A few weeks ago, freelance publishing professional Jamilah Ahmed wrote that the book business should face up to difficult conversations. She argued: “Publishing should be a hub of debate: a literal host of dynamic and ever-evolving perspectives and one that has apparently been striving to become more inclusive and outward-looking.”

Last week an email arrived in my inbox – as in many others – from SEEN in Publishing, an organisation that advocates for those whose gender-critical views have put them outside mainstream publishing conversations. The email highlighted a new report titled Everyday Cancellation in Publishing. In its introduction the children’s writer Onjali Q Raúf writes: “The publishing industry’s reputation as one of the last precious havens of thought, speech, debate and critique has been all but demolished this past decade, thanks to an ideological status quo which has thrived on a collective silencing of women’s legally protected sex-based rights and realities… It’s time for everyone to sit down now, and listen.”

Unlike some, I actually read the report. The language and approach is not promising. It uses the term - via a quote from Richard Dawkins - “trans cult”, its glossary dismisses the term “gender” as having “multiple definitions [that] limit its usefulness as a concept”, and it leads with its conclusions. Worrying, too, is that it is based on a tiny sample – 10 authors, 10 publishers or former publishers, two agents, a funder, a festival director and a representative of SEEN in Publishing. We all know a small number of voices can represent a larger cohort – the author of this report argues that it was hampered by not being able to publicise its research – but on this issue, that is not my experience. By contrast, a recent review into whether UK universities have protected gender-critical academics garnered 120 completed responses.

The corporates have followed internal consensus rather than commercial instinct

None of that invalidates the report, the points it raises, nor its central argument – that such perspectives have been shunted to the sidelines, and deliberately so. That bit is relatively simple to prove – the better-selling books in this area have largely been written from the gender-critical perspective, and yet generally eschewed by the big publishers. The corporates promise to publish for everyone but, in this regard, they do not, and have not. They know it too, because privately they admit it. They have followed internal consensus rather than commercial instinct, or to put it another way, care for the majority of staff and authors over the contrary views of others.

However, the report’s misgendering, the email bombing, the tagging of individuals in social-media posts, is unhelpful. Indeed, it repeats the errors of those it tries to reproach. Raúf’s call to “listen” – rather than converse – is just one example. Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ charity, is often criticised for treating the law as it wants it to be, rather than how it is. But this report falls down similarly: it dismisses opposing views as adhering to a “belief system” that inverts “reality”, in a way that feels dangerously close to erasure. It is particularly critical of children’s publishing, saying the sector “is arguably indoctrinating children into this belief system”. Here the word “arguably” speaks to a larger problem with the report – many of the accusations it wants to make are outside its scope, but it makes them anyway.

The report calls for a course-correction and, given the recent Supreme Court ruling, it could get one, alongside a more considered approach to these issues from the sector. But to Jamilah’s earlier point, there is a way of being inclusive and plural. This document is not it.

Updated on 9th July to reference Richard Dawkins’ use of the term ’trans-cult’ within the report, with additional commentary also provided by SEEN in Publishing here.