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What It Costs: Women Speak Out

Women writers and artists speak out about loss to their creative, personal and professional lives due to trans activism

5 non-fiction books of 2020

This year I barely scratched the surface of my non-fiction wishlist, but the following titles leapt out. Caution: cancelled authors and suppressed books! House of Glass: The story and secrets of a twentieth-century Jewish family by Hadley Freeman (Fourth Estate, hardcover) In this biography, Freeman — previously best-known as a columnist — turns the contents […]

5 fiction books of 2020

When I started this blog last year, I planned to write about books and current events with a feminist slant. 2020 has been an extraordinary year for women’s rights. Books took a back seat as Wild Woman Writing Club became a place for women who write, think and make to resist the destructive and chilling […]

Bullying the Children’s Author

I am a trained teacher and children’s author who has been subject to openly hostile tweets from a cohort of authors regarding my motivation for writing a body positive picture book ‘My Body is Me.’ Amongst other names, I have been called hateful, likened to an Islamaphobe, and my suitability as a visiting author in […]

An interview with author Michele Roberts

Under normal circumstances, I would have met the novelist and poet Michele Roberts in a cafe to talk about her most recent book, Negative Capability: a Diary of Surviving. Thanks to Covid, however, we are all confined to our cells. Michele speaks quickly and without hesitation, and is so articulate that she could be dictating […]

#LetHerSpeak

“This is the text of a petition developed out of the following letter which proved so popular that we’ve moved it to a new platform. We are a group of writers, actors, directors, musicians, producers, comedians and artists who wish to speak in support of JK Rowling. She has been subjected to an onslaught of […]

On unity

What is holding the line for women, now that we have the status quo ante? Is it trying to get the trans lobby organisations, which said not one word to halt the abuse of women campaigning against self-ID, to acknowledge they can’t—and won’t try to—railroad us? Is that tantamount to seeking the recognition of a […]

So what are your pronouns?

Ideally I’d be writing about this momentous week of once-in-a-lifetime victories for UK women’s rights campaigners, but I’m still too euphoric to do much more than bask, so this must do instead. A history postgrads’ hub invited students to network on Twitter, starting by introducing themselves and – this being post-sex 2020 – their pronouns. […]

Scotland’s First Minister Responds

Back in July we wrote to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to express our concerns that her Hate Crimes Bill would criminalise feminist criticism of transgender ideology and its proponents. We received a reply dated 27th August, which you can read below. This time around, the response is more substantive that the brush-off we received when […]

The Second Shelf Saga

…is a microscosm which illuminates what’s happening at the macro level. The takeover of public life, and people’s minds, by transgender ideology has made it a thing for a women’s bookshop to promote itself using anti-women rhetoric. We are in the upside-down. On paper, it looked so promising: a bookshop dedicated to keeping out-of-print books […]

Hachette rewrites the law for students

This is commentary on Nicholas Hellen’s article in The Times. My dog in this race is the way in which the word ‘woman,’and the reality of sex, are being eroded in our language and our laws. I began to speak out publicly when the full implications of GRA reform – replacing sex with gender identity […]