Until recently, legitimate reasons to suppress books had been diminishing: obscenity or blasphemy had disappeared. They appear to be increasing again, and expanding out of the realm of the law. I don’t think we should worry about books that are withdrawn because they cross, or prove to have crossed, some legal barrier. When, this year, Alice Sebold’s rape memoir Lucky was withdrawn, it was because the man she accused, and who was convicted on the testimony she then adapted for publication, was shown to have been innocent. That would always have happened, long before the phrase “cancel culture” was coined.

But a more ominous loss was Blake Bailey’s life of the novelist Philip Roth. The American moralising critics had been gunning for Roth himself for some time, on the grounds of supposed misogyny, both in his books and in his real-life relationships with women. Fortunately, the greatest American novelist of the last 60 years is, as yet, out of their reach. Bailey himself was an easier target. He was the author of magnificent lives of John Cheever and Richard Yates, and the Roth biography was magisterial — but too forgiving in tone. And so allegations of sexual harassment, assault and even rape against the biographer were hauled up. Although not yet proved, and apparently not the subject of legal proceedings, they were enough for Bailey to be dropped by his agent and American publisher.

Is it ever acceptable for a legally unobjectionable book to be cancelled, simply because an influential group dislikes its ideas or its author? This is a question that has plagued the publishing industry this year, and will continue to plague it.

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A temporarily successful cancellation was of the journalist Julie Burchill’s polemic on wokeness. It is fair to say that if you agree to publish Julie Burchill, you should know what you’re signing up to. The ride will be exhilarating, but sometimes bumpy. This apparently came as news to Little, Brown. Burchill got into an argument on Twitter with a younger, Muslim journalist. During the exchange, Burchill raised a historically verified fact about the age of one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, and made energetically tactless descriptions about the man the religion venerates. In March, she had to pay damages for defamation. Although this had no bearing on the contents of the book Little, Brown had signed up, they said that she had “crossed the line” and they would not publish it.

Like many writers, I’ve had to admit defamation in the past. 20 years ago, you would have been considered dangerously insane to have suggested that Harper Collins drop my next novel because I’d been rude about a lady artist in the Spectator. Fortunately, there are still some who think this way. Burchill’s book was picked up by a small press, and those who agree with her, or indeed those who, like me, very much enjoy disagreeing with her, can buy her book on the Woke Trials from Academica Press for £24.95.

If you can find a bookshop stocking it, that is — one underrated feature of cancel culture is that quite ordinary booksellers took to announcing in principled tones that they would not sell work they disagreed with. Two reasonable but sceptical books on trans issues by Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock were, it was suggested, having difficulty being displayed or even stocked by shops. I doubt it did the authors any harm. Amazon was not to be budged.

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What is behind these attempts to remove individual books from circulation? And why does publishing, even for a moment, indulge the protesters who want to make the memoirs of, say, a senior member of a conservative US administration like Mike Pence unpublishable? Why are they, or the accusers of Blake Bailey, not told to go away or, if they are within the publishing industry, to find another area to work in?

Some of the scenes that have taken place are unarguably risible. The Canadian polemicist Jordan Peterson has a devoted following for his conservative hard-work-and-self-respect talks and essays. Robust prescriptions of Canadian Protestantism aren’t to everybody’s taste. The New York Times amusingly described him as the “custodian of the patriarchy”, not reflecting that the patriarchy might not need one. When Penguin Random House announced plans to publish his new book, protesters within the Canadian office forced them to hold what was described as an “emotional” meeting. One junior employee explained that publishing the book would “negatively affect their non-binary friend”. PRH went ahead, perhaps foreseeing the difficulties in consulting all the non-binary friends of junior employees about proposed signings and publications.

There are, then, reasons to be hopeful. There has been little attempt to cancel, rather than criticise, writers of the past. VS Naipaul, Joseph Conrad and Philip Roth are still in print; Dickens, widely arraigned for his treatment of his wife, remains a stalwart of the classics lists. The revelation that people who have voted for the Conservative Party have, in the past, written good novels is not yet the universal object of horror. Even the dropping of very controversial current day authors has created opportunities: the American publisher Skyhorse snapped up Bailey’s book, as it had the Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and the hitherto blameless comic writers Garrison Keillor and Woody Allen, after similar campaigns against their supposed inappropriate behaviour.

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The direction of travel, however, is clear. We may be living in an age of transition, like the 1840s, when the liberal and relaxed means of expression of the previous age were snuffed out by a fervent and self-righteous rigidity. Mozart’s Così fan Tutte was dropped because it failed to draw an acceptable moral conclusion about marriage. Philip Roth’s novels may suffer the same fate. Will we who came to intellectual maturity in the Eighties and Nineties come to be stared at in the street, like the aged Thomas De Quincey, still off his face in staid 1850s Edinburgh? Well, we shall find out.

This is not a development proved or disproved by individual cases, and when campaigns of cancellation are waged against the million-selling Jordan Peterson, publishers have good reasons not to give way. Junior staff of publishers have been upset about working on J.K. Rowling’s books — she has committed the crime, among other things, of defending lesbians who have said that they don’t want to have sex with anyone with a penis. There are other junior staff to be hired, if that’s how they feel. For the moment.

Rather, we will know the truth of the development in years to come, when we can only guess at the careers that didn’t take place, and the opinions in society which, however widespread and ordinary, were deemed unpublishable. Even now, it is impossible to imagine that a novel, however brilliantly witty, could now be published by a good publisher if it made any jokes at the expense of a minority. And it may be that publishers, in a state of anxiety about offending, are pre-emptively walking away from very large parts of society.

I spoke to a couple of British editors recently who said, to their mild surprise, that they had no immediate plans to publish any novel by a man; to confirm this possible tendency, I am currently judging a new prize for novels of any sort, in which 49 out of the submitted 56 are by women. Whether publishers are turning away from half the human race, or that half of the human race is abandoning a way of life there’s no money in and nothing but disapproval to be expected, is arguable. The final result of an undeniable culture of cancellation is a terrible impoverishment of diversity, of fruitful debate, of the exploration and expression of different lives, different points of view, different ways of living in the world. That matters.

But it’s not just individual mothers and daughters who do this. It is also reproduced in the women’s movement. In American Electra, the feminist writer Susan Faludi argues that it is a central feature: matricide is a core dynamic in feminism from the Twenties onward.

“The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr”, wrote Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born (1976). Faludi quotes Betty Friedan, perhaps the quintessential rejecter of bourgeois domesticity as a desirable role for women, who said: “I didn’t want to be like my mother”.

And this dynamic, Faludi argues, has translated into “a persistent barrenness” within feminism: that is, a rejection not just of individual mothers but of the movement’s ability to create a heritage over time. Instead, each generation rejects the one that went before, endlessly reproducing this second-wave feminist scorn for endlessly victimised, unfree, martyred and unsatisfied mothers – both literal and also political. It’s a push-me-pull-you dynamic that both rejects whatever came before in the women’s movement, while also longing for an ongoing, motherly warmth and acceptance.

Nowhere is this battle over the nature (or, perhaps, the possibility) of a feminist legacy more evident than in contemporary arguments around trans identity. Shon Faye’s new book on “transgender liberation”, The Transgender Issue, argues this inheritance with energy and clarity. Meanwhile, in what it leaves half-said or unsaid, it also demonstrates it.

In general terms, the book delivers what you’d expect, given gushing blurbs written by Judith Butler, Ash Sarkar and Owen Jones: a bog-standard “intersectional” treatise. It abounds in the expected namechecks of standard “marginalised” groups, gestures in familiar ways at the evils of “capitalism” and evinces standard woke opinions on prostitution, prisons and immigration.

The Transgender Issue: an argument for justice is written with an op-ed journalist’s persuasive energy, in a style that (for anyone familiar with the so-called “Terf wars”) at times egregiously begs often hotly-contested questions. For example, proposed legislation that would replace biological sex in law with self-identified “gender identity”, a change with far-reaching conceptual and political implications, is breezily characterised as “a more humane process for gender recognition”.

But Faye writes well. Anyone seeking a primer on “trans-inclusive” and “gender critical” arguments could do worse than read this book alongside Helen Joyce’s Trans. The book’s interest lies in its ambivalent relation to an older generation of feminism.

Faye draws on second-wave writers and radical feminist history, to argue that far from representing a repudiation of the second-wave legacy, trans-activism is its inheritrix. To this end, The Transgender Issue quotes Andrea Dworkin’s approving 1974 description, in Woman Hating, of how new research and fertility technology “challenges the notion that there are two discrete biological sexes” and “threatens to transform the traditional biology of sex difference into the radical biology of sex similarity”. Elsewhere, Faye correctly points out that disagreements over the place of trans women in feminist groups go all the way back to the Seventies.

And, indeed, this matriarchal lineage is difficult to dispute, when it was this generation of feminists who first argued that “sex” and “gender” are separable. Andrea Dworkin stated in Woman Hating that “man” and “woman” are […] cultural constructs […] reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming”. What Dworkin outlines here is, today, settled opinion among pronouns-in-bio online leftists.

Against what Dworkin called the “totalitarian” idea of “man” and “woman”, other second-wave radical feminists imagined all of us liberated from the givens of biology. Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), for example, dreamed of a future in which women had been wholly liberated from reproduction by a mix of extra-uterine gestation and collectivised childcare.

From this perspective, if we admit of any relationship whatsoever between biology and wider social norms or structures, women are at risk of being subordinated again: relegated once more to (as Rich puts it) “the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr”. And if there’s no relationship between biology and identity, why shouldn’t a trans woman be — as Faye argues — also “female”?

Like the secondwavers, Faye rejects the “conservative” idea that women are “vessels for reproduction”. The Transgender Issue situates trans liberation as a logical extension of feminist call for bodily autonomy and particularly for safe and legal abortion. In Faye’s view, both abortion and gender medicine are forms of resistance to “[c]onservative ideological positions about gender roles and the degree to which an individual is entitled to autonomy over their body”.

Faye’s argument for “transfeminism” as a daughter of the second wave, then, has merit. It continues this matrilineal dynamic in one further way: by embracing the “matricidal” dynamic described by Susan Faludi.

Mothers have only the most tenuous presence in The Transgender Issue. Only two get more than passing, warm mention: Faye’s own mother (in the dedication), and the supportive mother of a transgender-identified child.

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Mothers as a political group are (in Faye’s characteristically tendentious style) airbrushed out. Reflecting on why British feminism in particular is resistant to the inclusion of trans women, Faye blames this on all manner of things, from a hostile press, to (somehow) the British Empire, while leaving out perhaps the most central rallying-point for “gender critical” activism: Mumsnet, or as it’s sometimes dubbed by those infuriated by its members’ stubborn wrongthink, “Prosecco 4chan”.

Mumsnet’s feminism pages have played a central role in gender critical activism politics for over a decade, a fact not unconnected to Mumsnetters’ (usually) shared experience of maternity. It is, after all, more difficult to take seriously the idea that “woman” is an identity, when you’ve experienced pregnancy, childbirth and the shift in outlook and social role that comes with motherhood. But for Faye, the possibility that mothers might have experiences in common, and views of their own, doesn’t merit airtime.

In The Transgender Issue, mothers appear as bit-part players. Some are kind blunderers who don’t understand their children’s identity needs; others are violently transphobic. Inasmuch we appear as a class at all in connection with the female reproductive role, we’re either gender-diverse “people with uteruses” (ie not mothers), or else women in need of abortion services so they can avoid becoming mothers.

Again, in keeping with second-wave feminism, Faye is keen to sever any connection between women and gestation. In one footnote, the notion that pregnancy is a women’s issue is dismissed as “conservative and regressive”. With that, a key locus of specifically female political interest is reframed as a set of fertility services, that can and should be detached from “woman” as a concept, and whose “postcode lottery” availability represents yet another injustice to the trans community.

Shon Faye’s “transgender liberation”, then, sits in intimately ambivalent mother/daughter relationship with the feminism that birthed it. It embraces the conceptual legacy of second-wave feminism; then, in accordance with that heritage, also rejects motherhood and maternity. And, at the same time rejecting its own second-wave heritage, which (we gather) wasn’t nearly radical enough but instead merely accepted a set of minor improvements to the conditions for bourgeois women under capitalism.

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Nor is it enough, in Faye’s view, to replicate such marginal gains for well-off, white, transgender people. Such activism (which the book exemplifies in Stonewall’s corporate “diversity” activism) affords at best superficial improvements without addressing The System that claims the right to determine who is or isn’t “acceptably trans under capitalism”.

For Faye, the real prize is smashing this underlying system, which the book identifies with “patriarchy”. Achieving this seems to mean abolition of all boundaries or limits, a vision that includes ending “rigid” ideas of biological sex, dissolving hierarchical relations such as “the state’s monopoly on legal force through policing, prisons and migrant detention centres” and ending any political structure — such as national borders — that imposes harsh divisions of any kind.

To replace this “patriarchal” regime, Faye envisages one of pure nurture. This order, we gather, would be unstintingly welcoming to the vulnerable, impoverished, addicted or mentally unwell. It would be endlessly adaptive to individuals’ specific, contextual, identity-driven needs. And it would be boundlessly giving with medical, housing and therapeutic resources – up to and including laser hair removal and gamete-freezing, resources certainly not universally available to other groups on the NHS.

It ought, Faye declares, “to be the state’s obligation to support trans people, not the other way around”. Even as it rhetorically sidesteps literal mothers, then, true liberation, is a political regime that sets out liberate women from the need to be mothers, by itself embodying the once-archetypal maternal qualities of empathy, nurture and support.

Faye characterises as “frankly unhinged” Germaine Greer’s argument in The Whole Woman that transgender women are engaged in a form of symbolic matricide. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say Greer didn’t go far enough. That is, it’s not just transfeminism that’s engaged in symbolic matricide, it’s pretty much all of it, from the second wave onwards.

Other strands have, of course, emerged over many decades of sometimes rancorous feminist debate. But Shon Faye makes a convincing case for transgender activism as the matricidal inheritrix of a profoundly matricidal strand in that debate.

And perhaps the regime of therapeutic totalitarianism The Transgender Issue proposes, to replace our current social order, is the true inheritance of this matricidal liberation. For since the likes of Dworkin and Firestone were writing, those women who didn’t want to be like their martyred mothers have increasingly swapped caring for toddlers favour of entry into public and working life.

In tandem, the care of even very young children has since been increasingly outsourced to institutional providers. Many of these young people are now adults: generations for whom, increasingly commonly, the earliest infant experiences of nurture are fused with a more impersonal, institutional authority.

Perhaps it’s natural that such adults would dream of a political regime on the same template of nurturing authoritarianism. And perhaps, too, Shon Faye’s vision of a politics so motherly no one need ever want, compete or quarrel again is the true contemporary legacy of the second wave’s mummy issues.