Time to stop hounding women who dare support female rights - Susan Dalgety

Poet and spoken word performer Jenny Lindsay has told how she was subjected to a prolonged 'hounding' after and lost work after being accused of transphobia

Roz Adams, an experienced counsellor, was hounded out of a job she loved with Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre.

Top lawyer Joanna Cherry was hounded on social media during her time as MP for Edinburgh South West, with one man sentenced to a community payback order for threatening her.

What do these three women have in common that has caused them to be the victims of such harassment? Astonishingly, it is because they had the temerity to say that men are men and women are women. That biology matters, no matter how someone chooses to dress or what name they give themselves. That human beings cannot change sex, and that women and girls are entitled, under law, to single-sex safe spaces, such as in a rape crisis centre.

Sadly they are not the only Edinburgh women to have suffered because of their belief in biology.

Education lecturer Shereen Benjamin was shunned by erstwhile colleagues at Edinburgh University because of her courage to stand up for what she believes.

Long time trade union activist and feminist campaigner Ann Henderson was accused of being a bigot during her term as Rector of the university for exactly the same reason.

Fame and wealth does not protect a woman. Author and philanthropist JK Rowling has endured years of abuse on social media for daring to speak out.

And there are many more women across our city who have risked reputations, friendships, even their careers, for the ‘sin’ of insisting that a woman is an adult human female.

Jenny Lindsay, who was forced to move back to her home town of Ayr after being shunned by Edinburgh’s cultural establishment for her views, has just published a book that exposes the cost women have paid for stating what, until relatively recently, was a universal truth – that sex matters.

Hounded is a brilliant book, just like its author, who I am proud to count as a friend.

It is written with intellectual rigour and compassion, a rare mix, and exposes how so many women have faced everything from threats of violence to loss of work for expressing their views.

Masterly as Hounded is, it doesn’t answer the question that has haunted me since I first started writing about the so-called “gender wars” seven years ago.

Why did so many politicians, like former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, health experts, senior civil servants, academics, writers, some of the most accomplished people in Scotland, swallow the myth that humans can change their sex? And instead of engaging with women like Jenny, Roz or Joanna, chose to shun them?

The culture is changing, slowly. This week, Roz Adams won substantial damages for the harassment she suffered at Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre.

Yet the national body that oversees Scotland’s rape crisis centre still cannot define a woman, despite working on it since October 2023.

Perhaps Jenny Lindsay can help them out. She wrote in Hounded that women are materially definable as a class of human being, and are culturally, legislatively and politically important, with our own sets of needs, rights and concerns.

See, it’s really not that difficult.