Silencing is not someone literally gagging you, preventing you from speaking. It’s people trying their hardest to create a hostile environment and trying to scare you into not speaking. Whether or not it works is irrelevant- it’s the fact that they try to do it 1/

Silencing includes publicly smearing a person’s reputation, dropping them from projects and collaborations, pursuing complaints about them to employers (often under the cloak of anonymity), contacting publishers and editors telling them to boycott their work 2/

Freezing them out at work, blocking them on social media, refusing to attend any events where they are present, encouraging students to complain about them. That’s all silencing because only a few people can withstand that stuff and still speak out 3/

Kathleen Stock is one of them. I am not. I don’t have the mental resilience for it. I hate conflict and am a relentless people pleaser. Were I to face the stuff those who have spoken out do, it would break me. That means I can’t say what I think and effectively I am silenced 4/

The fact that some brave people do speak about what is happening does not mean that the problem doesn’t exist, as Hines and others love to claim. To say that is as disingenuous as it gets and I hope history will judge them harshly for it 5/5