Just over a week ago, I posted a picture of myself wearing a T-shirt printed with the words “Nicola Sturgeon: Destroyer of Women’s Rights” on Twitter. I did this to show my solidarity with women who were protesting outside the Scottish parliament against the proposed Gender Recognition Act reform bill.

Some of the women, like Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce, have public profiles, but most of the women protesting do not. They also knew they might be taking a risk in demonstrating. It takes guts for Scottish women to stand up for their rights these days — not, I should emphasise, anywhere near the same guts as Iranian women are currently displaying, but guts nonetheless. They risk being targeted by activists, police complaints being made against them and even the threat of a spell in jail for posting what are seen as “transphobic” comments or images by their complainants.

Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, believes the protesters outside parliament on October 6 have nothing to complain about. The woman who calls herself a “real feminist” said to the BBC that her proposed new Gender Recognition Act “doesn’t give any additional rights to trans people nor does it take any rights away from women”.

I disagree. So, to name just a few who were also protesting that day, do Rhona Hotchkiss, the retired prison governor with a masters in law and a qualification in research methodology; Isabelle Kerr, former manager of Glasgow and Clyde Rape Crisis Centre, who was awarded an MBE for her international work helping rape and sexual assault victims; all-female independent policy analysis collective Murray Blackburn Mackenzie; and For Women Scotland, a grassroots feminist group that has emerged as a leading voice for Scottish women over the past few years.

If Sturgeon’s new act passes into law, a person will be able to change their legal gender as long as they’ve lived in their acquired gender for three months, and made a statutory declaration that they intend to keep doing so. Remarkably, nobody seems able to explain what living in an acquired gender actually means, so how those granting certificates can judge whether the criteria has been met is anyone’s guess.

Under the current act, those who wish to change their gender need a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, ie, persistent distress and discomfort with their natal sex. However, all medical gatekeeping has been removed from Sturgeon’s revised bill. I presume this is in response to the strong push from the trans activist lobby to “depathologise” trans identities. The argument is that trans people aren’t mentally ill: being trans is as natural as being gay. As Rachel Cohen, campaigns director of Stonewall wrote in 2017: “Being trans is not about ‘sex changes’ or clothes, it’s about an innate sense of self.” You may ask how anyone can assess the authenticity of somebody else’s “innate sense of self”. I haven’t a clue.

Soon, then, in Scotland, it may be easier to change the sex on your birth certificate than it is to change it on your passport. In consequence, intact males who are judged to have met the meagre requirements will be considered as “valid” and entitled to protections as those who’ve had full sex reassignment surgery, and more male-bodied individuals will assert more strongly a right to be in women’s spaces such as public bathrooms, changing rooms, rape support centres, domestic violence refuges, hospital wards and prison cells that were hitherto reserved for women.

In 2019, The Sunday Times made a freedom of information request to the Ministry of Justice that revealed almost 90 per cent of sexual offences committed in changing rooms happened in those that are unisex. Nevertheless, Sturgeon loftily dismisses anyone who fears her new legislation could be wide open to abuse. “It is men who attack women [feminists should worry about] and we need to focus on that, not on further stigmatising and discriminating against a tiny group in our society that is already one of the most stigmatised.”

In saying this, Sturgeon is employing no fewer than three arguments beloved of trans activists.

The first is that trans women are extremely vulnerable, far more so than biological women. This is in spite of the fact that no trans woman has been murdered in Scotland to date, whereas 112 women were murdered by men in Scotland between 2009 and 2019.

The second argument is that men who transition, uniquely among all other categories of those born male, never harm women. Yet there is no evidence to show that trans women don’t retain male patterns of criminality. According to Jo Phoenix, professor of criminology at the University of Reading: “Sex is the single strongest predictor of criminality and criminalisation. Since criminal statistics were first collected (in the mid 1850s) males make up around 80 per cent of those arrested, prosecuted and convicted of crime. Violent crime is mostly committed by males . . . This remains the case regardless of stated gender identity.” The Ministry of Justice’s own figures show that there are proportionately more trans-identified men in prison for sexual offences than among incarcerated males taken as a whole.

The third argument Sturgeon uses is that it’s transphobic to suggest any man would fraudulently claim a female identity. This claim is extraordinary. Nobody but the very naive can fail to be aware that predatory men are capable of going to great lengths to gain easy access to victims, and have often sought out professions or special status that offer camouflage for their activities. Sex offenders have historically been found among social workers, teachers, priests, doctors, babysitters, school caretakers, celebrities and charity fundraisers, yet no matter how often the scandals break, the lesson appears never to be learned: it is dangerous to assert that any category of people deserves a blanket presumption of innocence. Incidentally, it seems that prison is the perfect space in which to discover your innate sense of self: half of Scottish prisoners currently claiming a trans identity only did so after conviction.

This shouldn’t need saying, but in the current climate, it does: literally no feminist I’ve ever met claims all trans women are predators, any more than we believe that all men are predators. As I’ve already stated publicly, I believe that some trans people are truly vulnerable. That, though, is not the point.

I’ve spent much of the past 25 years campaigning for and funding initiatives to help women and children. These have included projects for female prisoners, campaigns for the rights of single mothers, the funding of safe spaces for victims of rape and male violence, and the fight to end child institutionalisation. I’ve also learned a huge amount about safeguarding from experts, both in relation to vulnerable children placed in institutions, who’re often abused or trafficked, and in the context of sexually abused women.

I say all this to make it clear that concern for women’s and children’s safety isn’t something I’m pretending to be interested in to mask a deep hostility to trans people. The question for me and all the feminists I know is, how do we make trans people safe without making women and girls less safe?

One of the most damning things I’ve heard about the consultation process for Sturgeon’s new bill is this: Murray Blackburn Mackenzie identified five female survivors of male violence who were prepared to meet with the committee and explain what had happened to them, the severe impact it had upon their lives, and why they fear the government is making it easier for violent or predatory men to get access to women and girls. The committee declined to meet the survivors, telling them to put their concerns in writing. Susan Smith, one of For Women Scotland’s founders, told me: “These women were prepared to parade their trauma and were rebuffed.” The committee did, however, find time to meet 17 trans-identified individuals.

In 1983 Andrea Dworkin wrote: “No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt . . . the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated.”

Nearly 40 years later, Rhona Hotchkiss says that vulnerable women in Scotland are being told “their concerns, their fears, their despair, must take second place to the feelings of men who identify as women. Politicians who say there is no clash of rights have no idea about the lives of women in situations they will never face.”

Rarely in politics is it easy to draw a direct line from a single policy decision to the harm it’s done, but in this case, it will be simple. If any woman or girl suffers voyeurism, sexual harassment, assault or rape in consequence of the Scottish government’s lax new rules, the blame will rest squarely with those at Holyrood who ignored safeguarding experts and women’s campaigners.

And nobody should be held to higher account than the first minister, the “real feminist” who’s riding roughshod over the rights of women and girls.

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The last few years have seen an escalation of bullying of female authors both inside and outside publishing in the UK. Rachel Rooney and Gillian Phillips in particular have suffered severe personal and professional harm because they dared challenge a fashionable ideology which has been remarkably successful in demonising those who protest against the current attack on women’s rights.

On Saturday, Joanne Harris, Chair of the Society of Author’s Management Committee, responded to a Twitter user who asked whether she had ‘expressed sympathy to JK Rowling’, ‘yes, and to everyone in a similar position.’ I was startled to read this, as I’ve received no communication whatsoever from Harris expressing sympathy for the death and rape threats I’ve received. I was less surprised to learn that Katharine Quarmby urged the society to condemn these threats in 2020 and 2021 and nothing was done.

Harris has consistently failed to criticise tactics designed to silence and intimidate women who fail to support her personal position on gender identity ideology and has said publicly, ‘Cancel isn’t a dirty word. We habitually cancel things we no longer want’. I find it impossible to square the Society’s stated position on freedom of speech with Harris’s public statements over the past two years and stand in solidarity with all female writers in the UK who currently feel betrayed by their professional body and its leader.

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I own a cuddly tortoise sewn by my mother, which she gave me when I was 7. It has a floral shell, a red underbelly and black felt eyes. Even though I’m notoriously prone to losing things, I’ve managed to keep hold of that tortoise through sundry house moves and even changes of country. My mother died over 30 years ago, so I’ve now lived more of my life without her than with her. I find more comfort in that tortoise than I do in photographs of her, which are now so faded and dated, and emphasize how long she’s been gone. What consoles me is the permanence of the object she made — its unchanging nature, its stolid three-dimensional reality. I’d give up many of my possessions to keep that tortoise, the few exceptions being things that have their own allusive power, like my wedding ring.

The most valuable thing I ever lost, at least in a strictly monetary sense, was a pair of spectacular diamond earrings I won many years ago at a charity ball auction. Though very beautiful, my new clip-ons were heavy and turned out to be exceptionally painful to wear, so tight they made my earlobes throb. I wore them to a formal event in London and found them so uncomfortable I discreetly removed them and stowed them in my evening bag. The following day, having flown back to Scotland, I opened my suitcase and they were nowhere to be found; irrevocably lost.

I put those departed earrings into my new children’s book, “The Christmas Pig,” which is a story of objects lost and found, of things beloved and things unregretted. I made my lost earrings grand and snooty, as befitted objects that demanded the wearer suffer for their beauty. When they reach the Land of the Lost, where the hero must go to rescue his most beloved toy, my earrings are angry that they aren’t treated with the respect they think they deserve. They soon find out that being made of diamonds counts for very little in the strange world where human-made objects go when lost, because a thing’s importance there depends on how much it’s truly loved.

There can be a strange magic in human-made things. Not in all of them: not in plastic bottles or Q-Tips or batteries; but in those that are interwoven with our pasts, with our homes, with our great loves. These are things that have been mysteriously imbued with humanity — our own or other people’s.

The magic of “things” often goes unnoticed until they break or are lost. We have favorite mugs and tea towels, comforting in their familiarity and utility; we treasure the lopsided objects our children made for us in nursery school, and we may still own those toys that soothed us when we were tiny. “The Christmas Pig” was inspired in part by one of those achingly necessary toys without whom sleep is impossible: a cheap cuddly pig around eight inches tall, with a belly full of plastic beans, that belonged to my son, David.

David was so attached to that pig, but so prone to losing it, that I became scared it would one day be lost and never found again. I therefore bought an identical replacement and hid it. David was 3 when he went rummaging in the cupboard where I’d stowed his pig’s twin and took it out, slightly confused. He declared it to be his pig’s brother and kept both of them. They’re both still with us, though their names are different from the pigs’ names in the story. Only David’s habit of hiding his beloved pig, then forgetting where he put it, is taken from real life.

Every writer is asked where ideas come from. It’s a relief to have an answer for once, because more often than not I don’t know — the ideas simply arrive. “The Christmas Pig” sprang from my musings on what it means to be a replacement toy. I’d always wanted to write a Christmas story, and once I’d dreamed the Land of the Lost into being I realized I’d found one at last. Christmas was the perfect backdrop to a tale of loss and love, sacrifice and hope.

Of course, it isn’t necessary to actually celebrate Christmas to grasp that element of the story. Every culture has its sacred, celebratory days when feasts are made and consumed, when the grown-ups are making a special effort, when the whole family assembles, when gifts are exchanged.

“The Christmas Pig” explores a deep attachment to an old object, with all its half-understood associations and meanings, at a time when we’re supposed to be in thrall to acquiring the new. It’s about the journey of a boy, Jack, who has a complicated family life, and is consequently a little lost himself, but who discovers his bravery and deep capacity for love in a strange new world. Of all the books I’ve written, this is the one that made me cry the most, because I was dealing with emotions that run deep in all of us. Loss and change are hard for children, but acceptance of these inevitable parts of life isn’t much easier for adults. There was a particular poignancy in finishing the book (which I began to think about in 2012) during a pandemic that has plunged us all into a frightening new world. “The Christmas Pig” shows how human beings — even small, lost ones — are capable of wonderful, heroic, transformative acts. It’s a story in which hope triumphs over despair and individual acts of kindness bring about huge, positive change.

A very strange thing happened on the day I finished editing “The Christmas Pig.” After emailing the final manuscript to my editor, I set about the mundane job of clearing out a cupboard. Sorting through its items — half my mind still in the story, with Jack and the things that came alive on Christmas Eve — one of the last objects I picked up was a small, nondescript box. It rattled. I opened it.

Now, you might believe this or you might not. I can’t blame you if you don’t; after all, I make things up for a living. Nevertheless, this is the truth: There, twinkling up at me as though they’d just been cleaned, were my long-lost diamond earrings, which I hadn’t seen for decades. How they came to be in that box, in that cupboard, I have no idea, nor can I fathom how they moved house with us without my knowledge. Nor do I understand how they escaped the careful search I made of the evening bag and the suitcase from which they disappeared.

Doubtless there’s a prosaic explanation, though I can’t for the life of me imagine what it is. Sitting on the floor amid the piles of dusty things I’d been sorting, utterly astonished by my discovery, I tried the earrings on again. They were exactly as painful as I remembered.

I’ve decided to sell them and give the proceeds to my charity, Lumos, which works to end child institutionalization. I think it rounds out my earrings’ story rather nicely, to have them return from their long exile humbled, wanting to do some good for children in the Land of the Living. I’ll write a note for the new owner — whose earlobes, with any luck, will be made of sterner stuff than my own — and explain their history, in hopes that they’ll give somebody as much pleasure as their rediscovery gave me.

How many times have I been asked whether I believe in magic? On the day I finished “The Christmas Pig,” for a few shining moments I really did.

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Poignant, funny and genuinely scary, The Hundred and One Dalmatians was one of my favourite books as a child and the story has lingered in my imagination ever since. Blue iced cakes always put me in mind of Cruella de Vil’s experimental food colourings, and whenever our dogs whine to get out at dusk I imagine them joining the canine news network, the twilight barking. There’s simply no resisting a book containing the lines ‘There are some people who always find beauty makes them feel sadder, which is a very mysterious thing’, and ‘Mr Dearly was a highly skilled dog-puncher’.

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‘I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.”

So wrote CS Lewis. A Gen Xer like me couldn’t claim quite the same, because we had television and boomboxes, and the attic in my childhood home wouldn’t have taken much exploring, being about six feet square. On the other hand, I had woods and fields in which I was at liberty to wander alone, as long as I returned for meals. I’m certainly the product of solitude and many, many books.

The elaborate fantasies I span before going to sleep each night made me far more eager to get to bed than most children. Some of my stories had set paragraphs that had to be silently recited before the daydream could begin. I’d embellish these fantastical tales until they could bear no more detail, at which point they’d collapse and lose their power, which meant it was time to build a new one.

I began writing aged six. Maybe, if I’d grown up now, I’d have joined an online writing group and posted my fiction there, although I was always quite secretive about the work I produced out of the classroom. As it is, only my bin and I know exactly what was in the short stories I churned out as a child and a teen, not to mention the novels that shrivelled up and died after a couple of chapters. One thing I’m sure about: my teenage self would definitely have gone looking online for the sense of self that eluded me until I was past 30, although I doubt I’d have found it any earlier. It takes time to realise that self-knowledge doesn’t reside in the labels you apply to yourself, and can’t be obtained through other people’s validation, although humans through the centuries have hoped otherwise.

In my early twenties I wrote quite a lot of a very bad novel called The Private Joke. I regularly abandoned it for months at a time to write other things, then picked it up again. Part of the manuscript was sitting up in the luggage rack when, aged 25, I was travelling by train from Manchester to London, and the idea for a very different kind of book hit me: that of a boy who didn’t realise he was a wizard, and was taken off to magic school.

The idea of writing for children had never occurred to me before, not because I thought it was in any way lesser than writing for adults — I read voraciously as a child and still count certain children’s books among my favourites — but because my childhood wasn’t very happy. I’m not one of those who craves a return to a delightfully carefree youth. For me childhood was a time of anxiety and insecurity. Yet the idea for Harry Potter came to me in a rush of exhilaration, and all I could think was how much I’d love to write it, how much fun it would be to build that hidden world. I kept writing The Private Joke alongside Philosopher’s Stone for a while until it dawned on me, to paraphrase the iconic Sesame Street song, that one of these things is better than the other, and I finally put The Private Joke out of its misery.

How many times was I asked while still writing it: “What makes Harry Potter so popular?” I never had a good answer. It has occurred to me since that much of what young people found in the Potter books are the very same things they seek online: escape, excitement and agency. The Potter books also describe a community that sees and embraces what others might see as oddities. Who doesn’t want that? How much more “seen” can a person feel, than to be told “you’re a wizard”? But the great thing about a book as opposed to a social media platform is that it puts no pressure on its reader to perform or conform. Like a friendly common room, it’s there to retreat to, but it doesn’t judge. It makes no crushing demands.

The children’s book I’m about to publish, The Christmas Pig, had a nine-year-long gestation. I first had the idea back in 2012, and finally finished it last year, at a time when the pandemic was still raging and I was unusually aware of the need for human connection. I think that’s why I kept imagining it being read aloud while working on it, something I’ve never done with any other book.

I always wanted to write a Christmas story, but I promised myself I’d only do it if I fell utterly in love with an idea. It takes a certain amount of courage to enter the field, given the standard of the best ones. My absolute favourite from my own childhood is Father Christmas, by that master of world-building, Raymond Briggs. My own children adored Allan and Janet Ahlberg’s beautifully written and illustrated The Jolly Christmas Postman.

When my Christmas idea finally presented itself, it arrived in a way no other story has come to me, because usually the source is a mystery to me. However, this story originated with a pair of cuddly toy pigs, each about 7in high, made of soft towelling material and filled with beans.

I bought the first pig for my son, David, when he was a baby. As soon as he could show a preference, it became his very favourite cuddly toy, and he wouldn’t go to sleep without it. Yet, despite his great love for the pig, he had a habit of shoving it under cushions, in drawers or inside shoes, then forgetting where he’d put it. This meant many panics at bedtime frantically tracking the pig down.

After a while, scared that the pig would one day be lost for good, I bought a second, identical one and hid it in a cupboard. Inevitably, toddler David went foraging in this cupboard one day and found the replacement pig. He declared it his original pig’s brother and kept it.

The original pig is now extremely worn and battered. His eyes fell out years ago, so I replaced them with buttons. He’s no longer soft and velvety, because he’s had to go in the washing machine so many times. However, the second pig still looks more or less as he did when bought. He was never loved the same way, never invested with the strange power we give beloved toys when we’re young. So one day I got thinking about that, about what it means to be a replacement, the understudy — the Not-Chosen-One, if you like. And then I realised I had my Christmas story, at last.

The pigs in the story have different names to their real-life counterparts, because some things should remain private between a boy and his pigs. The only parts of the story taken directly from life are the hero Jack’s habit of hiding his pig and not being able to find it again, and the sewing on of the button eyes.

I’m again writing about a hidden world, and magic, although they’re totally different to those in the Potter books. This is a story about being lost and being found, about loving and being loved, about what stays with us and what falls away. It’s also about hope and endurance.

The pandemic we’re all living through has shaken our world in every possible way. However much trouble it might have brought me at times, I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful for the internet as I have over the past year and a half. Without Zoom I wouldn’t have been able to see family for the longest stretch of our lives. The online world also brought me the joy of connecting with child readers again, as they sent me their illustrations for The Ickabog.

Nevertheless, these past 18 months have also made me reflect on how inadequate screens are, for true connection. Just as nothing can replace the physical presence of those we love, whether it’s family or a battered old toy pig, so the place where a writer’s and reader’s imaginations meet to create a fictional world can never be surpassed, even by the most beautifully realised digital game. Where there is a screen, there is always a barrier, but a book lives inside us, because our own imaginations made it come alive.

First book you remember being read to you?
The Wind in the Willows. I was four years old and had measles.

First book you remember reading for yourself?
I can’t actually remember not being able to read. The earliest book I remember reading to myself was The Great Pie Robbery by Richard Scarry.

First character from a book with whom you identified?
Jo March from Little Women. She shared my name, she wanted to be a writer, she was uncomfortable being a woman. I identified with her completely.

First “grown-up” book you read that stayed with you long afterwards?
I read Claudine at School by Colette when I was (probably) too young to read it, and it’s stayed with me ever since. There’s a strange mixture of honesty and dishonesty about what it is to be a teenage girl. Once I found out that Colette’s husband, under whose name the book was first published, had asked for the manuscript to be “spiced up” with some very male fantasies about what schoolgirls get up to, I understood why 11-year-old me had found it so uneven in tone.

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