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

In March 2020, hundreds of Labour-supporting women gathered in North Kensington to discuss the party’s proposed pledge to expel members deemed transphobic. The event was protested by a large crowd of trans activists who set off smoke bombs, chanted slogans through megaphones and thumped on the venue’s windows. Inside the hall, the cacophony made it almost impossible to hear the speakers. Afterwards, women were forced to run the gauntlet of activists yelling “TERF!”, whilst photographers snapped close-ups so attendees could be identified and shamed online.

As a volunteer steward that evening, I’ll never forget the sight of women scurrying away, faces covered, terrified of the consequences of exercising their democratic right to free assembly and free speech. This meeting does not merit even a footnote in Jenny Lindsay’s superb new book, which speaks to the complete normalisation and ubiquity of vicious, highly-organised attacks on women by gender activists.

Lindsay, one of Scotland’s most admired spoken word performers, has previously written about her own “hounding”, which began after she criticised activists who advocated violence against lesbians at Pride.

Here, without an ounce of the self-pity that characterises the trans rights movement, she builds on her 2020 essay “Anatomy of a Hounding” to show how the same modus operandi is deployed against countless women — named and anonymous, famous and voiceless — who dare to speak about their rights.

As a catalogue of the economic, psychological and reputational abuse women face, Hounded is an immensely valuable political and historical document. Lindsay however goes much further, offering a compelling analysis of why activists attack women so mercilessly.

Eschewing, though not denying, the simplistic explanation of misogyny, she argues the main reason is that the gender identity movement’s beliefs are indefensible — ill-defined, antithetical to reason and not even understood by their adherents. She gives the bleakly comical example of a man protesting a feminist book launch in Edinburgh. “So I don’t know too much about the book or the event,” he told a journalist, “except the fact that many people who are in gender studies or are well-educated in queer studies have condemned the contents … And I trust their condemnations.”

In contrast, Lindsay sets out the intellectual scaffolding of Hounded by listing the three “core beliefs” of gender-critical feminism: that women are definable as a category of human beings; that women have specific needs and concerns such as single-sex spaces; and that they have the right to meet and discuss issues that affect their sex.

Controversial stuff. Yet these beliefs (biological facts and foundational democratic principles) are anathema to the trans rights movement, which ducks every opportunity to debate them. Instead, as Lindsay shows, genderist lobby groups and activists rely on overwrought appeals to emotion (and emotional blackmail), circular reasoning, misrepresentation of their opponents’ position, accusations of hatred, and a kind of luxuriating victimhood.

It’s no coincidence that many of these stories come from the world of ideas — the arts, literature and academia — suggesting that this is where trans activists see the biggest threat to their movement. Questioning is kryptonite to the genderist cause; women who speak up must be silenced immediately and with extreme prejudice.

Lindsay lays bare the consequences of speaking up: social ostracisation, friendships destroyed, employers pressured to fire “heretical” staff, and venues targeted (usually with complaints, occasionally with bomb threats). It’s a potent mixture of psychological torture and economic exclusion aimed less at punishing individuals who do speak out, than at intimidating those who might. Lindsay points out that the betrayal of friends, either through cowardly silence or “both sidesism”, can be far worse, bringing a sense of profound isolation.

Perhaps the most devastating form of hounding is when it comes from one’s own spouse. Lindsay devotes significant space to women whose husbands discover a trans identity in later life, and the tactics they use to disorient and coerce their wives into accepting the husband’s fantasies as reality. As one interviewee attests: “He found a new language to abuse me. He was a woman now. Me? I was a TERF.”

Throughout Hounded, Lindsay makes a Cromwellian pitch to her “perfect reader”: someone who thinks it possible they may be mistaken, who might be willing to change their mind. If this lucid, lyrical and closely-argued book finds that reader, it will surely do so.

It is bewildering, however, to contemplate that, after more than a decade of trans activism, witch trials and very public houndings, there is anyone left to convince. The great tragedy of this book may be that the only people who will ever care about women’s hounding are the ones who already know.