This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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It’s four years since J.K. Rowling published the essay in which she discussed her experience of domestic violence and her concerns about the number of girls undergoing gender transition. She became a hate figure overnight. Three months after Rowling’s essay appeared, Graham Linehan and Stella O’Malley organised an open letter of support from figures in the arts including Sir Tom Stoppard, Jenni Murray and Barry Humphries.

As you scroll down the letter, the names become less famous. Seventy-two people down, there’s me.

I’ve worked in the arts all my life — in theatre, music and arts festivals. For the last nine years I have been playing the piano for silent films. It’s a niche within a niche. I don’t own a house, and I don’t have a pension, but I enjoy my life and I wouldn’t change it.

I had been accompanying silent films at the BFI Southbank cinemas for a year or so when the Rowling support letter was published. A day or two later, I saw there’d been a few tweets to the BFI mentioning me and demanding to know why a “transphobe” was working on the Southbank. I didn’t think too much of it, and I was looking forward to my next BFI show — the great MGM silent, The Wind, starring Lillian Gish. Covid put paid to that and, like many musicians, I was out of work for the best part of two years.

When BFI Southbank reopened, something had changed. Emails enquiring about work went unanswered. As I persisted, excuses started arriving — my emails had gone into the security vault. The cinemas are being renovated. Maybe next year? My contacts at the BFI are nice people, so I believed them. Over the next couple of years, as I saw every other pianist get gigs, it dawned on me that I probably wasn’t going to get booked again.

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Suspecting you’ve been blacklisted is one thing; knowing for certain is another. Figuring it out involves piecing together fragments.

A few days after Rowling published her essay, the chief executive of the BFI, Ben Roberts, and the BFI festivals director, Tricia Tuttle, tweeted what they called “a note to our trans and non-binary friends”. They did not mention Rowling, but their meaning could not have been clearer:

Trans and non-binary members of our BFI communities … have come under renewed attack in this last week … with major cultural figures continuing to share thoroughly discredited anti-trans rhetoric as pseudo-concerns about the welfare of children and of cisgender women.

The tweet was deleted a few days later.

As I began to suspect I’d been blacklisted, I remembered the two-year-old tweet and re-read it. It epitomises the extreme identity politics that is suffocating the arts today with its performative kindness towards its preferred, sanctified minorities and the ruthless dispatching of dissenters. Here are two senior leaders at the BFI — a public institution — behaving with unconscionable cruelty towards Rowling, whilst publicly signalling their affinity with this political movement.

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Blacklisting has traditionally been quite straightforward. In 2009 the Information Commissioner closed down an agency which had compiled a list of 3,000 construction industry trade unionists. Construction companies paid for access to the list, and the trade unionists were kept out of work.

Dissenting employees who are already on the inside are coerced into silence

Although today’s blacklisting is seen by its practitioners as motivated by morality rather than money, the same underlying impulse to create a secure community of the like-minded operates. Those who express political and social views are divided into the virtuous and the wicked, and contravening orthodoxy when it comes to race or gender is the quickest way to be consigned to the ranks of the wicked.

When an organisation becomes captured by this kind of politics, blacklisting is just one of the ways in which the political monoculture is protected. Dissenting employees who are already on the inside are coerced into silence, whilst those with approved politics can speak freely, happily bringing their politics into the workplace. This dynamic is widely reported by staff inside cultural organisations.

Those who are not silent risk punishment, either internally through the weaponisation of complaint and disciplinary procedures, or externally by the online mob. Silencing dissent is the proximate aim, but the larger goal is to foster a culture in which nobody but the favoured express themselves freely in the first place.

A recent scalp is the publisher of Kathleen Stock’s book Material Girls, who resigned in July following a campaign of abuse from publishing colleagues. Her sin was publishing one book about how the conflict between women’s rights and trans rights might be resolved.

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Pronoun rituals can play a role in filtering out unwanted people. Many who state their pronouns in their professional email signature are well-meaning, imagining that they’re just “doing the right thing” as a progressive. But pronoun declaration is also a political statement, signalling affinity with gender identity dogma.

For example, the website of the contemporary arts company Metal, founded by Jude Kelly, includes a pronoun declaration for every staff member. For the outsider considering applying for a job, or engaging with one of Metal’s projects, the sight of wall-to-wall pronoun declaration is a coded statement about who is welcome and who is not.

Some organisations take a more blunt approach. This is one arts organisation’s values statement, to which all prospective employees are directed:

We are pro-black, pro-gay, pro-disability, pro-trans, pro-community, pro-neurodiversity, pro-accepting people as we find them: We are proactive allies. We recognise intersectionality and inclusivity runs through everything that we do. If you’re not feeling this, we’re probably not the organisation for you.

This text is not meant literally — it’s unlikely that anyone reading it will be anti-black, anti-gay or anti-community. No, it’s a coded invitation to the politically like-minded, and a “do not enter” sign for everyone else. It’s a sort of blacklisting in advance.

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Inevitably, social media plays a role in feeding this beast. A recent response to the rise of gender identity ideology has been the emergence of so-called “sex equality and equity networks” — SEEN for short. “SEEN in Publishing” announced its formation in June, “for those in the book trade who recognise the material reality of sex, and support freedom of expression”.

To a reasonable person that sounds like a sensible idea, but there was a volcanic response on social media from outraged activist publishing professionals declaring their intention never to work with anyone in the network. Crime author Val McDermid tweeted her support for the blacklisting of SEEN’s members. Just take a moment to absorb that — a respected and famous writer called for the blacklisting of other writers.

The alacrity with which creative people participate in this punitive culture has been a depressing feature of the last decade. The writer Kate Clanchy had a thriving freelance practice teaching poetry with children and young people until her book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me was deemed racist by a trio of writer-activists.

They set about tearing her career apart, with a ruthlessness that sometimes seemed unhinged. Clanchy lost almost all her work, and her publisher Picador abandoned her. “What is sad is that I’m very good at teaching poetry and it was my life’s work,” she told me. “I never hurt anyone.”

Blacklisting is usually done quietly and behind closed doors. In my case, BFI management instructed curation and programming staff not to book me and not to tell me why. As these staff were people with whom I had good relationships, this was awkward for them. They were expected to lie to me — and they did.

Whilst the most energetic blacklisting is done by those who are driven by their politics and determined to exclude dissenters, much of it is done by those who just want a quiet life. They’re not zealots — they’re just trying to do their work without being derailed themselves by this punishing political culture.

Is this political zealotry, or a pragmatic avoidance of controversy? Or should we just call it cowardice?

They may not even think of themselves as blacklisting while they give some people the nod and some the frown.

The last few years has seen a burst of highly successful new books by gender-critical women. Helen Joyce’s Trans and Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls were the first. Each was a bestselling, agenda-setting book — perfect for literature festivals. But Stock has been invited to only one since the publication of Material Girls in 2021. Joyce has not been invited to any.

Poet Jenny Lindsay used to appear annually at Edinburgh International Book Festival, chairing events and running a live literature cabaret tent. Since her hounding by activists, she’s never been invited back. No gender-critical feminist has ever been invited. Is this political zealotry, or a pragmatic avoidance of controversy? Or should we just call it cowardice?

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I first expressed dissent from the dogma of gender identity ideology in 2018. Since then, I’ve been thrown off academic conferences, dragged through a malicious disciplinary process by my university, had activists and former colleagues campaigning to prevent me working, and I’m now aware of multiple instances of blacklisting.

But I’ve had it easy compared to the experiences of women such as Jenny Lindsay, who laid out the grim details of her own punishment within the Scottish poetry community in her essay “Anatomy of a Hounding”. If you’re wondering just how bad it can get, read her account.

As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie observed in her Reith Lecture a few years ago, this is an authoritarian movement which does not recognise its own authoritarianism. More than that, it is a movement which performs unctuous demonstrations of pretend love to its favoured minorities whilst its most gleaming-eyed true believers mete out dehumanising cruelty elsewhere. And it is a movement on the march, every year closer to a culture in which its politics is supreme, and everyone else is just afraid enough to be silent.