I found out through social media that the Royal Academy had dropped me. So instead of emailing me back, or responding in any way to my plea to not drag this into the open, they thanked the people that pointed out my indiscretion. They didn’t name me, but at that point, it had become such a big thing that everybody was talking about anyway. They will no longer stock this transphobic artist, and thanking people and that was that.

I’d been posting books that I’ve been reading through the pandemic. In March, I tweeted about a book, which documents far-Left extremism in mainly in Portland and Seattle, in the States, so very niche topic, certainly for a Londoner. And I called the book important and the author brave, important because as far as I saw it was the only book on the topic… [When the tweet went viral] you have extreme activists who then pile on and they pile on not just on Twitter, they’ve changed my Wikipedia page to say fascist, they then go through your friends and similar sort of behaviours. It gets quite scary, particularly when your friends don’t know what’s going on. There were threats from radio stations, saying they’re not going to play the band, several artists, some of whom we’ve worked with literally accusing me of endorsing fascism. And so it wasn’t just activists, it was then it felt like the music industry more widely.

One of the ways in which my behaviour has changed over the last few years is that I won’t engage with my friends on social media. So if there’s someone who is like a quote unquote, “civilian”, who follows me on Twitter it’s like, oh no, you don’t know what you’ve let yourself in for because like the cost of engaging with me and my public profile, is that somebody who has absolutely like no relationship or association with the stuff I think can be vulnerable to trolling. And that makes me feel terrible. It makes me feel guilty and responsible. And it makes you feel vulnerable and fragile as a person because ostracism is the worst thing that can happen to a human being. Humans can live in sub zero temperatures in the desert underground on the moon, or these things, but what humans can’t do is survive on their own.

It’s costly to speak up. If you work in Hollywood, everything is about the gatekeepers. So if you’re an actor or an actress, if you want to get to an audience, you have to get through producers, directors, financers. It’s all gatekeepers in the music industry… Well, the music press is another thing, which is another good example because I think that they’re an important example of gatekeepers. That’s a good way to get to a big audience when you’ve got a new album or whatever you’re trying to get it out and they are almost entirely pretty Left. So whenever I’m going to get interviewed by music press again, or if I’d stayed with the band, this story would come up and it would be a negative story. So it’s like, that’s also unfair for the band for them to have to suffer that.

I had a fascinating direct message exchange with a person who runs a small print and independent small press. And he got in touch to tell me that I shouldn’t be allowed to write for some of the people who I write for. And if I do write for them, they should be allowed to tell me what my tweets say. And I was like, hold up. This is a mad and totalitarian thing for you to think as a publisher. But from their perspective, this publisher didn’t see that that was a particularly mad and totalitarian position to hold. Her belief was that she was absolutely in the right and her ideas about gender identity, were the only beliefs that were constant with art and culture. And the position that I hold is an outcast position that should be unsupported. I, as a person who believes that sex exists and is important in many situations, should be not allowed to write.

What matters is to stick to my guns to stick to what I believe. That gets through to people, I think that gets through to people and to young people. So it’s important to not sort of waver and that doesn’t mean not take in new conversation, have the conversations. And most of the times when I’m trying to have a conversation, it really stops very quickly, when when you meet dogma. It doesn’t go much further. And when people say speech is violence, and I just keep calmly talking on and they realise that a lot of nonsense. You do get through to them. I am hopeful.

I think I like the question about what is art for and I think you can good art only happens through acts of bravery, small bravery, or large acts of bravery. You have to put yourself on the line you have to be willing to be wrong. You have to expose yourself to other people’s views and reactions. I think one of the problems with the low key volunteer Stasi totalitarianism is it’s corrosive to bravery. And it eats away at the all the stuff that makes people interesting, makes people capable of saying, terrible, shameful, shocking things in lyrics and novels and doing exciting, thrilling, so it makes people small c conservative in a way that is antithetical to art. I would hope for people to sort of rediscover the joy of being brave and rediscover this sort of pleasure of, we’d like acting in good faith and trusting other people.

Before the experience I would say I was quite against wokeism. Perhaps because of the apology I then got the anti-woke that came after me, and I recognised that they were behaving exactly as the woke mob. They are the thesis and antithesis, but I’m more interested in the synthesis, in the middle ground. I think that I’m changed in that I’m now quite cynical about that movement. More than I was before.