New report on everyday cancellation in publishing

Has publishing has become a hostile environment for people who hold gender-critical beliefs? New research commissioned by Sex Matters and SEEN in Publishing investigated the working environment for authors, agents and publishing staff who believe that sex is binary, immutable and important.

The research included interviews with 25 people working in publishing – authors, editors, employees and agents – as well as a review of policies, statements and social media and an analysis of published books. 

This investigation uncovered serious failures in law, policy, safeguarding, training and data collection, all contributing to an environment in which people who believe in the material reality of sex have been cancelled, harassed and abused with impunity. 

These failures have created tangible, significant personal and professional detriments, as well as a wider culture of fear. But the effects reach beyond individuals: organisations have also created legal, financial and reputational risks and harms for themselves. Funders, unions and other industry bodies have often exacerbated these harms instead of fixing them. Clear leadership is required to course-correct: a sustainable industry is based on markets, not ideology. 

Poor commercial decisions

Publishers have made poor commercial decisions guided by ideology, not markets. There is a vast gulf between books commissioned on gender-identity beliefs and what actually sells: the analysis done for this report on trade non-fiction books shows that the average book about women sells seven times more copies than the average book based on gender-identity beliefs. Gender-critical books sell, on average, nine times more. Commissioning editors have run scared of bold, brave, interesting books that reflect a diversity of ideas and that readers want, and instead commissioned books that fit the beliefs of their junior staff. 

Helen Joyce received a £20,000 advance for her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, which went on to sell over 23,000 physical copies in the UK and over 100,000 internationally. Munroe Bergdorf, by contrast, received a six-figure sum for Transitional, which sold fewer than 3,000 copies in the UK.

Relentless abuse 

Abuse of those with gender-critical views in publishing has been relentless. People – usually women – have received death and rape threats. Others in the industry have threatened them with reputational damage and loss of work, have used slurs and insults against them, and conflated their views with transphobia, homophobia, racism and other forms of bigotry. Gender-critical individuals working in publishing have been accused of wanting the deaths of trans-identifying teenagers and working towards genocide. There have been industry calls for those with gender-critical beliefs to be demonised, and they have been labelled as fascists for thinking that there are two sexes.

In 2020, the former children’s author Gillian Philip added the hashtag #IStandWithJKRowling to her Twitter (now X) profile. She was then subjected to an extreme 24-hour social-media pile-on that included death threats. Philip’s contract was immediately terminated by her publisher with the tacit support of her agent. 

Media collusion

Mainstream media outlets have compounded the problem. Coverage of published books was perceived by our interviewees to be biased towards those based on gender-identity beliefs. It is notable that gender-critical books have sold so well despite this apparent bias – analysis conducted for this research shows that in non-fiction, the average gender-critical book sells 10,000 more copies than the average book based on gender-identity beliefs. 

Journalists on BBC Radio 4’s flagship women’s-affairs programme Woman’s Hour have not interviewed best-selling gender-critical authors about their books, despite the issues they cover being so relevant to women. By contrast male gender-studies academic Grace Lavery has been interviewed, despite selling only 1,723 copies of Please Miss – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis. So has Juno Dawson, a male transactivist who also identifies as a woman. Dawson has depicted womanhood as a submissive sexual identity: “I knew I wanted to be ‘the woman’ when it came to sex… It was a conscious urge to get fucked, be penetrated as a woman would be.” It is surprising that somebody with such a perspective, which arguably undermines the position of women in society, has been platformed on a programme about women instead of authors who argue for women’s rights. 

Bias in all areas

There has been huge bias not only in commissioning, but also in which books receive publicity and which authors are platformed. Some interviewees perceive investment in publicity to be lower in some publishing houses for books and authors that reject gender-identity beliefs. Venues have sometimes refused to allow gender-critical authors and others in the publishing world to speak. When they have received a platform, gender-critical speakers have often been subjected to relentless attempts by transactivists to deplatform them. These attempts have sometimes been successful. 

In 2023, protestors at the Edinburgh launch of Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader physically attempted to prevent people entering the venue and shouted “Shame on you!” at those who did so.

Several authors withdrew from the 2025 Oxford Literary Festival after an announcement that Helen Joyce would be discussing her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality with fellow gender-critical author Julie Bindel. Joyce and Bindel’s event was the only session to sell out, and it did so within 24 hours. A separate event featuring the philosopher and author Constantine Sandis, organised after he said that he would not share a stage with Joyce, reportedly sold fewer than 100 tickets.

Another author was invited to chair a literary event. The invitation was later rescinded. A subsequent subject access request revealed that a publicist from her own publisher had contacted the event organisers to demand her removal due to her supposedly “anti-trans” views. 

Women bear the brunt

Women have found themselves at the sharp end of this belief system. Women in publishing appear more likely to be publicly gender-critical. Being asked to state pronouns in email signatures or to use “inclusive” language that ignores female realities can make some women feel that they are being required to align with a belief system with which they fundamentally disagree. 

Policies about women in publishing often fail to centre actual women. One publisher’s menopause policy is “inclusive of all gender identities including trans and non-binary employees”. Another targets everyone, “whether you’re a cis woman, a trans man, intersex or non-binary”. Women have occasionally been dehumanised: one publisher put out a journal paper entitled “Trans women, cis women, alien women, and robot women are women: they are all (simply) adults gendered female”.

Lack of representation for lesbians and gay men 

Gender-critical lesbians and gay men working in publishing lack staff groups that advocate for their needs and rights based on their same-sex orientation. People who are same-sex attracted have been told that heterosexual men identifying as women are lesbian, and that heterosexual women identifying as men are gay. Lesbian, gay and bisexual members of staff who perceive a conflict between their own rights and what are presented as trans rights have no representation in publishing houses. No staff networks were identified that focus exclusively on LGB issues or that represent the views of those lesbians and gay men who do not believe that members of the opposite sex can self-identify into their dating pool. 

Unlawful behaviour

Employment law and other relevant legislation are frequently contravened. Examples of potentially unlawful behaviour by publishing houses include:

• Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies that fail to consider the protected characteristics of sex and religion or belief, while focusing on gender identity (which is not a protected characteristic) or the poorly defined concept of “gender”. Of the 30 organisations reviewed for this research, only four correctly cite the protected characteristics of sex and gender reassignment across their publicly listed policies. There is a wider failure to balance the needs and rights of all employees and workers, focusing only on those who have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment and ignoring those with other protected characteristics. 
• Allowing trans-identifying staff to use toilets that align with their gender identity, not their sex. This breaches the legal requirement to provide single-sex toilets in the workplace and turns single-sex spaces into mixed-sex spaces. 
• Surveys that conflate sex and gender identity, rendering the data meaningless. This also means that there is no obviously lawful purpose for its collection under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
• Failure to sanction abusive social-media posts by employees against other members of staff, from accounts that clearly link to their place of employment. This sometimes contrasts with draconian and unlawful sanction against staff whose social-media output challenges gender-identity beliefs.

One publisher’s trans-inclusion policy, for example, mandates the use of trans-identified colleagues’ pronouns, suggesting that mistakes are corrected and that repeated failure to use chosen pronouns may be “regarded as harassment” and dealt with accordingly. This may represent unlawful discrimination against employees who hold gender-critical beliefs and who do not feel comfortable manifesting the belief that a person can become a woman or man (or neither) through a process of self-identification. Staff at another company were told that they may need to use different pronouns depending on the day or week: a colleague might be he/him on a Monday and they/them on a Thursday.

Funders, literary venues and representative bodies also appear to be acting unlawfully in some cases. 

Misleading training

Training and advice in the sector has been exceptionally poor. One person was informed that an employer could not find a trainer who could deliver accurate equality-law training. A creative industries organisation incorrectly names the Act of Parliament on which it trains people, calling it the “Equalities Act”. The Publishers Association has based its data-collection guidance on Stonewall advice, which states that sex and gender are the same thing, that gender and gender identity are the same thing and that data on sex should not be collected. 

Necessary anonymity 

A criticism of SEEN in Publishing, a sex equality and equity network for publishing professionals, was that its organisers chose to remain anonymous, but reactions from the industry – including naming it a “vile TERF publishing group” (commissioning editor) and a “nasty, anonymous, hate-filled little network” (editor), and telling its members to “get fucked” (publisher) – show why it has been necessary for them to do so. “I was really scared,” said a representative of SEEN in Publishing of her decision not to reveal her identity. She pointed out that most of the abuse directed online at the network had been sent from social-media accounts that were linked to their employers in the publishing industry. It is striking that calling people disgusting, nasty bigots can be done in full daylight, while joining a network that believes in the material reality of sex requires secrecy to protect those joining it from the perpetrators of this open abuse.

Children’s publishing 

The promotion of gender-identity beliefs in children’s publishing is widespread and its ramifications are serious. Children who identify as trans are more likely than other children to have underlying vulnerabilities such as autism, poor mental health, a history of abuse or having grown up in care. They are several times more likely to grow up to be lesbian, gay or bisexual. They need support to feel comfortable in their bodies. Children’s books, on the other hand, paint a shiny, sparkly world of trans identities that supposedly fix deep-seated underlying challenges, resolve bodily hatred and create enduring joy in the form of “trans euphoria”. 

These publications are steeped in stereotypes. The blurb for the book I Am Jazz, for example, reads:

“From the time she was two years old, Jazz knew that she had a girl’s brain in a boy’s body. She loved pink and dressing up as a mermaid and didn’t feel like herself in boy’s clothing. This confused her family, until they took her to a doctor who said that Jazz was transgender and that she was born that way.”

Jazz Jennings is now an adult who has had several transition-related surgeries and experienced post-surgical complications, as well as many other health issues. 

Damage done

The impact of this hostile environment and the harms it has caused to those in the industry who hold gender-critical beliefs has been immeasurable. Interviewees mentioned stress and poor mental health, fears for their own safety and the safety of their families, physical ill-health and financial catastrophe. Loss of work has been the biggest professional impact.

One person was affected so badly she felt suicidal. Other examples of health effects include stress-related illnesses, panic attacks and symptoms such as high blood pressure. One interviewee experienced migraines so severe she had to lie on the floor at work, vomiting into a bucket. 

Several of the named interviewees in this research have lost book and employment contracts, speaking engagements and other means of generating income. Rachel Rooney stopped writing after two and a half years of cross-industry bullying, much of which took place online. Jenny Lindsay lost clients, speaking engagements and other works after her hounding. In May 2025, Ursula Doyle reached a settlement in her case against her former employer, Hachette, for discrimination on the grounds of her gender-critical beliefs. Gillian Philip was fired after she was swarmed on social media. Sibyl Ruth’s contract as an editor was effectively terminated after she posted online about her lawfully held beliefs. 

These losses are cumulative, as people who are seen as industry disruptors or troublemakers are less likely to get work in the future. 

Six case studies accompanying the report give more detail:

One publishing employee said:

“In terms of the culture, senior leadership has to wake up. They can be saying the right things, but they have to be paying attention to what is going on below them. They can’t just be sitting in an ivory tower saying: ‘We publish for everyone.’ If staff are acting in a way that is contrary to that, you have to act.” 

The report concludes with both sector-wide and organisation-specific recommendations.