Mick Hartley

Rachel Rooney, the children’s writer demonised by the publishing world for her gender-critical views, is interviewed in the Telegraph:

“This is the book that ended my career,” says Rachel Rooney, holding a copy of My Body is Me, a picture book for three to six-year-olds published in 2019. You could not find a more innocuous, inclusive and warm-hearted children’s paperback if you tried, yet it led to bitter recriminations for its award-winning creator, a torrent of abuse and ultimately her cancellation by the publishing world.

Her “crime” was to be a gender-critical feminist voice in an industry that was, and largely remains, adherent to a rigid gender ideology. Before her cancellation, she was a widely acclaimed author, winning one of poetry’s most coveted awards and regularly featuring in lists of “Top 10 books for children” in The Guardian, among other newspapers.

But Rooney, now 63, found that being out of step with trans orthodoxy and publicly declaring a belief in the binary nature of biological sex – even when the book in question made no reference to gender or sex – was fatal for the career she had always dreamt of, as well as her livelihood.

What she calls “playground bullying and all the cowards who don’t want to get bullied themselves” drove her to despair and thoughts of suicide. She no longer writes at all. “This interview feels like my last way of expressing what happened to me,” Rooney says.

She collaborated on a book titled My Body is Me, arguing that children’s bodies are perfect as they are. That’s when the abuse really began.

Even before it was published, Rooney was already being attacked by fellow authors on social media for her unfashionable views. In the summer of 2019, she contacted the Society of Authors, her trade union, to point out that the list of “protected characteristics” on its website included gender and gender identity but not sex, which was legally incorrect, and the society agreed to change it.

But, after the book came out, “it just went ballistic among the children’s publishing community, especially following the criticism of [children’s author], Clara Vulliamy”.

In December 2019, Vulliamy posted a succession of messages on X vilifying Rooney and encouraging the organisation that promotes author visits to schools, Authors Aloud UK, not to endorse her or My Body is Me, saying it propagated an “extreme ideology” that “targets children”.

“What shocked me was how coordinated the attacks seemed,” says Rooney, who received months of personal abuse via social media and her website. “Be aware,” said one tweet. “Rachel Rooney is a transphobic writer who is using children’s literature to spread her hateful worldview.”

Another informed parents that Rooney was a “Terf” – a trans-exclusionary radical feminist – who was trying to “stop kids questioning gender. If you wouldn’t let your kids read terrorist propaganda, don’t let them read this”.

Rooney feels she was personally targeted by more influential and established people with less to lose than her. “Authors, librarians and publicists were all working against me. I used to get four or five requests a year to contribute a poem to major anthologies. That stopped, and I don’t get any now.”

Rooney used to visit two or three schools a month to supplement her income, but once the attacks became widespread, these bookings stopped completely. She was told by a publisher that some booksellers were refusing to stock her work.

It’s a scarcely believable story of a witch hunt, taking place in the quintessentially nice middle-class publishing world – which turned out to be full of the most vile and vindictive people.