In September, I will appear as the claimant at an employment tribunal, in which Hachette is the respondent. I resigned in April 2024 because I had found it impossible, for various reasons, to do my job.
Over the next few years, this kind of abuse became routine. I was called a terf, a transphobe, a bigot, a far-right conspiracist, a vicious bully, a racist; accused of having been radicalised online as though I were an 18-year-old incel, not a fiftysomething female book publisher; and told I was widely despised by my colleagues and everyone in the industry. These posts would copy in my employers and various staff networks at Hachette. They came from all sorts of people in and around publishing, some anonymous, some not, some who had themselves complained about being bullied online, and some with tens of thousands of followers. One of my most persistent critics was a self-styled publishing commentator who continued to be platformed by the industry at the London Book Fair and was appointed as a judge for the British Book Awards. She was in addition an enthusiastic advocate for a group of young people in publishing who set up a social media account, The Young Refuseniks, which they used to advertise their curation of a “blocklist” — crucially different from a blacklist, you see — which identified all the “transphobes” in the industry, so that people could be kept “safe” from us (because of course, I was on the list). After they realised that blacklists, sorry, blocklists, are considered somewhat problematic, the whole thing disappeared, but not before it had garnered a great deal of support from many in the business.
In May 2021, three days before the publication of Material Girls, the Bookseller published an “open letter” from a group of anonymous people in the industry who claimed that “transphobia” was rife in publishing. The three-page document was titled “The Paradox of Tolerance”: “If we are tolerant but ill-informed, tolerant with no limit and no moral compass, then the intolerant destroy inclusivity and persecute minorities. To maintain a tolerant society that moves with new understanding and broadens its language to include rather than exclude, we must be intolerant of prejudice.”
Start of a much longer article at https://thecritic.co.uk/how-i-was-hounded-out-of-publishing/