This is the most important interview I’ve conducted this year. And so, I’ve altered how I normally structure them. Today, the only voice you’ll hear is Jenny Lindsay’s.

Ms Lindsay is one of the most significant poets, spoken-word performers and essayists to have emerged in Scotland’s literary scene in the last decade or so. She has been a successful producer of theatrical, spoken-word events for assorted institutions across Scotland’s entire cultural sector. She made a stunning film-poem called The Imagined We which won the inaugural John Byrne Award for Critical Thinking in 2020.

Then she decided to speak about the potential and actual harms to women of gender ideology. Her book Hounded, published this month, tells the story of how vocal women, including herself, can lose everything following a targeted campaign by gender identity activists who, she believes, first seek to silence women and then to erase them.

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“I have some ‘red lines’ that govern my approach to this debate. I have total respect for the individual and I’m happy for you to identify however you wish,” says Ms Lindsay. “But I don’t want you to ask me to say things that I don’t believe. For example: some men can give birth; some lesbians can have a penis.

“I set out the core beliefs of those women who, like me, have been hounded for them. These are: that women are materially definable as a category and that we’re legislatively and culturally important with our own needs rights and concerns on that basis as females. Thirdly, that women should have freedom and speech and assembly to discuss any issue they like but particularly issues that affect them such as self-ID legislation.

“If you look at any woman who’s been hounded, you’ll find she’s tripped the wire on either one, two or all three of those beliefs. I tripped core belief three because I said lesbians shouldn’t be beaten up at Pride marches.

"Rosie Kay, [the leading choreographer] tripped core belief one because she was saying that her body was important to her as an adult human female dancer. But most of us have been hounded over the middle core belief.

“What gender identity activists ask of us is to say that the category ‘woman’ isn’t legislatively and culturally important on the basis that women are a definable category.

"We’re no longer mammals; we’re merely a social category and that social category can be identified into by anyone who wants to. It’s very different to the story we were told about trans-identifying people 20 years ago where it was all about gender dysphoria.

“Some of my most vicious hounders are cis-identifying [straight, heterosexual] women. They’re pushing an ideology that says women aren’t definable and that we’re not legislatively and culturally important with our own needs, rights and concerns.

"Some of them say: ‘I don’t mind if there are transwomen in the Rape Crisis Centre’.

"My response to that is: ‘Well, good for you but other women’s rights aren’t yours to give away’.

"The social cost of being a woman who speaks out about this is way too high. My book is an attempt, I hope, to change the story a wee bit.

"I encountered an issue in 2013 when I was booked to do a Creative writing workshop for an LGB charity. The woman who’d booked me said very casually: ‘Just to let you know, we’re trying to normalise introductory pronoun circles before all of our workshops these days. I thought: ‘What the hell’s an introductory pronoun circle?’.

Jenny Lindsay in the Debate Night series on BBC Scotland channel with Sir Tom Hunter, Monica Lennon, John Swinney , presenter Stephen Jardine and Tory MSP Murdo Fraser (Image: Martin Shields)“I could see the bafflement on some people’s faces and I was baffled too. It was a really weird thing at the time and I’d never had anything like that before. What happened next was akin to a scaffolding rising around you.

"Later, at a writers group someone said: ‘I think we should all go round and share our pronouns’. It’s the small things like that: you start seeing the pronouns and the email signatures, then you start hearing people say that they identify as non-binary … then it’s everywhere.

“When you de-centre women from the biological then things start to go really, really wrong. I knew very early on that I couldn’t subscribe to this belief system; that most of the people around me in the arts do believe in this belief system that we’re not allowed to talk about it.

“It’s so prevalent in the arts, media, academia, research and politics because these are elite sectors. The most well-known women who are speaking out about this and being hounded over it are women in these circles. This is a top-down ideology: it’s not a grassroots movement.

“There’s a false notion that the arts is somewhere to be kind; to be nice to people and to embrace the marginalised. But the Scottish arts gives no attention to working-class writers. It’s not inclusive at all. The Edinburgh poetry scene is so elitist.

“For a number of years I was just like, “well, it’s a clash of belief systems: they’ve got their beliefs; I’ve got mine and we’ll all just rub along. I used to book trans-identifying poets whose poems were about gender ideology. The book is about showing exactly what happens to women who get hounded psychologically, socially, economically and democratically if they dare speak up against gender identity activism.

“It’s like living in three different worlds. You have the world of the gender-activist hounders. This is where even the tiniest, mildest thing you might say about gender ideology can cause problems, like ‘women are materially definable as a category of human being’. It’s a totalitarian world.

“Then there’s the very intense world of the women who’ve been hounded. This is the only world where you can talk and know that people will totally understand what you mean. For instance, I spoke to Rosie Kay, the dancer, last night. We check in regularly. Both of us were artists who were at the top of our game and then lost everything. To me this hits as misogyny; it hits as hateful; it hits often as lesbophobia; it hits as the most disgraceful period of failure of political leadership.

“We’re at a point where lesbians are being harassed by males [who identify as women] for not wanting to sleep with them and people are acting as if this either isn’t happening or they’re minimising it and going along with it. That’s disgraceful.

“The final world though, is the one I found myself in in 2019 when I was trying to explain this to my family and non-arts friends. It’s the world of those who aren’t quite aware of what’s going on. To a majority of those people it just sounds nuts.

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“The economic harms have been extreme. It took a while to lose absolutely every client, but I’m now at the stage where I’ve lost absolutely every one of them. Every time I speak about this I lose another one.

“There’s an anatomy of a hounding: how it begins; its manifestations; its consequences. Almost all of my friends were trying to go along with it, even if they didn’t agree with it. But I felt that the consequences of saying that women aren’t a category were really extreme. You’re harmed by the ideology itself then you’re harmed for speaking out about it and finally you’re harmed for pointing out the harms of speaking out.

“It’s a multi-layered psychological attack. If you have these core beliefs about what it means to be female, you experience it as the most extreme misogyny. When a trans-identified male screams in my face that lesbians do have penises and I’m just going to have to accept it, this doesn’t hit any differently from any other man doing it, except now the left goes along with it and acts as though I’m at fault for asserting women’s boundaries.

“The most brutal passage in my book concerns Lara, whose sexually-abusive ex-husband has transitioned. Lara (not her real name) had attempted to go along with it, but just couldn’t. Yet, she was the one who lost all of her friends; not him.

“When her husband transitioned she said: ‘He’d found a new language with which to abuse me. He was a woman now. Me: I was a Terf’.”

 

Earlier this year, I’d said that The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht – also published this year - was one of the most important political books ever to have been written about Scottish culture and politics. Hounded, by Jenny Lindsay deserves the same accolade.

Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars, By Jenny Lindsay, Published by: polity