Mick Hartley

Ursula Doyle was hounded out of publishing for her gender-critical views:

I have worked in publishing for 30 years. I have left my job after four years of hounding and abuse from peers who think I should not express my GC opinions nor publish authors who share them….

In 2020 I published Kathleen Stock’s influential book on sex and gender, Material Girls. Since then, I have been a target for abuse by colleagues in the book industry, who have used social media to accuse me of – among other things – bigotry, prejudice, transphobia and hatred, often tagging in my employer, Hachette, and Hachette’s Pride network.

Hachette have done nothing to protect me, and have created a hostile working environment for me and anyone else who shares my views. When two of Fleet's authors complained that my views were transphobic, the company agreed to move paperback editions of the authors' books away from the imprint to another part of the business, damaging my reputation both inside and outside the company. I became ill with stress and associated conditions, and finally resigned. I am bringing a claim of discrimination on the grounds of my gender-critical belief (sometimes known as 'sex realism'), and of sex discrimination….

She writes about it at The Critic:

“I am going to dissect every word of this toxic TERF-y trash fire and call out the sheer irresponsible cruelty of platforming a notorious bigot with a release like this. @Docstockk is a [sic] infamous Transphobic [sic] bully of the highest order. Shame on you.”

This was posted on Twitter on 4 February 2021 by someone working in publishing about the forthcoming release of Material Girls by Kathleen Stock, a book which examines why reality matters for feminism. The publisher was Fleet, the imprint I ran at Hachette, a major global corporate publisher. I didn’t take it very seriously at first.

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.

On and on it goes, the petty vindictiveness of the trans supporters – so sure of their virtue. A grim reminder of the state of the publishing world….