13 hours ago
JENNY LINDSAY: Scots women were cancelled for simply believing in biology. The courts said we were right. So why is the nation's biggest book festival STILL intent on silencing us?
The alert arrived at 10:30am: 'I searched for your name in the 2025 Edinburgh Book Festival. In vain!'
This was followed by an unsmiling emoji and was posted to me on X (formerly Twitter) by a long-time supporter of my writing.
I've been dreading last week's Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF) programme announcement for some time. A couple of months ago, realising that the programming deadline had likely passed, I made a joke on X about missing being invited to festivals as I used to love the free tote bags that authors receive on arrival.
I almost deleted the joke, thinking it may sound a bit churlish, but people immediately expressed outrage that I hadn't yet been booked for a single Scottish book festival, of which there are several.
Edinburgh hosts the biggest one.
Until the programme announcement, I knew some were hoping I'd be there with my latest book. People also hoped to see Lucy Hunter Blackburn and Susan Dalgety invited, as editors of the Sunday Times bestselling anthology The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht, to which I contributed a chapter.
But all three of us knew that wouldn't be happening. I'd pitched many months ago on behalf of all of us, and didn't receive so much as an acknowledgement.
In years past, by contrast, I've been welcomed to the EIBF many times, not only when I had a book out, but also as an events chair and a guest programmer for their live literature cabarets.
You may be asking yourself: who is this entitled woman?! Why on earth does she think she deserves a platform?
Maybe her book is woeful? Badly-written? Didn't sell well? Got terrible reviews? Isn't on an important topic?
It's fair to ask all those things. But, while it is frowned upon to blow one's own trumpet as a Scottish writer, none of these things are true of either my own book, Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars, nor of The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht.
Hounded is my debut non-fiction book, which charts the psychological, social, economic, and democratic harms meted out to women who have opposed gender identity ideology.
I was approached to write it by my publisher, Polity, in itself a rare example of a commissioning editor actively scouting for new writers.
I've been the target of a hounding myself. It began six years ago when I was a poet and events programmer.
I called for an end to threats and violence against women trying to meet to discuss the legal problems with men self-identifying as women.
This felt a perfectly reasonable thing to wish for, but led to a bewildering set of experiences that culminated in the loss of my entire livelihood.
I've since written essays on my experiences and the phenomenon generally.
I was suggested as someone who could therefore take on the difficult task of exposing the extent of the abuse that vocal women have been experiencing, with care, diligence, and balance.
My book demands neither agreement with my views, nor any other woman's: it asks solely that a reader understands our position, and then assesses whether – even if we are wrong in our views – whether any of the treatment we receive is justifiable.
Despite still being targeted by activists, who continue to try to scupper my ability to make a living, reviewers and readers have routinely said that I have done just that.
Those who approach the book in good faith know it to be, at root, a plea for a way through this appalling mess; a mess caused precisely by a lack of debate and a rigidity of thinking by activists who refuse the possibility that they might be wrong.
But they have been proven wrong. Repeatedly. Including in the highest court in the land.
The Supreme Court judgement in favour of For Women Scotland against the Scottish Ministers this April ruled that, yes, as we hounded women have argued for years, 'woman' really does mean 'a biological woman' in the Equality Act 2010.
The court made clear that for women to have any rights at all, in some crucial instances, it HAS to mean this.
Importantly, that ruling confirmed beyond doubt that the 30-plus women who wrote a chapter for The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht, including JK Rowling, former MP Joanna Cherry, and former prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss, have been correct to push against the ideological creep of activist rhetoric.
It demands any man who claims to feel himself a woman should always be viewed as such, whether in a lesbian dating group, a sports team, or a Scottish prison.
This has been the wildly unreasonable demand of predominantly male trans activists for decades. The WWWW anthology charts how this oddest of ideas mainstreamed, largely by stealth.
It exposes how – starting in the late 1990s - this happened, alongside the shutting down of all dissent, eventually contributing to the downfall of former First MinistersMinister Nicola Sturgeon, disgrace in our national Parliament, and leavingleft abused women with no guaranteed access to single-sex rape crisis services, amongst other foreseeable consequences.
Meanwhile, the litany of scandalous cases of women sacked, threatened, and even assaulted for refusing to accept the mantra that 'trans women are women' has grown longer and ever more disturbing.
Given the utter chaos caused by this ideology, you might expect two successful, recently published books addressing it to feature at Scotland's largest (and handsomely publicly funded) book festival.
Alas, no.
As soon as the programme was announced, I knew that supporters of women like me would be rightly angry.
Not just at the intentional snubbing, but by the promotion of gender identity activists, whose instinct is to censor opponents, and who have publicly declared their intention to defy the law, clarified by the Supreme Court ruling.
To be clear: these people are saying they oppose women's rights and plan to continue breaking our boundaries.
Providing compelling proof of the death of irony, the EIBF organisers have chosen as their theme this year the idea of 'Repair.' Their programme promises the festival will explore 'the many things around us which feel broken, and how we might seek to fix them.'
Given the 'star' attraction at this year's festival is former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, the idea that much 'repairing' is going to happen is laughable.
Ms Sturgeon's unstinting support for these activists has survived the reality that male rapists have been housed in women's prisons, her own colleague, Joanna Cherry, being sent death threats, a Supreme Court judgment proving that under her leadership her party beclowned itself, and the atrocious 'heresy hunt' against Roz Adams at Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, presided over by trans-identifying Mridul Wadhwa. Ms Adams only 'crime' was to try to assure a rape survivor that her appointed counsellor would be female.
There is a weary predictability that, once again, a book festival has chosen to ignore all of this in favour of platforming people who make no secret of their contempt for women like Roz Adams.
This week marks the four year anniversary of Maya Forstater, founder of human rights charity Sex Matters, winning a case that confirmed our belief that biological sex is both real and important is 'worthy of respect in a democratic society.'
But in the bubble-world of Scotland's literary sector, they've been ignoring that as steadfastly as they're now ignoring the Supreme Court judgment.
Our literary scene is small. It is rare that a book on Scottish politics makes it on to the Sunday Times bestsellers list, never mind three times, as The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht did.
The editors of that book have every right to be as hacked off as their thousands of readers that they are not platformed.
We had all hoped for change at EIBF, for good reason.
In an interview last year, upon being appointed as the new director of the festival, Jenny Niven said:
'We need more places where people can come together to really chew through the more difficult, more controversial topics in society. How do we hear really good information away from all the kind of social media noise?'
Ms Niven went on to recognise her 'responsibility to create spaces where those sorts of conversations can happen'.
What a pity, then, that the programmers of this year's festival have demonstrated no such commitment.
I was delighted by Ms Niven's appointment as EIBF director, having long admired her work in Scottish literature.
It gives me zero pleasure to appear to criticise someone I know to have cared deeply about writer development, books, and festivals generally.
I strongly defended Ms Niven and the festival last year, when both came under fire from activist campaign group Fossil Free Books (FFB), who opposed the EIBF's funding from long-time sponsor Baillie Gifford.
Unsurprisingly, a great deal of those involved with FFB are also ardent gender identity activists.
To reward these censorious disruptors with lavishly supported literary platforms, when they enthusiastically destroyed the EIBF's partnership with its main sponsor of over two decades, feels, to me, completely absurd.
Similarly, to rightly note a duty for book festivals to platform discussions about 'controversial topics' then fail to host one on this issue is a serious lost opportunity.
For years, the most 'controversial' thing a writer could say, gaining a 'provocateur' label in the process, has been: 'no, trans women are not women and there are sound moral and legal reasons why people should stop pretending they are.'
Continued refusal to explore those reasons by not platforming women who've set them out isn't wrong solely on freedom of expression grounds. It also gives succour to those continuing to heap further abuse on women already reeling from their years-long houndings.
Another high-profile event at this year's festival features trans-identifying writer, Juno Dawson, who, following the Supreme Court judgment wrote:
'a few very determined transphobes have crawled their way to the heart of the law like maggots in an apple.'
The movement Juno Dawson supports claims campaign groups such as For Women Scotland 'dehumanise' their opponents.
But given frequent references to us as 'maggots', 'vermin,' 'TERFS,' – or, as recent single from songwriter Kate Nash had it – 'GERMS,' it's perfectly clear who is doing the dehumanising.
A further corruption of language and meaning.
Gender-identity ideology has broken many things that need 'repaired' if we are to have a functioning democracy, never mind a healthy literary culture.
Ostracising the women trying to fix things, while simultaneously platforming those who hound them, is a continuation of division, not a healing of the rift.
It is beyond time for the arts and culture industries to realise this. I'd hoped the fierce grip that activist-writers have on our literary world was starting to weaken.
It's the hope that kills, of course. But – should said writers not lose the EIBF more sponsors - there's always next year.
