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Hello everyone.
Thanks very much for signing up to this newsletter. Given how much utter rot permeates our email inboxes nowadays, I feel your decision to subscribe is quite the statement of trust. Proactively seeking out yet more stuff to look at, assess, read/bin, file, reply to, do something about or just forget suggests you take some interest in my take on this story and I am very grateful.
Many of you reading this will have come across from my "secret email" Post Office newsletter. I think I also plugged this gender newsletter on X, which may also be how you've fetched up here. I'm going to keep it relatively quiet until I'm happy with how it looks and feels and I've got some content to tell people about.
At the moment I don't have any content to tell you about, but I do have a series of excuses for not having any content, which I feel is the kind of content you definitely didn't sign up for. Nonetheless, I'm feeling chatty, so here goes:
Did you get this?
First things first - is this microphone on? If you did get this newsletter, please hit reply and indicate, in a manner of your choosing, that it landed safely in your inbox. Even if you just write "got it!" and send that back, it will be reassuring.
I'm writing this on a completely different platform to the secret email. So I'm learning all the back end stuff (which I'm not very good at) from scratch. I can't seem to upload images at the moment which is a bit annoying, and I'm not sure weblinks are being highlighted. Baby steps....
Also I am completely amazed at the sheer volume of work which is already being done on sex and gender by some incredible writers. There's a huge amount of informed opinion, new content, analysis and specialist takes out there. Just getting across it all takes time, and makes me ask what exactly I'm here for - what can I bring to the table?
I think the answer will be new stuff. News lines or content not seen before. That's easier said than done, but it's what I'll work towards.
Blog post vs Newsletter
By signing up to this newsletter, you have also signed up to the blog post email alerts. Both the blog posts and these newsletters are also published on the Gender Blog website. What, you may be asking, is the difference between the two? This was a question I asked myself when I realised the process was essentially identical.
The main difference is one of tone. If I have some news, or just want to write a more formal piece containing useful factual information, I'll write a blog post. This will be sent to you via email and published on the website under the Blog tab.
If I want to write something chatty, which hopefully also contains useful factual information, I'll compose a newsletter, which will be sent to you and published on the website under the Newsletters tab.
Both are essentially exactly the same, despite having completely different back ends. That's because this does give us (us being me and the technical Master of the Dark Arts behind this newsletter and the website) the option of splitting the two up in the way we have done with the Post Office stuff whereby blog posts are public and free, but the newsletter is initially email only and only sent to people who have made a donation of some description.
I am loathe to try to monetise anything right now as there are so many people running paid subscription newsletters and, rather more importantly, I don't have anything worth asking people to consider paying for yet.
Confidential correspondence
One of the joys of the Post Office newsletter was that it brought me into contact with people who had expertise to share, great contacts and/or some mind-blowing personal stories to tell. If you ever want to tell me something interesting, please just hit reply to this email. It goes straight to my email inbox. No one else sees it. It will stay in complete confidence. And I will no doubt want to contact you directly as a result.
The only caveat is that I do get lots of information from lots of people about lots of stories every day. I have no admin function (sometimes I get asked if my office can deal with a matter - I wish!) and I have to keep an eye on paying the mortgage, which requires me to do other work. But rest assured, the gender wars are a matter of significant interest to me. I don't yet think the public are fully appraised of its horrors. It is my intention to eventually help ensure they are.
Why is everything taking so long?
That's a good question. I was telling my publisher (and, privately, anyone who would listen) in 2022 that my next book would be about gender. I went public with my scepticism about gender ideology last year. It was my plan to spend 2024 writing a book on the matter, but then at the beginning of the year, an ITV drama rather put paid to that. I am still (happily) dealing with the public interest and work generated by its fallout.
As a result I have spent the last two years building up contacts and making some inroads into the already very-well established gender-critical (or "sex realist" as I prefer to call it) world without actually generating much output.
Late to the game
The first event I attended was "A Woman's Place is in the Press" in November 2023, which was great. Really powerful and incredibly well-attended. In May this year I had the great privilege of attending the launch of SEENinJournalism at the University Women's Club. In Edinburgh over summer for a Post Office book-reading gig I had a private meeting with some of the leading lights among For Women Scotland and Murray Blackburn Mackenzie and then I funded myself to attend the Genspect conference in Lisbon, Portugal.
On all these occasions I was very much taken by the warm welcome I got and the atmosphere generated by some fiercely intelligent, well-informed, determined people, some of whom had risked losing (or had lost) everything whilst making their arguments years before I started even thinking about this story.
I will never forget - as per the Post Office scandal - I have come late to this. Those who have done the real difficult work in appalling circumstances deserve considerable credit. I will aim to ensure I acknowledge this at all times. Please feel free to remind me if I have not done so properly, or missed something somewhere.
Okay it's finishing now
This email has already gone on far too long (and I'm really sorry about the lack of pics), but it has given me an idea for my next newsletter, which is a list of books I have read and websites/substacks I find useful. It is my intention to start building out the (currently blank) Links page on the website so there is a handy page directing visitors to the good stuff.
This being a two-way street, please do send me your reading recommendations on the subject of gender - whether it's a newsletter/substack or book - and tell me in a sentence or two why you find/found it interesting or useful. I have already read quite a few essential texts and now I've bought a kindle, I have gone on a spending spree. As a result I have quite a lot in the pipe to get through. Much as I love physical books, the kindle does allow me to highlight and lift passages worth remembering in each text so I can put them all in one place cite them in future.
I'll try to get another newsletter out before Christmas with my (and your) book/substack recommendations so you can buy them for yourself or the engaged relative in your life. And I'll try to generate some original content before long. Please send me any comments you have about the readability and functionality of this newsletter. I will aim to improve is as we go along.
Thanks for reading!
NIck
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