The story of women being interviewed by the police for their allegedly hateful transphobic comments – something which is legal by the way, it is not hateful comments which are illegal but actual hate inducing comments – starts to get even better. It would appear that we’ve not really got some mob firing up the pitchforks but something between an overprotective mother and a monomaniac on the other side of this.
Let us, just for the moment, accept that there should be a law against hate. There shouldn’t be, obviously, it’s acts which should be illegal, not speech. But accept that anyway. The thing is, what some would describe as simple free speech well within those restrictions imposed by anti-hate law, well, others wouldn’t. So, we’ve got to work out what actually is and isn’t:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] A second woman is being investigated by the police following allegations that she made transphobic comments on social media, the Telegraph can reveal. Womans’ rights campaigner, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, has been interviewed by two separate police forces after being accused of committing a hate crime by Susie Green, who runs a charity helping transgender children. [/perfectpullquote]Hmm, well, we did have some of this yesterday:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] What Caroline Farrow actually said here, to whom and how, is irrelevant. It’s simply not something that’s any business of the State’s in the slightest. We all can – and will – associate with Ms. Farrow as we wish or not as we wish based upon what we think of her given what she says. That’s the social punishment for overstepping societal boundaries. All that before we even get to the basic point at issue here. Apparently she used “he” instead of “she”. And if that’s to be a crime then we’ve a certain problem with large parts of our language. Try saying, in that Kenneth Williams nasality, “Oooh, get her!” This is of course to use the wrong pronoun given any biological reality. It’s also a well understood and used phrase to mean someone up themselves. And we’re going to lock people up for it? Especially given the way is exactly describes all too many of these varied activists policing our language. [/perfectpullquote]And back to today’s story:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Ms Keen-Minshull, a mother of four, said investigating people because of their legally held views was a complete waste of police time. The 44-year-old was first interviewed by West Yorkshire Police last year, on suspicion of malicious communication, following a complaint from Ms Green, who runs the Mermaids charity. Two officers travelled to Wiltshire where she lives, and questioned her for several hours over six Tweets she had posted. That case was eventually closed with no further action, despite officers undertaking a victim’s review following a request by Ms Green. But she has revealed that she is now the subject of a second police investigation, this time by the Wiltshire force. [/perfectpullquote]That’s quite a lot of police time really. And here’s the interesting thing. It’s the same complainant both times, or all three times against both people. Who might indeed be the victim of a campaign of hatred. Or could perhaps be an over protective mother with a thin skin:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] But speaking to the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme, Ms Green said the comments had gone much further than that. She said: “It’s not just the misgendering, it’s actually the context that she puts it into, and that she calls me a child abuser. “She constantly refers to my daughter as a boy but that’s not… the key issues here weren’t those. It was the really damaging things that she said about me and my actions that made me decide that this was an appropriate course of action.” [/perfectpullquote]The actual complaint is that she’s said nasty things about ME! Who isn’t transgender. So it’s not even transphobia or hatred, is it? It thus rather looks like a grasping at any argument to stop people being mean to Mum. Which isn’t really something the law should be concerned with, is it?