The evening of 2 June 2019 is something of a ‘sliding doors’ moment in my life. I had just read a column in a local arts magazine called The Skinny, written by a notorious gender identity activist. In it, the columnist justified violent action against lesbians at Pride marches, defending tweets in which they had written: ‘Get in their faces, make them afraid. Debate never works, so fuck them up’. He admitted he had faced some backlash for his stance from ‘Terfs’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) but he ‘stood by what [he had] said’.
It was a far cry from what I was used to reading in this magazine. I tweeted politely to The Skinny: ‘Hello! One of your commentators here advocates violence against lesbian activists at Pride. I find it extraordinary that such views are given an airing in The Skinny…’ The backlash was extraordinary. My life changed forever.
These past five years of vilification have been challenging
Back then, I was a reasonably successful if financially unstable poet, writer, and live literature promoter.
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