December 15, 2023 - 1:00pm
Free speech is a serious matter. In some countries, expressing the wrong opinion can get someone imprisoned or killed. In the UK, two MPs have been murdered since 2016, demonstrating the need for protection of a very wide range of views. It highlights the importance of avoiding the kind of hyperbole that risks turning politicians with unexceptionable views into hate figures.
Earlier this week, the Conservative MP for Redditch, Rachel Maclean, revealed she had been reported to the police for refusing to pretend that a man in a wig is a woman. In the world certain activists would like us to inhabit, telling the truth about someone’s sex is now so grave an offence that it apparently merits the involvement of the law.
In what appears to be an outbreak of common sense, West Mercia police have confirmed receiving a complaint but said it is not being treated as a crime. Perhaps the police have taken note of a statement by the Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, that Stonewall does not make the law in this country. But in the Britain of 2023, the fact that they have stood up for Maclean remains a surprise — and an exception. Because it comes after years in which police have pandered to the claims of trans activists, granting them exceptionality in what should be a free debate.
Last month officers from Northumbria police asked a woman to attend an interview in Newcastle after she posted gender-critical comments on X, threatening to arrest her if she didn’t come voluntarily. One of the posts she was questioned about was a “daily reminder that transwomen are men” and a duty solicitor advised her about the wisdom of “curtailing” such sentiments in future. The woman, who is a football fan, has had her membership of Newcastle United suspended while she is being investigated.
Other women’s rights campaigners who have been questioned by the police include the founder of Standing for Women, Kellie-Jay Keen, who has faced violent protests at some of her rallies. She was interviewed under caution at a police station in Wiltshire in February after she spoke at a rally where signs declared “being a woman is not a crime” and accused the police of acting on behalf of trans activists. Feminists have repeatedly contrasted the readiness of officers to investigate legal speech with their apparent reluctance to make arrests when women face threats and assaults.
The Maclean story began when she shared a post on X describing a Green parliamentary candidate, who now calls himself Melissa Poulton, in the neighbouring constituency of Bromsgrove as “a man who wears a wig and calls himself a ‘proud lesbian’”. Maclean added a comment to the effect that the Greens “don’t know what a woman is… but the people of Bromsgrove certainly do”. She later deleted it, but the original post was perfectly accurate, given that Poulton was until recently a man called Matthew Viner. And it is noteworthy that people are often at their most strident when their arguments lack substance. All the usual accusations — transphobia, dog-whistling, misgendering — have been thrown around by Poulton and supporters like Peter Tatchell.
But trans activists have grown too accustomed to using the arm of the law to shut down debate. It is their attempt to make the price of expressing certain ideas, in this case the fact that human beings can’t change sex, unacceptably high. When politicians are afraid to say what they think, for fear of being shamed or reported to the police, the very foundations of democracy are under threat. While West Mercia police have correctly protected Maclean, all gender-critical feminists deserve the same safeguards.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She has been Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board since 2013. Her book Homegrown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists was published in 2019.
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SubscribeNext step, hopefully, some of the so called trans activists who issue appalling threats to women get a visit from the Plod??
Wouldn’t that be the obvious thing to do? Won’t happen. Time for the British public who have some logic to get more active. It doesn’t seem that voting is doing the trick.
Are you certain about whose side the British public are on?
https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/43194-where-does-british-public-stand-transgender-rights-1
Interestingly most people pay little to no attention to the debate.
Absolutely 100%.
You can blame the blanket ban on coverage by the BBC for that. In support of the career ending bullying by activitists. If people knew the extent of this social engineering experiment, they’d pay attention. Time everyone started talking about it.
Unlikely if they’re driving a rainbow-bedecked Plod car, as they might well be
They call it a pander car.
If that gag is yours, I owe you a pint!
Haha. excellent!
To paraphrase Germaine Greer ‘women don’t know how much “transactivists” hate them’
As always this quote from 1984 nails it.
Irrelevant tangent question: do you take your user name from the beloved, sadly discontinued, chocolate bar?
Sadly its just an arbitrary name.
Given the topic of this article, I’d like to be able to make a pun on the band name Manfred Man, who had a hit with the song 54321.
But I have a head cold so the best I can mange is (Trans)Manfred Man.
That’s still pretty good.
That’s pretty good.
I hope you are feeling better!
Saying 2 plus 2 makes 4 is a LIE. 2 plus 2 makes 11, in trinary.
xx=xy in transnary.
To paraphrase Booker T Washington (1911):
“There is another class of people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the
LGBTIQ before the public. Some of these people do not want to lose their grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”Yes. Though this surely holds for radfems all the more. Without another battle to fight they really are redundant.
Do you seriously think rad fems have no other causes to work toward? Here are just a few: protecting women from being trafficked into surrogacy, pórn and prostitution, protecting girls from female genital mutilation, protecting women and girls from forced marriage, improving access to justice for women who have been r@ped, preventing mothers who have committed very minor offences (eg not paying council tax) from being sent to prison, because their children end up in care at vast expense to the state and because men are not imprisoned for the same minor offences.
TL;DR: rad fems have many changes to work to bring about. Most work for no pay, anyway.
Not to mention protecting women from male transvestite fetishists invading female-only spaces, and girls from genital mutilation by sadistic paedophile transmengeles.
Very few in the west. I’m not including in my criticism feminists in other areas of the world where the situation is very different.
You obviously don’t know any feminists!
As a staunch believer that a woman is an adult human female I learned very fast to grow a thicker skin in this debacle. Positively it has taught me vocabulary which I would never otherwise have learned (mostly abusive, but I’ll take what I can get). One of my favourite games these days is to respond explaining that owing to my advanced years I cannot understand the terms they have used and can they explain them to me.
Relieved to hear West Mercia police have demonstrated some common sense, unlike countless other forces across the country. Great article.
Answer? No! But they may have decided it’s in their interests to be a little less stupid.
Why aren’t the trans-activists making these threats of violence simply arrested and charged? This is not a freedom of speech issue: it has never been legal or acceptable to make violent threats.
I simply do not understand why these people are not arrested for their crimes?
If someone had warned of this ten years ago……
I’m not sure the LGB crowd thought through what expanding to include the Ts would look like, but that’s the nature of activism. Victory is never clearly defined, so no one can recognize. As it is, ‘victory’ is counter-productive; it spoils the grift, which is why the point of activism is to perpetuate the problem or the perception of the problem. If a few women, straight or lesbian, get run over by men playing pretend, well, they’re just the eggs in the omelet.
As a “member” of this LGB crowd, I assure you nobody asked me about expansion, or indeed the values I’m supposed to represent. Everything is being done in “my” name when I just want to go about my daily business not getting involved in 90% of this tosh.
Stop the world, I want to get off.
In the USA, expressing the wrong opinion will rarely get you killed. But you may wish you had been. You may merely lose your job, or you may become the subject of Federal or Civil lawsuits. The famous Grand Juries are feared, since they are reputed to indict even Ham Sandwiches. The Civil lawsuits are even more feared, since they require no proof to be found guilty (none, none at all) and penalties for ‘wrong speech’ have run over a billion dollars. And with this happy state, the Media tells us to worry that Mr Trump might destroy this utopia.
They couldn’t be doing a better job of creating support for Trump, given that four more years of Biden will guarantee that the woke authoritarians will gain even more power over the rest of us. The enemy of my enemy is indeed my friend.
Really, unherd. My last post here, noting offencisve and not many downvotes. Where is it gone? Misuse of reporting system?
Back briefly, then gone again. Someone playing games?
I think the constant appeal by gender critical supporters to a notional debate over trans issues is disingenuous. There is nothing that will convince them that humans can change sex so the suggestion that these and other core assumptions are up for debate is clearly rhetorical. Trans activists of course believe the opposite, and thus what we have is a real conflict between two competing versions of reality. The comparison with past wars of religion is apt. And as as we know, such wars can frequently becomes wars of annihilation.
My money would be on the feminine (XX) side for the winner!
It’s a race against time. Most of them are not very young anymore. Younger feminists (including the XX ones) support the trans side.
They really don’t.
Americans aged 18 to 29 favour letting transgender people use the restroom of their identity by a 2-to-1 ratio. Among Americans aged 60 or more, the ratio was 2-to-1 in reverse with people saying restroom use should be mandated by the gender on one’s birth certificate.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lgbt-poll/exclusive-women-young-more-open-on-transgender-issue-in-u-s-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKCN0XI11M/
Any evidence for that? The polls in the US show that they do.
Publishing poll results without the exact wordng is little more than a crock of (you know what).
The wording is a cut and paste. The link is given
The fundamentalism is only coming from the trans activists who insist that everyone must affirm their magical thinking: “Trans women are women. No debate.”
There’s plenty of things which could be constructively debated if they would respect the rights of others to disagree with them.
Look at it this way. Let’s say you were organising a debate about the role of religion in society and invited a Christian and an atheist.
If the Christian said that they would only participate on condition that the atheist first affirms the Christian God as the only true deity, you wouldn’t be saying that both sides are being equally unreasonable would you.
So what compromise on fundamentals are you suggesting the anti trans side would be prepared to make in order to take the debate forward?
I’m not sure what you mean here. There is no anti trans movement. Most people support trans. You can support trans people, even if you don’t think they are biologically the opposite sex. And a trans person should not require or expect someone to believe they are biologically the other sex.
So called anti trans people simply don’t want trans men competing in women’s sport and they oppose children getting life altering medical interventions.
“You can support trans people, even if you don’t think they are biologically the opposite sex.”
This is absolutely the crux of the matter. It is as simple as this.
Calling people who refuse to submit to pseudo-religious dogma “anti trans” is gaslighting of the highest order.
Except on the fringes, gender critical feminists (and their supporters) fully endorse trans people’s rights to live in peace and safety. That does not and should not mean they have to grant men who identify as women a free pass to enter spaces set aside for women’s safety, dignity, fair competition etc.
And it’s not gender critical feminists disrupting trans rights rallies or threatening to punch the other side.
What does “anti-trans” even mean? It’s as mindless as the casual use of the various isms and phobias that are designed to stifle debate and declare anything that opposes the prevailing orthodoxy to be heresy. It’s not anti-trans to notice that guys are not really women. It’s not anti-trans to notice that men do not get pregnant or have periods, no matter what medical schools say.
That’s none then.
I cannot speak for gender-critical feminists, but there is a fairly obvious way forward. First, both sides stop arguing about what trans people *really* are. The word ‘woman’ means someone who has a female body, and inhabits the female social role, and identifies as female – all at once. Much like the word ‘mother’ means someone who provides the eggs and gives birth and nurtures and has parental authority. When you get adoptive mothers, or people whose self-identification clashes with their biology, reality has just proved more complex than ,language can handle. So you accept that trans women are women in some ways but not others, much like adoptive mothers are mothers in some ways but not others. You drop the slogans like ‘trans women are women’ or ‘Woman: adult human female’. Then you start discussing for each separate area, what the criteria should be to access whatever treatment society metes out specifically for women.
My proposals are clear, but they are all up for discussion. For sport that should be male puberty. For prisons it should be functional genitals – as the mother of a trans man put it, she would not wish for her son to end up as the only prisoner with female genitals in a male prison. For dress, pronouns, and general social interactions we should treat someone as a woman once she stably makes clear that she identifies as such. For all-women shortlists and women’s officers it is whatever woke organisations can agree on. For dating sites you need to declare your genitals and/or birth gender.
For hospitals, rape crisis centres and dressing rooms it gets harder. Surgery should certainly be enough, but we do not need to go that far. You could settle on letting people get access as their chosen gender, provided it is a big enough hurdle to keep the piss-takers out, and that it requires a genuine examination (not a certificate from a doctor of your choice) to prove that you mean it and quality for a gender recognition certificate. All societies have rites of passage. If you want to pass from one gender to another, it is not too much to ask that you go through a rite that marks your new status to the satisfaction of the society around you.
I’m not sure how acceptable that would be to either side in the debate, but I think it’s a really good attempt (as you say, all up for discussion) to come up with a set of reasonable solutions. Credit to you.
There really is just too much crazy talk around this issue on both sides – talk about erasure and genocide, for example. And some of the radical feminists deliberately provoke and then scream blue murder when they get the effect they were seeking. To be honest that has always been part of their MO. Provoke, get a response, play the victim.
Spot on. Let’s face it, what each side wants to do is vent its hate, and bully the other side into accepting its position.
The UK is supposed to be a pluralistic society. It has been many years since we were forced by law to attend church every Sunday. People who want to attend, can, and people who don’t are free not to. This is what gender critics want; the freedom not to believe in gender ideology. This includes being able to choose schools, therapists and clinicians who won’t indoctrinate our children into these beliefs. In my childhood, all state schools were Christian. Now there are non-religious schools. Let’s have at least some schools that are not part of the Church of Trans, please.
The author is clearly right in relation to free speech. At the same time it is clear that both sides of this rift within feminism are intent on winding up the other side deliberately. FGS give it a rest.
You cannot seriously imagine that radical transgender ideology is only controversial amongst feminists?
Based on previous posts, I would say that our friend Morley is an ally of the trans crowd. He also believes in the legitimacy of debating the morality of the sexual abuse of children. Because, you know, progress.
I’m not in the habit of flagging people, but this is flat out lie in print. You have therefore been flagged for abuse.
In the comments section of ‘Can Pedophilia Ever Be a Thought Experiment?’ you posted the following in response to public outrage following Professor Stephen Kershnar stating during a podcast that an adult male having sex with a 12 year old girl would not necessarily be at fault:
‘And isn’t this part of the value of people like Kershnar – that it pushes the rest of us to examine our assumptions, the incongruities in our own moral positions, and, at the very least, to work a lot harder to justify the positions we refuse to let go of?’
Show me where I’m wrong.
No. But it is not a case of feminists on one side and non feminists on the other. And it is the feminist and trans activists who are doing most of the winding up.
Unherd is too tied to a trans v feminist narrative. Feminists feature strongly on both sides.
Ideologically, yes – it is a rift within feminism. Both sides draw their inspiration from feminist ideology.