Activists are still getting upset about books

“The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht” has caused an uproar, which is precisely why everyone should read it.

Gender activists aren’t generally all that fond of reading. Books have the capacity to open our minds, to introduce us to worldviews we might never have otherwise encountered, to transport us to unfamiliar realms of the past and the present. Gender identity ideology, on the other hand, is maintained by a combination of blind faith, historical and biological illiteracy, and a complete lack of critical thought.

So it’s odd that so many of these activists with a phobia of the written word end up working in bookshops. They don’t make for model employees. There have been numerous reports of Waterstones staff members hiding books that they deem “problematic”, including those by Graham Linehan, Julie Bindel and Helen Joyce.

But the skewed principles of staff members can only go so far in a capitalist system. When J. K. Rowling contributed a chapter to The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht - an anthology of essays by women who have fought back for their rights in Scotland, often at great personal cost - the subsequent publicity turned it into a bestseller. It is currently at number three on the Sunday Times Bestsellers List. 

Not even the bullying and entitlement of activist staff members could prevent the official Waterstones account on X including it in an image of new releases.  

If you want to understand the ferocity of gender ideologues, one need only scan through the various unhinged responses to this post. The consensus among the activists seemed to be that the Holy Month of Pride must not be violated by such a blasphemous item. People who hadn’t read it were quick to label the book “transphobic” and “hateful” (even though it is nothing of the kind) and an LGBTQIA+ activist called Jack Duncan went so far as to brand it as “fascist”.

Perhaps we should give Jack the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he genuinely believes that these mostly left-wing feminists, many of whom are gay, have been standing up for their rights to single-sex spaces and expressing concern about the medicalisation of healthy children as a ruse to distract the public from their genuine goal: the instigation of the Fourth Reich. Perhaps he thinks that those who have spent decades fighting for progressive values have suddenly all simultaneously discovered Mein Kampf and are delighted with its contents. Perhaps Jack really is that deluded.

It is surely more likely that he simply lacks the historical knowledge necessary to know what “fascism” actually means. Maybe, like many of his fellow activists, he has simply been failed by education. Fascism was an authoritarian political movement of the twentieth century that made claims to racial supremacy and pushed extreme nationalist dogma through censorship of the press and the militaristic repression of dissent. A few neo-fascists linger today, but they are not especially pro-feminist. If Duncan is genuinely concerned about fascists, he’s unlikely to find them writing books that promote women’s rights.