The case of Waterstones and the anti-trans author Christina Dalcher
According to a recent post on an influential Mumsnet forum, the leading British high-street book retailer Waterstones has come out as Gender Critical (GC).
For those uninitiated in the jargon, the Gender Critical (GC) movement is made up of radical "feminists" (once known as TERFs) who campaign against transgendered individuals, and who claim that biological sex is binary and immutable, and who dispute that gender can diverge from biological assignment at birth, and who appear to wage a relentless (and often bad-tempered/malicious) campaign against the rights of those who seek gender reassignment.
One leading academic, Claire Thurlow, in a damning peer-reviewed academic assessment, asserts that the so-called Gender Critical movement: "continues to rely on transphobic tropes, moral panics and essentialist understandings of men and women. These factors also continue to link trans-exclusionary feminism to anti-feminist reactionary politics and other ‘anti-gender’ movements."
Last week, it emerged that the leading UK book retailer, Waterstones, had dismissed a long-serving bookseller, Tilly Fitzgerald. With an apparently, otherwise unblemished employment record, Fitzgerald was dismissed for her "social media usage".
As had been widely reported, both by the UK daily newspaper Metro here, and in the Bookseller, here, Fitzgerald was fired after becoming embroiled in a trans row with self-acknowledged anti-trans activist and author Christina Dalcher.
Fitzgerald, after learning of Dalcher's transphobic views, replied in a public comment on X (formerly Twitter), that she would "bin" her own copies of Dalcher's books.
In response, Dalcher contacted Waterstone's on X/Twitter, asking whether the company would be okay with that. Following Dalcher's intervention, Fitzgerald was dismissed.
I reached out to Waterstone's by email on July 10th 2024, asking whether their decision to dismiss an employee was as a response to pressure from Dalcher or her representatives. In an initial response, the same day, Waterstones PR department stated the following: "We have never had any contact with Christina Dalcher or any of her stakeholders. "
I challenged this version of events, the same day, pointing out that Dalcher had written to Waterstones. The retailer subsequently replied as follows, by return on July 10th:
"Christina Dalcher has indeed tagged Waterstones on her social post but we have not had any other contact , nor engaged in any conversation with the author or any of her stakeholders on the subject through any channel."
What this demonstrates is that, at the very least, Waterstones was disingenuous in its initial response.
I have also reached out to Christina Dalcher's US publicist and agent (as advertised on her website). Both claim they no longer present her. I have also reached out to her UK publicist/publisher who didn't reply.
In the final analysis, the Gender Critical movement makes at best controversial arguments that i) biological sex is binary and immutable -- a point that is not the consensus in medical science, ii) claim that gender must be aligned with biological sex -- a point empirically established as nonsensical by decades of sociolinguistic and anthropological cross-cultural research, and iii) present arguments in inflammatory and divisive ways, using transphobic tropes especially on social media venues such as X/twitter.
The upshot appears to be, arguably, that the GC movement seeks to spread an ideology of hate, and to promote public moral panic, as claimed by the academic Claire Thurlow.
In the final analysis, one must wonder what Waterstones was thinking, in dismissing a long-serving employee with an ostensibly unblemished record. This is surely a PR disaster for them. And seems to play into the narrative that Waterstones is putatively a non-inclusive organization that fails to recognize and value all groupings of society, especially an already marginalized group such as the transgender community.
Ultimately, in this scenario, where hate and a lack of tolerance prevails, we all lose.
See my related articles in Psychology Today:
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