Don’t mention the women.

It was predictable that August in Edinburgh would see a flare-up of the gender wars. Scottish politics has been pivotal in the UK-wide battle over gender self-identification, and the issue has come up at the Edinburgh festival before. Probably no one would have expected the National Library of Scotland to be the battlefield. But when a bestselling gender-critical anthology, The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, was excluded from a centenary exhibition, that is what happened.

Trying to make the women who wouldn’t wheesht wheesht is a fool’s errand. They told you they wouldn’t wheesht!!

Its editors, Lucy Hunter Blackburn and Susan Dalgety, were already upset when they learned that their book had not been chosen for the Dear Library exhibition. They had not been invited to appear at the Edinburgh book festival either – despite their big-name contributors and hot topic. So they put in a freedom of information request. When it revealed that their book had received four nominations from members of the public, before being rejected at the urging of an LGBTQ+ staff network, they complained.

Last week’s result, after a pointed intervention by Index on Censorship, was an apology and a U-turn. Blackburn, a former civil servant, said it had been “emotional”, and that she would now tell her 97-year-old mother, a retired bookseller, all about it.

This perhaps sounds tame compared with the Irish writer Graham Linehan’s arrest at Heathrow by armed officers, and the row about the policing of tweets that followed.

Nah, it doesn’t, because it’s all the same thing. None of it is tame; all of it is aimed at silencing women entirely.

Blackburn and Dalgety were ignored not only by Edinburgh’s book festival. They have not been invited to any book festivals at all. Nor has Jenny Lindsay, the Scottish author of Hounded, which describes how she was driven out of her career as a poet and arts programmer due to her gender-critical views. There are more than 100 literary festivals in the UK each year, and big ones such as Edinburgh’s feature hundreds of authors.

I was invited to three literary festivals, and am lucky to be able to write about these issues in the Guardian. But I have also been snubbed. Last year the Conway Hall in London refused a booking for a launch of my book, and complaints to other venues where I was appearing were stressful and upsetting.

That’s the goal. Punish women for existing. Needle needle needle. Get all the institutions to tell us to shut up.