The book is titled Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars. It is not yet in print in the US but both the hardcover and paperback editions will be available here next January. What is it about?
The last decade has seen countless cases of women being fired, disciplined, protested or no-platformed for their views on sex and gender. Whether high-profile celebrities or previously unknown feminists, such women’s vocal non-belief in ‘gender identity’ as a universal human condition bears a high social cost. These ‘houndings’ are often presented starkly, clinically, in headlines or fleeting social media moments, stripped of the true cost of holding such beliefs.
But what is the reality behind the headlines and noise? What are the true consequences of holding – and living with – such seemingly now-heretical thoughts?
Hounded charts the often hidden and unspoken harms women face for prioritising and defending sex-based language and rights. Outlining the often-bewildering array of tactics used by opponents against such women, as well as the resilience required to refuse to be silenced, Lindsay presents a compelling argument for recognition of the individual and social harms that are being enacted under the auspices of ‘gender identity activism.’
This debut non-fiction book by award-winning poet and essayist Jenny Lindsay, whose own ‘hounding’ offers a unique perspective, is a solid, sane, witty but also compassionate account about the very human cost of this extraordinary cultural and political schism.
The Amazon.com page for the book features several blurb reviews, the most interesting of which, I thought, was this one:
“Jenny Lindsay’s Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars is a reminder of why compassion is so vital for social justice work in a liberal democracy. Lindsay lays bare the dark side of the gender identity debates, exposing the damage caused by online smear campaigns, harassment, and violence targeting gender critical feminists. While I vehemently disagree with Lindsay and other gender critical feminists on sex, gender, and trans inclusion, we do not have to be on the same side to know that terrorizing those with differing beliefs is illiberal and dehumanizing. Hounded serves as a crucial wake-up call to the silencing impulses on the left that stifle meaningful debates, and the human cost of this silencing.”
Caroline Heldman, Occidental College
Lindsay lives and writes in Scotland and it is a good bet that Rowling is featured in the new book. The fox badge reflects that the person wearing it, a Gender Critical feminist presumably, has been set upon figuratively by hounds, whence “hounded,” in the aristocratic sport of fox hunting. The hounds referred to here are the Gender Theory extremists, the TWAW enforcers, who, oblivious to irony, act out authoritarian pantomimes online and in person while claiming to be hunting “fascist TERFs.”
It is a beautiful photo of Rowling, one of the best in several years. I have to believe, though, that we are meant to laugh about the exchange Rowling had with an admirer, given the absence of any wrinkles in the picture, in which both discuss the non-existent signs of aging as if they haven’t been air-brushed, filled, or botoxed away, as if Rowling is a weathered prune.
Still, whatever ‘work’ Rowling has done to maintain her youthful visage in addition to the hair coloring, it is good to see her looking as well as she does now that the tide has turned as totally as it has in the “transgender” TERF wars. For someone who has been hounded as Rowling has for as many years as she has and at such a cost, a true solve in the alchemical formula, that she appears no worse for the wear and ready for the next battle is no doubt reassuring to those who look to her as a lightning-rod leader in resistance to contemporary madness.
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