but I did not want my personal story of male violence hijacked, nor the wider points about the importance of feminism, which I knew would be dismissed in their entirety if that particular issue was foregrounded. Oh, the sodding irony! But poetry, for me, is not a place to righteously and with certainty berate an audience with your own political viewpoints. It is a place for exploration, care, nuance, creativity and experimentation - which I also brought to This Script, which was, afterall, written for what I imagined would be a pretty diverse audience. Plenty of gender identity believers and trans-identifying people attended the show, with a fairly prominent trans person saying afterwards that they had gotten a lot out of its poems about navigating gender. That was what I had wanted to contribute in attempting to navigate the growing (and to my mind, dangerous) schism, but to creatively, rather than argumentatively labour my point.
Of course, I’ve felt no choice but to move into speaking more plainly about it all now, but the aims of that now-blighted show remains. I want us all to get through this, with our heads intact preferably. My issue is with gender identity activism, not those who feel themselves to carry an inner gender identity, as much as I disagree with their interpretation of what gender is and how it functions. It is the activism and its destructive tendencies that brought me into this war in the first place, because it is that which has caused the lasting damage we can see all around us. But, I digress.
The above; these themes, are likely to be what I can bring to Darren’s explorative show on Friday, as he navigates very publicly what being so open about his extreme childhood experiences, and his emotional battles, has cost him. Being publicly shamed when writing from deeply traumatic experiences requires skin as thick as rhino-hide, but also massive amounts of self-care. Getting that balance right can be a tricky business, not least as we live in an age of social media, where any old bastard can fire off their takes at you, often without taking the time to understand a single thing you are saying. If you are already in something of an unstable mood, or if about fourteen people have already said exactly the same criticism of whatever it is you’ve just ‘put out there’ this can be difficult to manage. We may also discuss me doing this to Darren once, leading to an almighty stooshie between us, which took an in-person hug and chat to mend some months later. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I hope Darren won’t mind me mentioning that there is, of course, a bit of trepidation about my appearance. For anyone out there who is tempted to have a pop at Darren for booking me, all I will say is to come along and ask questions if you want to. Where Darren and I may differ in our politics (and for the record, I have absolutely no idea what his views are on gender identity legislation; that does not matter, and is not the focus of the planned conversation) both of us share a desire to talk openly and frankly about what it is like to be writing from personal experience in an age that seems to demand it, but does not always think about the consequences of doing so. We have both struggled with addiction, and we have both struggled to live with trauma, and we have other shared experiences as writer/performers in the Scottish scene. I hope Darren will also not mind me mentioning that, also like Darren, I have had far more support for my writing from outside of the Scottish literary establishment than from inside it this last few years; some of Darren’s early detractors, who lambasted him frequently - and also warned me not to book him (I ignored this) became some of my own hounders within a few short years.
I hope the event goes smoothly, and I am pleased to have been invited. Darren is someone I have long admired, even when he’s jabbed at my middle-class wankerry live literarararararary events programming. I’m also delighted that his early detractors did not get their wish for him to be silenced. They won’t be getting my silence either. No matter how much of a husk of the human condition I am privately from time to time… Anyway! See you on Friday! xx