The long arm of Stonewall Law

The UK police force has become institutionally misogynist

Firstly, let’s cast our minds back a whole two weeks, when the Court of Appeal ruled that the College of Policing’s guidance on recording gender critical views as non-crime ‘hate incidents’ was wrongly used by Humberside Police, when they contacted Harry Miller over his social media activity. There was no suggestion that he’d broken any laws but he was still told that his ‘thinking needed to be checked’ because an unknown person who said they identified as transgender had complained about his tweets, saying they perceived them as prejudiced.

This new ruling backed Miller's legal right to speak his mind and potentially cause offence, and meant the College of Policing has to rewrite its guidance on hate crimes to ensure that any future recording of non-crime hate incidents does not disproportionately interfere with the legal right to speak one’s mind.

Two days later it was reported that the UK home secretary will table an amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill as soon as this month to restrict the police from processing personal data relating to non-crime hate incidents, make the process more transparent and strengthen free speech safeguards.

The message may have got through to politicians, the media and perhaps the general public, but not, it seems, the police.

In October the SNP MP Kirsty Blackman protested at the LGB Alliance conference with two trans activists who held up signs saying ‘trans rights are human rights’. Someone then photoshopped the signage, as happens to anyone holding a sign in a photograph in 2022. One was changed to read ‘TERFS WERE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING’ and the other stated ‘TRANS RIGHTS ARE VERY BORING WE LOVE TERFS’.

Thousands of people have shared the image and it doesn’t appear that any social media company has viewed that it breaches their community standards. Despite this, Surrey Police have contacted one individual - who didn’t even make the image but just shared it like many others have done - to say they want to question him.

WeAreFairCop @WeAreFairCop

.@SurreyPolice consider this a public order offence and wish to arrest the person who posted it. Please retweet if you disagree this is a public order offence and that the police should have better things to do.

Miller’s organisation Fair Cop has spoken to the investigating officer, who has said that if the individual does not voluntarily hand himself in then he could be arrested, even though almost certainly no crime has been committed.

This, of course, comes on the back of the police taking no action against numerous (non-doctored) signs on public display in 2021 that were less obviously humourous jokes and more in the way of intimidating women with threats of sexual abuse.

It also comes less than a week after Hertfordshire Police showcased a transgender police officer, even though the photo of him was in breach of their own uniform policy.

When this was pointed out to them, they deleted the post and wrote that they will delete derogatory comments about him, even though almost all the comments were about the uniform policy. When it was then pointed out that they didn’t actually have the authority to do this, they deleted that post and replaced it with a new post saying they will ‘report’ derogatory posts instead. And when Fair Cop pointed out that Harry Miller had just won a landmark legal ruling against the College of Policing, they deleted that post as well.

Meanwhile, here’s one police officer wearing nail varnish to raise awareness about slavery and another in high heels to highlight something about domestic violence.

And there’s also this:

As Fair Cop has stated: We can see that euphoria after Miller v CoP was short lived. There is an ingrained and harmful response now hard baked into police forces - that the feelings of offence from one particular minority group overwhelm the actual law or any common sense application of it.

2022 will therefore be the year of injunctions and damages, over and over again until lessons are finally learned.

Harry Miller’s court victory proved once and for all that the debate around gender is an important one in which we all deserve a voice. It also showed that those of us who refuse to submit to a bullying, authoritarian ideology have Had A Point All Along, or as the sign says “TERFS WERE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING’. Is that the hate speech here? If so, the police taking a highly ideological position on a bitterly contested matter.

Cancel culture isn’t just about artists like Terry Gilliam and Rosie Kay. The real threat to gender ideology is ordinary people talking about it. That’s what this kind of policing is all about. Trans rights activists can’t win the debate, so they turn to helpful sadists like Adrian Harrop, David Paisley, Stephanie Hayden, James Billingham and, apparently, the UK’s police force, to put the frighteners on the public.

At a time when women are reporting sexual assaults to the police at the lowest rate ever, a time when women have been sexually assaulted or even killed by officers, the police really should have to explain why they are coming down so emphatically on one side of this issue. It’s a grave insult to women that they do and the longer they ignore the issue, the worse the fallout will eventually be.

Let’s hope 2022 sees an end to the police acting as the long arm of Stonewall Law.