The children's author CANCELLED by her publisher after backing J.K. Rowling

By GILLIAN PHILIP

The first sign of trouble was the unusually high number of new Twitter notifications that had pinged overnight on my mobile phone.

As a successful author with an established social media profile, I’m used to a steady stream of messages, but this ran to hundreds. And the tone of them was different – horribly so.

Instead of chat from book-lovers, there was an onslaught of abusive tweets – anonymous, of course – that contained among them threats of death and sexual violence.

In case that was too subtle, several contributors decorated their messages with images of guns. ‘I’m going to punch u in the throat’ declared one of those that are printable.

It was far from a pleasant start to my day but, if I’m honest, I had been expecting at least some negative reaction.

The reason? I had dared to offer support on Twitter for J.K. Rowling’s stand against allowing transgender people to self-identify as male or female.

What did surprise – and devastate – me was the cataclysmic fallout over the next 24 hours of posting the simple hashtag ‘#IStandWithJKRowling’. I couldn’t have dared to imagine the damage that it was possible for a faceless mob of trolls to inflict.

But much more of a shock was the spineless way that my publishers capitulated in the face of this foam-flecked online protest.

They summarily sacked me and, in doing so, destroyed my livelihood without making any attempt to hear my side of the story.

I’m not remotely transphobic, but the idea that a man can simply declare himself to be a woman, fully intact, without surgery or hormones, and be allowed into women’s prisons or hospital wards is a crazy situation that I sometimes want to shout about.

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