Norwich Confidential

A misogynist chancer joins forces with a compliant local press to smear feminists, by Corisande Pick

Anyone remember They/Them clownchild, Owen Hurcum? He was the vibrantly hairstyled man in a dress from Harrow, Middlesex, who identified as Welsh, as non-binary/genderqueer/pan and as a member of three different political parties in as many years. Hurcum was Mayor of Bangor before he showed his commitment to the job and to Wales when someone gave him a houseboat in East Anglia and he scarpered to the other side of the country.

There’s obviously a gap in the market for an entitled young, white misogynist with an enterprising haircut and a loose relationship with reality or the truth.

Step forwards Alexander Catt, 25, recently elected Green Councillor for Norwich City Council. On being elected for Sewell Ward, Catt announced the climate emergency was going to be his top priority.

Instead, it seems to be defaming feminists and encouraging Norwich residents to break the law on flyposting.

What’s amazing is that a journalist at my local newspaper, the Evening News (part of the Eastern Daily Press) simply repeated everything he said, totally uncritically, while publishing his photos that show he’s lying.

Councillor Catt repeatedly calls simple statements of fact - ‘Humans Cannot Change Sex’, ‘A Man is a Man Even If He Wears a Dress’, and ‘Puberty is Not a Medical Condition’ - “hateful” and “transphobic”. They obviously are not, and it’s a bit of a tactical error to illustrate the article with photos, as everyone can see that they are not. The Evening News must have realised this, as it has removed comments, which were almost unanimous in calling out Catt’s nonsense for what it is. It hasn’t removed the lies though.

As a representative of a political party that once used the slogan “trust the science”, Cllr Catt seems to think it’s worse to tell kids that puberty is normal and doesn’t need medical intervention than to hand them over to what Dennis Kavanagh calls “the gender abattoir” of medicalisation and sterilisation.

The rather attractive and recognisable designs are by our friend The Famous Artist Birdy Rose, who is not happy being libelled by Cllr Catt and the uncritical churnalists at the Evening News who have simply reprinted his press release without fact-checking. Her statement is here:

TheFamousArtistBirdyRose @TheFamousArtBR

Hi @EveningNews I have just emailed a complaint to your editor about yesterday’s article which is defamatory towards my reputation. Please respond promptly.

But that’s not enough for Cllr Catt. He also wants people to be terrified of any expression of legally-protected gender-critical beliefs and the people (mostly mild-mannered feminists, lesbians and gay men) who hold them.

Alex claims, without any evidence, that these messages “could spiral into much worse” and recycled an ancient slur that some of the stickers have razor blades underneath - although his own photos of partly removed stickers show no such thing.

We know he’s lying because if he had any evidence he would certainly photograph it and call the police. But we also know he’s lying because feminists don’t do that. Cllr Catt wants people to be terrified of reality, to associate Gender Critical feminists with the kind of monster that would hide razors behind stickers, and to hate anyone holding legally protected and factually accurate views about reality.

Ironically, he claims he’s doing this in the name of inclusion.

He’s also encouraging people to get stickers with the message he approves and stick them around as a response.

This is incitement to the criminal offence of flyposting.

The good news is that it must mean the environmental crisis is over now. Right?

Right?