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Why do women support trans rights?

Over the past six years I have attended numerous meetings concerned with women’s rights and the threat posed to them by transgender ideology.

In the unlikely event that any of those in thrall to said ideology had even started reading this post, I’m confident that a number will have stopped doing so on reading the words ‘transgender ideology’, muttering that “trans people aren’t an ideology” or some such thing. For those sticking around, let me explain: transgender ideology (also called just ‘gender ideology’ or ‘gender identity ideology’) refers to the belief that everyone has a gender identity, which is independent of and takes priority over one’s biological sex in determining whether one is, in fact, a man or a woman. In the case of men who claim to identify as women, it follows that they should be accepted as women by everyone in all circumstances and the same goes for women who claim to be men. Thus, it is not people who call themselves ‘transgender’ who are an ideology. The word ‘ideology’ refers to the belief that people can claim to be what they are not and that such claims should be taken seriously without any consideration of the costs to anyone else.

Of the meetings and events on this subject that I have attended, the majority have attracted noisy protests, where activists have gathered to try to intimidate, shout abuse and drown out the attendees, most of whom were women. At every event, the angry male protesters were joined by women who participated in the bullying and the abuse.

I recently uploaded a video to my YouTube channel disputing the claims of Matt Walsh and other conservative men that feminism is responsible for transgenderism. His reasoning seems to be that, because feminists argue that expectations of how women should think, behave and present themselves are largely socially constructed (and referred to as ‘gender’), some men are inevitably going to demand to be accepted as women and vice versa and it serves us right for being so bolshy as to reject limiting, regressive stereotypes of femininity in the first place.

I won’t repeat the points I made in my video, save for one:

Leaving aside the differences between various schools of feminist thought, the fundamental purpose of anyone’s feminism is, surely, to challenge, to combat and try to overcome whatever stands in the way of improving women’s lives and well-being, wherever we are disadvantaged. Any ideology that hurts women and girls isn’t feminism. This isn’t to deny that many women who call themselves feminists support and promote transgender ideology. I contend that those women shouldn’t call themselves feminists and that supporting gender self-ID isn’t feminism.

Contrary to what some suggest, this is not the No True Scotsman fallacy, which occurs when you generalise about a group of people and exclude from the group, anyone who has a quality or trait or does something that doesn’t fit your generalisation. If I say, “no true Scotsman, even if he were born and raised in Scotland of Scottish parents, would put sugar on his porridge,” you can see why it’s ridiculous – why it’s fallacious.

But if I say, “no true vegan would drink cows’ milk”, that is not ridiculous and it’s not fallacious because the definition of a vegan is someone who chooses not to consume or make use of any animal products.

If you accept that the basic definition of a feminist is someone who supports women’s social, economic and political rights then, surely, no true feminist would support the right of men to declare themselves women, given the negative impact this can have on women (not to mention children and gay men).

So why do they support so-called ‘trans rights’?

From the fauxminists, as I call them, I’ve seen only one answer, which is that those men who claim to be women are indeed women – a kind of woman – because that is their ‘gender identity’ and that is what matters. That they are male and that the majority are heterosexual doesn’t matter; that the majority do not have genital surgery doesn’t matter; that most have a natural physical advantage over most women in sporting competitions doesn’t matter; that most are easily discernible as male and, as such, likely to cause discomfort and alarm if they access female-only spaces, doesn’t matter; that a great many manifest male-typical behaviours doesn’t matter.

Their female supporters prioritise the feelings of a small but ever-growing number of men over those of most women and no true feminist would do that unless they are using a redefinition of the word ‘feminism’, much as they use a redefinition of the word ‘woman’ to the circular, incoherent and meaningless “anyone who identifies as one”, which isn’t a definition at all.

However, I am less interested in discussing the definition of feminism than I am in trying to understand why any woman – whether she calls herself a feminist or not – supports gender ideology.

I have a few ideas – some of them informed by women who once supported what they called “trans rights” and no longer do – and I intend to talk about them in a video I am planning to make very soon. My opinions are unlikely to find favour with those women who still consider themselves to be ‘trans allies’ but I have arrived at them in the absence of any input from such women themselves and am open to changing them in light of their explanations. I have repeatedly posted an invitation on X (formerly Twitter) for women who support gender self-ID to give their reasons. Not a single one has availed herself of the opportunity to enlighten me, so this post is my last-ditch attempt at drawing an explanation from any of them for the following:

Why are you OK with male-bodied people being permitted to crush the dreams of young sportswomen by competing in women’s sports and winning the titles and honours that female athletes have trained hard for?

Why are you OK with men being appointed or elected to positions originally intended to increase female representation and address the specific issues affecting women?

Why are you OK with men calling themselves ‘lesbians’ and hijacking lesbian social groups and dating apps?

Why are you OK with boys and men accessing the public toilets and changing rooms designated for females, when doing so makes girls and women feel uncomfortable, embarrassed and unsafe?

Why are you OK with violent men – including rapists – being incarcerated in the female estate?

Why are you OK with physically healthy children being turned into lifelong medical patients and given interventions with potentially very serious effects on their health as well as resulting in sterility?

Why are you OK with young people, who’ve yet to reach full maturity, drastically changing their healthy bodies with irreversible surgeries?

And, finally, do you really believe that those of us who are not OK with any of the above are bigots whom it’s OK to try to threaten, intimidate into silence, cancel, shout over, get banned from social media, fired from our jobs and assault?

I’m hoping for serious, thoughtful responses that will make me reconsider the evidence I have accumulated over the past six years and, if I get any, I will include them in the video I am planning to make.

But I won’t hold my breath.

 

Published 30.12.23

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What is it about Helen Joyce?

Catching up with Peter Boghossian’s interview with Helen Joyce on YouTube today, I learned that Jordan Peterson’s video of his own conversation with Helen had recently been removed by YouTube for supposedly being in breach of their rules against hate speech though, contrary to what Boghossian asserted, it only merited a warning, not a strike. I understand that YouTube’s policy is one strike means you won’t be able to do things like upload, post, or live-stream for a week – which is surely no great hardship to most YouTubers. But getting three strikes within a 90-day period results in a permanent ban.

Hearing that Peterson’s video has been removed reminded me that, of the dozens of videos I have posted since I started making them regularly three years ago, the one that YouTube removed without explanation or hope of getting the decision reversed, was also one about Helen Joyce I uploaded last year. It was removed for the same supposed reason.

Another of my videos, removed by YouTube after a bullying campaign against me by Class War activists because it supposedly breached some privacy rule, I was able to re-upload with minor amendments – specifically by disguising the identity of the bully-in-chief, Helen Parsons.

My more recently banned video – which was about Helen being defamed by the gender loonies – was removed back in April this year. The email notifying me says:

Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our hate speech policy.

We’ve removed the following content from YouTube:

Video: The vile defamation of Helen Joyce

We know that this might be disappointing, but it’s important to us that YouTube is a safe place for all. If content breaks our rules, we remove it. If you think we’ve made a mistake, you can appeal and we’ll take another look. Keep reading for more details.

How your content violated the policy

Content glorifying or inciting violence against another person or group of people is not allowed on YouTube. We also don’t allow any content that encourages hatred of another person or group of people based on their membership in a protected group. We review educational, documentary, artistic, and scientific content on a case-by-case basis. Limited exceptions are made for content with sufficient and appropriate context and where the purpose of posting is clear.

Having read their policy and reassuring myself that the video in question was no different from any other video I’ve posted and in none of them do I glorify or incite violence against anyone or encourage hatred based on anyone’s member of a protected group, I appealed.

Continue reading

Why I won’t use “your” pronouns (video transcript)

This video is proving to be one of my most popular and I have been asked to provide the transcript. Here it is – I have not included the supporting evidence in the form of screenshots and video clips that I show in the video. 

Pronouns are part of language. If we are to speak naturally, we use pronouns. We use ‘he’ and ‘she’ about people even when we are in their company. I sometimes see people saying they don’t talk about people in front of them so it’s not an issue. But think about it next time you are in a group, interacting. You’ll find it is impossible to avoid using he or she about someone present, at least some of the time. It’s not something we can avoid doing.

But we don’t have our own pronouns any more than we have our own verbs or adjectives. People refer to me as ‘she’ and ‘her’ because they can see that I’m a woman or they refer to me ‘he’ and ‘him’ because they can see that I’m a woman and they think it will upset me for some unfathomable reason. But I don’t own the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’ any more than I own the adjectives ‘brilliant’ and ‘fabulous’. It is other people’s choice how they refer to me – not mine.

If you expect me to use the terms ‘transwomen’ and ‘transmen’ and to refer to men who call themselves transwomen as ‘she’ and to women who call themselves transmen as ‘he’, then you are expecting me to go along with a falsehood.

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Responding to Rebecca Watson’s misinformation Part 2: puberty blockers

Here is the transcript of second part of my video response to Rebecca Watston. The first part is here

 

 

This is Part 2 of my response to Rebecca Watson’s appalling video, What the Science Says About Trans Teens on Puberty Blockers. In the first part I drew attention to the falsehoods she put out about surgery in teens about which she said this:

So, we can dismiss that as something that doesn’t really happen.

And I showed that this is wrong.

Now we are going to hear her mislead her viewers about puberty blockers. We start with her talking about Texas governor Greg Abbott’s directive, which was to investigate families who are transing their kids, for child abuse.

Abbott also mentions puberty blockers, though, and that DOES tend to be prescribed for teens under the age of 18. So what are they, and why do people like Abbott think that they’re abusive for teens? Puberty blockers do essentially what it says on the tin: they press the “pause” button on the flood of hormones we get when we enter puberty. They are completely reversible,

Really? It’s interesting that in 2020 the NHS amended the information about puberty blockers on its website, which once said they were considered fully reversible but no longer does so. There must be a reason they did that.

It now says:

 

You cannot in all honesty say that the blockers are fully reversible if their long-term effects  are unknown

Continue reading

Responding to Rebecca Watson’s misinformation Part 1: teen surgeries

It is very concerning to see a high-profile US “skeptic” youtuber promulgate patently false information about serious medical interventions on children and young adults (see here). In my last two videos, I exposed a number falsehoods in a video by Rebecca Watson and, in the hope of reaching a wider audience, I have decided to put transcripts of these videos on my blog. My response is in two parts and it’s better on video!

 

Recently I watched a youtube video by self-identified “Skepchic” Rebecca Watson entitled What the Science Says About Trans Teens on Puberty Blockers. It was appalling! There is so much in it I would like to comment on that I expect this will run into two or three parts. We’ll see how I get on.

Here’s Rebecca:

Last month Ken Paxton, the current Attorney General of Texas, published a nonbinding opinion that parents who provide their transgender kids with science-based medical care should be investigated for child abuse.

Transgender kids? What are they? I feel like I’ve already said this a million times:

When talking about anything to do with gender ideology or any other controversial topic, it’s important to be clear what you mean!

Does Rebecca agree with Jazz Jennings, who said this:

I would say that I have a girl brain and boy body and I think like a girl but I just have a boy body.

So does Rebecca think there are girl brains and boy brains and it’s possible for a girl brain to somehow find its way into a boy’s body and vice versa? Because that’s not science – that’s bollocks.

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Guest blog: “One Day You’ll Understand Why Men Like to Do This”

To mark Autogynephilia Awareness Day 2022, I am posting one woman’s harrowing account of her experience at the hands of an abusive man.

 For B., who gave me the greatest gifts of all — a firm grasp on reality and a deep understanding of the importance of child safeguarding, and for every child who will one day wake up from this social experiment wondering why so few adults held the line on their behalf.

Growing up, I had a personality similar to that which Abigail Shrier has since outlined in her book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” I was a highly-feminine presenting, “high-anxiety, depressive… [girl who]… fell prey to anorexia and bulimia [and] multiple personality disorder” after the autogynephile next door battered and raped me to the tune of three first-degree felonies the summer before my senior year of high school. My overbearing yet docile behaviors were often described as “too much,” and I experienced social isolation from being “different” at school, which I now believe may be due to austistic-presenting traits which are often ignored or misdiagnosed in females. My personality differences led me to spend time at neighbor’s houses more often than with peers, and I truly loved my built-in community.

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Review: Men in Dresses by Sophie Atherton

“Have you ever noticed how oddly keen some men are to get into a frock?”

Nope. Up until a few years ago, I wasn’t aware of ever having personally known any man who was keen to get into a frock. The only transvestite – assuming that’s what he was – I ever recall noticing in real life was improbably tall and scary-looking, as he wandered around the ladieswear department of the large store where I worked over Christmas as a 16-year-old.

His was the image that sprung to mind when, years later as a volunteer on a suicide helpline, I took the occasional call from men wanting to talk about cross-dressing. While many callers to the helpline talked of situations I could understand and empathise with – love unrequited, bereavement, loneliness, anxiety, depression – the cross-dressers seemed to inhabit a different world, one about which I knew nothing and cared even less. A small minority of this minority were men who were distressed and ashamed and only indulged themselves behind closed doors. Being kind, empathic, socially liberal and non-judgmental about what consenting adults did in their private lives, I couldn’t understand what their problem was. Relax. If you’re not upsetting anyone else, just do what floats your boat and get on with life. I never said this out loud because I sensed it wasn’t what they wanted to hear and, anyway, I wasn’t there to give advice but to be a listening ear. The ones who clearly got sexual gratification from talking about their fetish to an unknown woman over the phone – and they were the vast majority of this particular group – were dealt with the same as any other “sex caller” and got short shrift.

In spite of that experience, the question about whether I’d noticed men being keen to cross-dress, asked on the back of this booklet by Sophie Atherton, seemed strange. Why would I know anyone like that?

My feelings after reading through the six very short stories told by Sophie – all of them true and drawn from her own life – were a mixture of relief that this wasn’t yet another thing I’d had to deal with in my own youth (or since), a sense of vicarious violation, anger on behalf of all the women who have been affected by this most self-indulgent of proclivities and yet further disappointment in mankind.

These men are people’s sons, brothers, partners and friends. Why wouldn’t I know someone like that? If I do, I’m probably one of the last people on earth they’d want to discover their fetish and I’m not sorry about that. Due to the onslaught against women’s rights and the disregard for our need for privacy, dignity and safety by those who’ve taken their fetish to the extreme and now claim to actually be women – and particularly by the bullying and attempts to silence those of us saying, “No, thank you” – I am less inclined to be kind and non-judgmental. My empathy these days is reserved for the women in these men’s lives, for the distress caused to them.

Told in a manner that is simple, unadorned and direct, Sophie’s anecdotes bring those feelings to life. I won’t go into detail about any of the situations described but they are all extremely engaging and relatable – they could happen to any of us and I don’t need to have gone through similar to understand exactly how she felt in the moment and how the other women she writes about felt. While gender-identity ideologues have taken advantage of women’s vulnerabilities and compassion to divide us, anecdotes such as these speak to a commonality of female experience of being used by ordinary, unremarkable men. While reading them I was able to forget how divided we are. Having finished reading, my incomprehension of women who are unable to recognise the abuse inherent in the act of treating womanhood as a costume and performance was greater than ever.

The bigger question asked on the back of the booklet – Why shouldn’t a man wear a dress if he wants to? – is one that gets right to the heart of why this is a difficult issue for feminists and progressives. I often say people should be free to express themselves as they like as long as they hurt no one else. But what is ‘hurt’?  Does being made to feel mortified and belittled, even if unintentionally, count? If so-called “misgendering” is violence and abuse, where does demanding a man’s wife go along with his LARPing as a woman sit on that scale? To what extent should his right to free expression be allowed to impinge on women’s boundaries?

Don’t get me wrong. I still don’t care if men want to wear dresses. I applaud gender nonconformity and I don’t care what consenting adults do behind closed doors. I do care that women are asked, expected and forced to tolerate, participate in and defend an activity that makes them uncomfortable, ashamed and grossed out.

Every one of Sophie’s stories raised the question in my mind of what I would have done at that age, in that circumstance? What would I do now that I’m older and wiser? What advice should I give to a young girl, should she find herself in any such situation? And why the hell should we have to even think about this stuff?

It is a sign of the dark times we live in that I feel the need to applaud Sophie Atherton for her courage in telling these stories publicly and under her own name. She deserves to sell many copies and I hope she does. You can order it here.

 

Published 01.02.22

 

Guest blog post: My body dysphoria by Stella Perrett

I am pleased to publish this guest post by Stella Perrett, whom I first heard about when she was cancelled by the Morning Star because a cartoon of hers that the paper had published, had offended a few fragile souls. I blogged about it here. I also reviewed her book here. This is the very moving story of her unhappy childhood. Her website is here and her brand new youtube channel is here.

Do Dysfunctional Families create Dysphoric Children?

I was 11 when I decided I would never have children. I would not put any other child through the misery of childhood I had suffered. I kept this promise to myself for the rest of my life, until I got safely past child-bearing age.

“Gender-Dysphoria” in the 1970s was a term known only by specialist doctors. My Guardian-reading, Liberal-voting parents had certainly never heard of it.

Dr D.H. Montgomery, Director of the Gender Identity Clinic at Charing Cross Hospital and his colleagues, had been treating their patients, (75% male, the reverse of today’s situation at the Tavistock Clinic), since 1965. An organisation called the Beaumont Trust, founded in 1971, existed to counsel men then known to everyone as transvestites (and still exists).

And that was it. To the general public, the subject was a mystery. The nearest we came to it was watching British comedians on TV who wore drag as part of their act  Stanley Baxter, Dick Emery, Les Dawson­or pantomime dames on stage, in the Christmas panto.

But no one ever pretended they were women. We laughed at them at their parodies of women – and part of the laughter was because they were unable to look like women and it was so obvious they were men. Very uncomfortable looking men too, squeezed into dresses and stumbling around on high heels, with grotesque makeup. They were figures of fun.

I see and hear feminists today saying that the British Panto/comedic tradition of men dressed as women (and women as the Prince, the gender-bending went both ways in Pantomime) was always meant as an offensive caricature of women. But that is not how I remember it.  We always knew we were laughing at their complete inability to imitate women.

Childhood

My brother was not an overtly masculine child. He loved rock music and taking motorbikes apart but he was not sporty. He was a disappointment to our father, who had the typical dual personality of the psychopath: charming to strangers, abusive and authoritarian to his family. He fostered that whole “pilllar of the community” thing. When my brother stumbled around the football field in the rain, our father would shout from the touchline, “Come on, you sissy!”

It was me who eagerly went to watch football with him and collected stickers of every team in the British isles. It was me he took to see “boys” films in the cinema  – Tarzan and cowboy films. I vividly remember being taken by my father at age 9 to see “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” – with it’s gay overtones, which would have gone over his head and which I was far too young to recognise – and feeling very uncomfortable at an almost-sex scene in it.

I realised even at my young age that was the main reason my father had wanted to see the film and maybe wanted to expose me to it deliberately. I was substituted for the son he actually had but didn’t appreciate.

He took us to the same barber for short-back-and-sides. I was allowed to dress in jeans, get dirty, leave the dolls in the cupboard and play with Action Men. Instead of girls’ comics, I asked for and got American war comics, Tarzan, Dracula, science fiction.

My mother was a victim of coercive control, a modern term only added to UK Law in 2015. Even as a child, I could see she was a depressed and intimidated woman. She chain-smoked and rarely smiled. I never saw any affection between my parents, only shouting and silence. Although very bright and artistic, she had abandoned her early interests as a young woman – she was a local clay-pigeon shooting champion, when few women were involved in that sport. She had travelled abroad as a “Queens Guide”, the top tier of Guiding, and had enjoyed it very much.

But I believe she cut her University life short to look after her dying father – an Edwardian concept of the utility of the unmarried daughter. Her potential was wasted. She exchanged her possible life for one of endless drudgery in marrying my father. I suspect she suffered from post-natal depression after the births of myself and my brother. She took refuge in housework and ‘good works’.

My mother had no automony. She once told me that she didn’t know if there was any money in the house if the “Man from the Pru”* came calling. She did not drive and never went out anywhere alone. Limiting someone’s financial ability and controlling their movements is typical of coercive control. I felt sorry for her but, because she did not protect me against his abusive behaviour, I also resented her for her weakness.

One day, my father came home from work, came into the living room, looked at us lying on the floor watching Star Trek on TV and said, “Don’t think you can do that when you’re 18”. As a child, you take pronouncements like that very seriously. I decided I would make sure I was not anywhere near him or his house by the time I was 18.

The couple of times I tried to speak about the bullying at school, he just laughed. I don’t remember any sexual abuse – I suspect he was too much of a coward  bullies are. I do remember him exposing himself to me and saying, “What are you looking at”?

He insisted on bathing me and washing my hair, when I was old enough to do both myself. When washing my hair, he would deliberately pull it painfully. He used to put me in scalding hot water until I screamed with pain.

Maybe that was abuse? We would say so now.

My Mother colluded in it, so I thought this was how all parents behaved. I found my schoolfriends’ houses very strange by comparison – like visiting people from another planet because in my house, no one smiled, laughed, kissed, or cuddled their parents or siblings.

I was so alienated from my family that sometimes when I walked home from the bus stop after school, or any time I was walking home, I had a strong recurring vision that when I turned into my road, my house would have vanished and there would be only empty fields. I felt alone, like I would always have to achieve things by just my own efforts.

So in this atmosphere, I grew up believing – convincing myself –- that I was a boy. No one told me any different, I heard the word “tomboy” and just assumed it was their way of describing me.

My mother told me that I was always independent. On my first day at Primary School, she said I threw a tantrum because I wanted to go on my own, not with her holding my hand. When she asked me if I wanted a bicycle, I pointed to a rank of gleaming motorbikes and said, “No, I want one of those”!

At Primary school

I was bullied constantly and struggled to make friends. I reacted by being the ‘class clown’. I was always the one who disrupted the lessons by throwing the textbooks out of the window into the mud. I got into fights with boys in the playground, which I always lost because of my disability. A psychiatrist might have had something to say about that but I was not to see one until my teenage years, by which time I was already a “criminal”.

My mother kept me educated but ignorant by keeping me out of school a lot as an “invalid”. She was over-protective of my disability and took me for lots of medical check-ups. She had plenty of books at home. She bought me “The Lord of The Rings” for my 8th birthday. I read it in three weeks. My reading age was seven years ahead of my actual age – another red rag for the bullies.

I did not query the idea that I was a boy. I fully expected to grow up to have a beard, be six foot tall, grow muscles and join the Army at 18. This was so obviously the polar opposite of what I was actually like – five foot nothing and disabled, that it’s hard to know how I sustained it. By reading American comics, probably.

My mother encouraged me to join the Brownies, and later the Girl Guides; the adventurous aspects (camping, orienteering, going on the Ten Tors Expeditions on Dartmoor) validated the “masculine” personality I had developed.

I was traumatised by my first period. I had been told nothing, by parents or teachers. I was terrified I was bleeding to death. It happened at home and I remember my mother just laughing. Now I understand that to be nervous laughter but as a child, it seemed just dismissive. This extraordinary, central event in my life was trivialised and laughed at. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she then told me I would have to put up with this event every month for the rest of my life.

After that, I tried to ignore my schoolmates’ chatter about how their breasts were growing, fashion and boys. I continued to dress as a boy as much as possible and invented reasons not to wear the girl’s school uniform, not to do girly stuff at school.

Nowadays all this would be called primary gender dysphoria.

By the time I reached puberty, it was blindingly obvious that I wasn’t a boy, even to myself. My earlier belief had evaporated, leaving behind only resentment.

I have recently read Nimco Ali’s book (published 2019) “What we’re told not to talk about – women’s voices from East London to Ethiopia”. The ignorance about their bodies of some girls in backwoods communities in Africa and the Middle East, was no different to my ignorance, growing up in a “civilised” country, to middle-class parents, with all my so-called “white privilege”.

I had visual and aural hallucinations, I cried a lot in secret. I saw my future as a huge black mountain, which I somehow had to climb. At the summit, I believed, was the magic age of 18 and freedom.

Secondary School

…was a nightmare because there my life was dominated by organised gangs, whom I spent most of my time trying to avoid.

It was a rough school in a good area, with a good reputation. It had acres of sports fields, 2000 kids, shiny science labs…and a probation officer on-site with his own office. He was kept constantly busy with the naughty kids; thieves, bullies, rapists and arsonists, whom he represented in local juvenile courts and packed off to the nearest Approved School.

Any slightly autistic, quiet, disabled, artistic child like me was beneath the radar of the teachers. Their interest in your future was non-existent. They either did not notice the bullying or tacitly encouraged it.

The teachers were ageing hippies. Fifteen-year-olds joined them for cider-drinking sessions in local pubs in the lunch hours and after school. Our married Head of English was more or less openly having an affair with a sixth-form girl, which was treated as a huge joke by the other teachers. (Years later he became Tony Blair’s Labour government’s education adviser and this scandal came out and he lost his job).

I learned very little there, except how to skive off and drink beer in secret, sowing the seeds for decades of alcoholism.

When they herded us into the science lab one day to watch that film of a baby being born, I was among the ones sat at the back, laughing and kicking our heels, ignoring it, except for occasional horrified glances at the screen, and giggling.

I continued to behave like a boy. I did a “boys’ subject”, Technical Drawing. I liked “boys’ sports”: boxing, football, motorcycling. But because of my disability, I was deemed not capable of the more exciting activities like school trips, canoeing, athletics, or swimming. My resentment at these restrictions festered, especially when I saw my brother being allowed to take part in them.

To control the headaches, backaches and misery of my periods, I persuaded my mother to get the doctor to prescribe me the contraceptive pill. No one told me what effects this might have. I guess it suppressed my oestrogen and gave my natural testosterone more of a chance, which may have enhanced my feeling of inner “masculinity”.

No one ever told me that it was not wrong or unusual for a girl to reject the extreme femininity they were expected to adopt and saw around them everywhere. The endless fawning around boys. The girls’ magazines like Jackie, which glamorised girlie clothes and behaviour. School dances, which I avoided like the plague. The constant talk of going out with someone and marriage.

It was a confusing time. Male pop stars dressed androgynously. Male footballers wore long hair. Men played at looking like women – without the misery we had to put up with – and were lauded for it. Just like today. The internet has only increased their visibility 100%.

I rebelled by wearing clothes, which might have labelled me a Goth (all black, leather, chains, Dr Martens) if there had been any other Goths around to recognise me! I finally met and made friends with one, in the relaxing, but bizarre, surroundings of the mental hospital I was in at age 16!

This resulted in my father’s angry comment, “You can’t wear black for the rest of your life”! To which I replied, “Watch me”!

I fantasised about killing the bullies at school, and my father. I thought about death and suicide every day.

Being disabled was a large part of this but I have since wondered: Could this constant frustration and rage have been anything to do with using the pill without a break? Certainly it has never left me, except that after the menopause I seem to have calmed down slightly!

Cosmetic surgery

In order to change my appearance, so I did not look like my Father’s side of the family, I wanted dental surgery to cosmetically repair my over-bite. I pestered my mother to request this from the dentists who made my braces (it was a fad for parents to make children wear braces in the 70s, almost like a fashion accessory). I was refused, on the grounds that my bones were still growing, and they could not perform such surgery until after I was 25.

This is interesting, since children today are being okayed for drastic “trans” surgeries from 16 onwards. I eventually had both jaws broken and re-set in my early thirties. A major surgery, which took months of painful recovery.

It’s interesting to compare my desire for cosmetically altering facial surgery with the modern cohort of girls with gender-dysphoria, and their desire for surgeries, which similarly separate them completely from the persona their parents brought them up with or desired for them. You can’t do much more of a “F…you” to your parents than wanting bits of you removed or altered, to physically make you no longer the child they raised and remembered.

By the time I was 15 the bullying became too much and I carried a knife to school for protection. I didn’t make it past the first weeks in the Sixth Form. I dropped out and went to what we call “the school of hard knocks” instead – psychiatric hospital and then prison. It was for a minor offence, which nowadays would have led to probation or a  short time in a young offender’s institution.

But I was so desperate to escape from my adolescence that I successfully hammed it up as a mad psychopath in order to get locked up for as long as possible, so that I  could safely reach the magic age of 18 and my longed-for “freedom” and autonomy. In those days, Prison Governors could, and did, add days or weeks to your sentence for minor disciplinary offences, so you only had to refuse every order to get a longer time inside.

Nowadays, I would have been hamming it up as a “boy”. Teenagers are good at acting out their delusions.

The four years I spent in those establishments as a guest of Her Majesty were the happiest of my life up to that point.

Adulthood

To cut a long story short: I rode motorbikes (my childhood ambition), spent 20 years in the construction industry, travelled abroad on my own and presented as androgynous all my life. In my 20s I campaigned for Gay Rights during the AIDS crisis, sent my hard-earned cash to the women and children fund of the 1984 Miner’s Strike and mixed with lesbians and feminists in London.

I had to endure several abusive relationships, including escaping domestic violence, taking a man to court and getting him convicted in my 40s. It wasn’t until I reached 50 that I found a nice man to settle down with, who also never wanted children and I finally beat my alcoholism.

I’ve tried various types of therapy over the course of 30 years: none of them worked. It’s only now I’m post-menopausal (without HRT – no extra oestrogen for me, thank you very much!) that I feel as “masculine” as I ever wanted to feel when I was young. I can finally look in the mirror and see the person I thought I was, as a teenager. Would today’s availability of “transing” drugs, hormones and surgery have helped me? No. Because my body dysphoria did not mean I would have been “cured” by doing more to imitate a boy than I already did, wearing their clothes and doing “boy stuff”.

Some actual counselling as a teenager would certainly have helped, not “Oops, carrying a knife for protection? Do Not Pass “Go”, go straight to mental hospital”! But by the 70s, state schools no longer had the traditional mothering presence of the school matron, who used to provide a private office and a comforting ear for unhappy children to talk to.

As an adult, I have had many rewarding experiences. I’ve achieved things I wanted to do, seen places I wanted to see, I’ve gained qualifications. I’ve run a business, I’ve had recognition as an artist.

I have been a proud union member all my working life and a union activist and representative in my workplace, until I retired in 2020, after my public cancellation. I’ve even made friends. Something you never think, as a disturbed teen, you will achieve.

Yes, it’s been tough. But life itself is tough.

The ‘cure’ for me was not medical intervention – the cure was very simple and something, which no one ever explained to me, something which is available in abundance, to all of us: TIME.

END

 

NOTES:

British terms: ‘Skive’  to bunk off school.

‘Man from the Pru’ (the Prudential) a visit from the Household Insurance collector

‘Do Not Pass GO’  reference to the family game Monopoly. “Do Not Pass GO-Straight To Jail”!

 

Published 06.01.22

 

Feminists vs Gender activists – a story of police bias: Part 3

The third video in this series can be viewed here. Transcript below.

Welcome to part 3 of my story about why I reported a bully to the police and what happened when I did. In this part, I am going to talk about those comments he made that were the final straw. Before I do, I want to slip in something that I hadn’t originally planned to say but it was inspired by a new search I’ve just done to see if he is still going on about me and I came across a tweet posted in July this year, 2021.

Katy Montgomerie had asked a totally extraordinary and demented question about whether any trans people have ever threatened legal action against gender critics. He must have known the answer to that. This tweeter responded, quite reasonably, asking if Monty had never heard of one notoriously litigious trans activist – I may have mentioned him before in this series – and they added that the bully I reported to the police had threatened legal action against me, which he did.

So the bully quote tweets it. I’ll just show the first part of his tweet for now. He says:

This is part of the myth he and others are trying to perpetuate that, although I’m in my 60s and about 165 cm tall, in their fevered imaginations I am this gigantic brute who can single-handedly take on men less than half my age and drag them around and thrash them up and down. It’s true that this man has never physically threatened me but that’s not what the tweet he was responding to was about. The question was about threatening legal action, which he did.

Back in May 2019, I received a couple of emails from this bloke about half an hour apart complaining about a blog post I wrote entitled ‘Rattling the honey badger’s cage’. It was about a troll who had tried to leave hundreds of very abusive and sometimes threatening comments on my blog and on the blogs of many other gender critics. Total nutter. I have never bothered to inform the police about this troll but I know of two others who did. One of them only reported him after receiving a clear and credible threat of violence against her. The other person who complained, having gathered evidence of his abuse from nearly 30 people he’s targeted, tells me she pushed as hard as she could but, again, the police weren’t bothered. Honey Badger should really have tweeted some pictures of ribbons or something for the police to take notice.

Anyway, my bully seemed to think that in the blog post I wrote, I was implying that I thought he was the Honey Badger.

In that post, I show Honey Badger’s first comment to me which starts,

You’re a lying twat, you, Maria. An ugly, old, hateful little slag. You got what you fucking deserved that day in Hyde Park. It’s a pity Tara didn’t shut you up permanently.

And he ends by telling me to fuck off and die and he calls my husband a nonce.

OK, I haven’t shown these emails in full before but I’m now making them available on my site. Just now I’m going to highlight three things from the first email.

First he says,

I have never once in my life spoken to any woman, using any of those terms.

OK, time for a little reminder of terms he has used to and about women but as long as he doesn’t call us hateful little slags, I’m sure we’re very grateful.


He even says,

I make no bones about this…… those things that were said to you were disgusting, I don’t believe anyone should have to put up with that!

Seriously, is this guy for real? Look at what he does expect people to put up with!

This leads to my second highlight:

But let me make myself very clear once and for all, we fell out…

No, we didn’t fall out. This suggests that we once had some kind of friendly relationship or acquaintanceship. Remember the very first thing he ever said to me was to call me a “raging terf imbecile“, etc. I didn’t even know he existed before he turned up and posted that on Facebook thread I commented on in the last video.

It gets better.

…but this is now bordering on a campaign of harassment, you have multiple mentions of me on this blog and various insults.

Yes, I had exposed a tiny fraction of his appalling behaviour and lies on my blog and I’ve called him stupid or similar. I mean the cap fits!

But this is far beyond that, this is flat out malicious defamation.

Says the man who has repeatedly and maliciously lied about me in hundreds of tweets and has never stopped. How utterly unsurprising to know that he can’t take a tiny speck of what he spends half his life giving out.

Thirdly,

I will be seeking legal advice for malicious communications, defamation and harassment at the beginning of next week, you have the weekend to remove these baseless lies…If this page is not removed over the weekend, there will be action taken.

I took that as a threat of legal action although arguably the action he said would be taken could have been of some other sort. Of course, there were no “baseless lies” in that blog post and all I could do when I got that email was laugh out loud and then ignore it. The blog post he doesn’t like is still up and it’s not going anywhere.

Now to reveal the second part of his tweet which, as I said was posted in the summer of this year 2021 – ten months after I’d reported him to the police.

You see at the bottom he says that I am on record as being a racist and he has receipts. That baseless lie brings me to the main business of this video.

Earlier this year – as a sort of prequel to this video – I made a two-part video in which I recounted what happened in Hyde Park on 30 August 2020 when a group of feminists were aggressed at Speakers’ Corner by a much larger group of people who’d been on a Black Lives Matter march. I showed all the footage that I could get my hands on and I exposed how this same individual – the bully – who, again, hadn’t even been present and several others as well had again come up with a made-up version of events and I showed the defamatory tweets they made about some of us.

I cannot begin to describe how angry and distressed I was to see these comments. That is not something that I find easy to admit to because he will totally get off on knowing that I was upset because that is why he does it and that’s the kind of person he is. He’s a bully.

It was way back in January 2020 – after I posted the video showing everything that happened when I was assaulted at Speakers Corner and highlighting his responsibility for the false narrative that has been circulating ever since – that he started this new tack of calling me a racist on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. I addressed it in the introduction to the abridged version of my Speakers’ Corner video, still in January 2020.

So there is no evidence that I’m a racist but how do you prove you’re not something? Attending a public protest saying, “No to Racism” perhaps? I’ve no doubt these nutters would find some way of reconciling that picture and any other evidence with what they want to believe.

In September 2020, three years after the assault on me, after he’d repeatedly accused me of dining out on the assault and in spite of the wealth of evidence that gives the lie to his fantasy version of it, he was still accusing me of having deliberately taunted the thugs who attacked me. And now – after this…let’s call it what it is…after this attack on us by gender-cultist BLM marchers – none of whom, by the way, were suggesting we were racists (they were calling us transphobes) and my tormentor was inventing a new narrative, again casting me as the villain in an incident which the evidence shows quite clearly was started by the BLM marchers. But what was unendurable for me was the repetition of the lie that I am a racist.

Here he is defaming Kellie-Jay and a bunch of her friends, saying we are a racist, white supremacist gang.

And here he is calling us Nazis.

A step too far. I know it’s been said by others many times but this fashion, this penchant nowadays for flinging out the word ‘Nazi’ at people you disagree with is an insult to…it disrespects everyone who suffered under the Third Reich. That includes both my parents and their families – especially my mother who was from a country that was occupied by the Nazis and, as someone who was born in the post-war period, I grew up knowing from the earliest age of the suffering that had been endured by so many of my parents’ generation…and their parents That is something this bully and his acolytes are not capable of understanding because if they did, they surely wouldn’t behave as they do. Their conscience wouldn’t allow it.

OK, here is a tweet from someone who thinks I have a criminal conviction for some kind of racist attack or harassment in the past. Where could he have got that idea from? Because it wasn’t from anything I have said or done in my entire life. I have no convictions; I’ve never even been arrested, let alone charged with anything.

The bully responds without confirming or denying but with yet more hateful lies:

There was no doubt in mind that this was to be the test case and the police would fail it miserably, as indeed they did.

I’ll tell you what happened in Part 4.

 

Published 17.12.21

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Feminists vs Gender activists – a story of police bias: Part 2

The second transcript is below. See the video here.

In the first part of this series I explained the background to my decision to report someone to the police. Welcome to part 2.

There were several candidates I could have chosen to report – but one individual made it very easy for me, not only by using his real name and living in England but by sinking lower than had any of the others by tweeting about me falsehoods that were more despicable than any I had seen previously. Blatant lies that were the total opposite of everything that I have stood for my entire life. I genuinely felt that if anyone was hateful and deranged enough to believe them – and I know some people do – they could well be hateful and deranged enough to physically attack me, my home or hurt any of my loved ones.

I also want to say that I have never lied about anyone or anything in connection with the assault on me in 2017. I have repeatedly been called a liar but there is not one scrap of evidence that I have ever done so and a mountain of evidence that everything I have said is the truth.

At the beginning of 2020, I made a video about the assault on me at Speakers Corner and the trans activist response which showed how the same individual had circulated a false narrative about what happened to me when I was attacked by those three men. The video is still right here on YouTube. It is entitled ‘Assault on Maria MacLachlan at Speakers’ Corner and how trans activists responded’.

If there is one thing that has destroyed my faith in humanity more than anything else it is that ordinary people will quite shamelessly lie – in spite of the evidence that contradicts their lies – if they think it will help their agenda. There are people who think nothing of trying to destroy the reputation, the career, the health of someone who has done nothing to them but whom they see as a political enemy. Of course, I am not just talking about myself here. I know of countless people who have been targeted with the irrational hatred of those I make no apology for calling a cult.

I am not claiming that what I’ve endured is as bad as what women I mentioned in Part 1 have endured at the hands of the police – and I should add Kellie-Jay Keen to that list.  I’m certainly not claiming that the bullying of me is anywhere close to what’s been happening to certain journalists including Julie Bindel or academics like Kathleen Stock and Jo Phoenix.

I know that there are many more victims of the dreadful abuse and defamation by these cultists, who aren’t as well known, who don’t have the love and emotional support that some of us have and who live in fear of their livelihoods and more.

In my case, their continued defamation of me and their attempts to shut me up has had largely the opposite effect to that which they apparently intended. It has galvanised me into being far more active than I had ever expected to be and it has won me far more support than if they had just behaved decently and honestly in the first place.

It is for everyone being victimised by the cultists and being failed by the police, by politicians, by employers, by their trade unions, that I will continue to call out the cultists and expose the failings as I come across them.

Having seen that particular individual sink so low, I did a search of his tweets and I was staggered. If we include his own retweets of his own lies, there were well over 300 tweets about me in the three years since he first started lying about me. This felt like a serious and terrifying obsession. I don’t recall tweeting about this bloke. I may have done. I had challenged him directly on Twitter in the early months after the assault and I mentioned him in several blog posts I wrote because of the lies he told and the vile things he said about me and others and I posted the screenshots of his tweets. Why shouldn’t I? But what I never did was lie about him. I didn’t need to – the proof of the abuse was in his tweets.

So I collected screenshots of a large number of his tweets – not all by any means – and I have made those that I collected available on my website. As I said in Part 1, my anger and distress doesn’t come from being insulted, it comes from being lied about in a way intended to stir up hatred against me. Having said that, I do want to draw attention to some of his insults for what they reveal about him, as well as what they tell us about Twitter’s double standards.

First, a general one in which he gives his opinion of women and our male allies with whom he disagrees.

I’m now going to show you one directed at Caroline Farrow.

I mentioned this in a blog post I wrote once saying it was the most disgusting tweet I’d ever seen, which it was at that time. The author eventually responded on Twitter to me by saying it goes double for me. How sweet.

 

Note that the man with hundreds of tweets about me accuses me of being obsessed with him. This reminds me of a rather entertaining self-own of his I came across, in which he shows a screenshot he grabbed from… well, it’s obviously YouTube, probably from below one of my videos, in which I am addressing one of my oldest real-life friends as “babe”.

 

He says I never talk like this? How the hell would he know what I talk like unless he tries to read or listen to every word I say anywhere? I use the word ‘babe’ a lot in real life but only to people I am very close to – I don’t use it sarcastically against my political enemies of the other sex as he does, which is presumably why he’s called creepy. Imagine the ego to think I might have picked it up from him!

Now that we’ve set the tone, let’s look at a few of the insults that he’s come up with just for me. In the first part, I mentioned that I was quoted in the Sun saying people should be free to insult each other.

He’s called me Rose West a few times. For those who don’t know, she’s an incarcerated torturer and serial killer of young women, including her own daughter. Most of her crimes were committed in partnership with her husband, Fred West, who committed suicide in prison. Here we go, I’m a “Poundland Rose West”.

 

And here he brings my husband into it.

Here I am called a “blatantly obvious weirdo crank with serious, serious issues”.

 

No irony there at all.

Here I am a swivel-eyed loon.

Here he suggests I’m someone who has violent fantasies and wants to enact them. I get quite a lot of this sort of thing from the cult and it stems from the fact that when three members of their cult – physically attacked me for no good reason. I fought back.

I fought back in three ways. At the time, I tried to stop the one who’d smashed my camera from running away by holding onto him; secondly, I immediately reported the attack to the police and went to court; thirdly, I mocked the ridiculous false narrative started by this individual and since then I’ve devoted much of my time exposing the hate of the gender nuts and challenging their ideology through my website and more recently through this YouTube channel. They cannot stand the fact that they haven’t managed to shut me up. They cannot stand women who are not only actual women but stronger and braver and smarter than they are. That is what this is all about.

 

I’ll just show one more:

Here he calls me dopey, hypocritical, hate-addled, batshit, twatspangled, fucknuggetted, gobshite, Rose West wannabe.

Now I am many things but I am not a wannabe torturer or serial killer and I am not hypocritical. I’ll say it again – I am not bothered by insults especially from those who are so obviously morally and cerebrally inferior.

So what am I bothered about – apart from the rank stupidity of people like this guy? Fabrication. Sheer invention for the purpose of justifying violence against me or anyone else and for the purpose of stirring up hate and possibly instigating more violence.

The first lie that I know of that this person tweeted about me was at 6.51 am on 14 September 2017. In other words, early in the morning on the day after I was assaulted. He says I’d been on a Facebook page “all day long” on the day before the assault “giving out vile abuse.”

Now, if he’d only said this once, I wouldn’t be bothering with it but he repeated it nine times that first day and he even claimed to have evidence to back up what he said about me but, of course, he didn’t produce it because it wasn’t true. He was so desperate to get people believing his narrative.

Let me tell you about that Facebook conversation.

A group called Action for Trans Health London was trying to get a meeting I planned to go to shut down. The meeting was about proposed changes to the law in favour of gender self-ID and it was to be my first meeting on anything to do with transgender issues. I didn’t understand why some people wanted to stop it happening rather than coming to the meeting and arguing.

I mean, if they had decent arguments they would have won over hearts and minds, right? I knew very little about gender ideology back then and what the conflicts were about. But I was really disgusted at these people trying to get a meeting closed down. Of course, we’re all used to it now. Trying to bully, intimidate and shut people up, rather than trying to defeat us with arguments, has become the norm.

So I went to this group’s Facebook page and I saw a post by Clare Solomon that seemed eminently sensible to me. I gave it a ‘like’ and read the first few responses, which were typically nasty and ridiculous and calling feminists ‘transphobes’ and accusing them of making trans people unsafe. I felt pretty angry that they were trying to get the meeting shut down and I joined in the conversation.

While that conversation – or silly squabble would be a better way of putting it – was going on, they got news that the venue had cancelled the meeting I wanted to go to and they started posting celebratory posts, which made me angrier. I called them bullies. I called one of them a handmaid – which was wrong because he turned out to be a trans-identifying man. I think most of the idiots on that thread were men posing as women. Then suddenly this guy appears and calls me a raging terf imbecile, prejudiced, muddy thinking, whining like a spoilt baby, a moron. This was his first comment on the thread and it was by far the most abusive comment that was said by anyone on that thread.

This was one of my very first online exchanges with gender nutters and I was quite shocked by how hateful and nasty he was. So I took screenshots of the entire conversation, never dreaming at the time that I would need to use them to disprove his defamation of me.

So, he tweeted that same lie – that I’d been giving out vile abuse all day – nine times on the first day after I was assaulted and several more times over the next ten days or so before I finally wrote a blog post giving my account of what had happened to me and linking to my screenshots of the entire conversation he’d been lying about. My intervention amounted to fewer than ten tweets in under two hours. The screenshots can still be viewed here.

Anyway, that wasn’t the worst thing, obviously. The worst thing was that – also on the morning after I was assaulted – this person had taken from one or more available videos showing the assault on me some 25 carefully selected stills and had deliberately omitted the most important one, which was Tara Wolf running out and attacking me, while I was standing two or three metres away from the group of people harassing us and I was filming them. This guy had added an entirely fabricated narrative of his own which placed me as the instigator. I’m not going to going into that succession of tweets in any detail now because I did that in my videos about the assault – both the long video and the abridged version.

And, again, not satisfied with posting this work of fiction just the once, he actually retweeted the whole thing six times.

He retweeted it even after the court case at which the only one of my three assailants who was caught and charged was convicted of assaulting me. And just in case you think he confined himself to the pack of lies in that twitter thread – not at all! Still on the first day after the assault he was making ridiculous and unsupportable claims like this:

The guy must have spent hours posting lies that were deliberately intended to hurt me, hurt my reputation…and for what? What exactly was his purpose? Was it to make me so angry that I would stop living my normal life and start fighting back by getting involved in campaigning, building a website, creating a youtube channel, etc?

I don’t think so.

It was a victim-blaming narrative to justify the attack on me and that is why the cultists picked it up and ran with it.

A couple more things before I finish this part.

I was mystified by this. Private photos? I had to go and look at every mention I’d made of him on my site because I honestly couldn’t remember posting any photos of his gob on my site. But, actually, I had. It is one graphic with two images, I’m obscuring them because apparently these photos of himself – which can only have been put online once upon a time by himself – upset him. I can’t imagine why, seeing as in at least one which is clearly pre-transition, he just looks like an ordinary bloke and not like a pantomime dame.

 

I can’t remember where I found this creation but the reason I grabbed it and uploaded it onto my site is because of what it said at the bottom.

Yes, he did that and yet he thinks I’m guilty of some kind of heinous criminal act because I stuck a couple of pics that were already in the public domain, put on the web himself:

And I put them on some obscure page of my website. Furthermore, he was incomprehensibly proud of the fact that his partner – the mother of his children – is apparently a wannabe violent thug, too.

Having said all that, in my judgment, none of the tweets that I have shown so far – even though they were far worse than anything complained about from Kate Scottow or Marion Millar or Ceri Black – merited a complaint to the police. What did merit the complaint I made? I will show you in Part 3. Bye for now.

 

Published 17.12.21

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Feminists vs Gender activists – a story of police bias: Part 1

This is the transcripts of the first of a 4-part series of videos I have made and uploaded to YouTube. The first one can be viewed here.

Hi everyone, I am Maria MacLachlan and this is the video that I have been procrastinating over for quite a long time. Actually, it’s the first in a series of videos because there is quite a bit I want to say. In them, I will explain why and what happened when I reported a trans-identifying bully to the police. In the first one, I’ll talk about the background to my decision.

I’m feeling the love

I hope to go public with these videos all on the same day and be done with them. It’s not a subject I relish talking about. Again I am posting the transcripts of these videos on my blog. The reason I do this with certain videos is that I know that, in spite of my lovely mellifluous speaking voice and my glowing youthful and very feminine looks, some people will never watch a video of mine and some people won’t watch a video at all – unless it’s anime or something. But some of those people will at least skim through a written piece and I want to get what I say in these videos shared as widely as possible because of what I have to say about the police.

This account is one I’ve always known I was going to give. By ‘always’ I mean since last December and I’ve kept finding reasons not to do it.

When a Scottish feminist called Marion Millar was arrested and charged in Scotland earlier this year that gave me another reason to wait and see what happened in her case so I could include something about it in this video.

Marion Millar

Marion’s case initially involved a handful of tweets she posted that offended a couple of people I’d never heard of. I’m told one is a male actor and another one – a woman – is an SNP councillor. Those tweets of Marion’s didn’t even break Twitter rules and it’s really not hard to break Twitter rules if you take a pro-feminist position.

You don’t have to do very much to get banned from Twitter if you are a feminist and Marion’s tweets didn’t even meet that very low bar.

When I was in Glasgow with Marion I saw all but one of the tweets that were complained about to the police. Marion showed them to me on her phone – all but the one she’d deleted were still there on Twitter and they were nothing! By Twitter standards, they were less than nothing. One of them showed a picture of suffragette ribbons! The one she’d deleted – if I remember rightly – referred to a notorious litigious transgender activist so I can’t blame her for deleting it.

It beggars belief that the police took this complaint seriously and how they treated Marion. That’s the way to keep public confidence in you! Ask a respectable professional woman if she wanted to hang someone with ribbons because he’s gay. Seriously, that is what Marion was asked at her police interview. For crying out loud!

And it is bizarre that the Procurator Fiscal didn’t throw the damn case out at first glance. This was a trivial and vexatious case that should never have been brought and the real victim here, who has been unjustly punished just by the process even before going to trial, is Marion.

And of course, it never went to trial,  the case has been discontinued, which is what I expected from the outset. But why the hell did it take so long?

Ceri Black

The nasty man who complained about Marion’s tweets has since done the same to a woman in Northern Ireland and again it looks like he’s picked the wrong woman to mess with. Her name is Ceri Black. If you haven’t already done so, do read the transcript of a speech she made just after police had contacted her, which is posted on Graham Linehan’s substack.

Ceri’s response to being invited by the police to attend a voluntary interview under caution at the police station was:

Come and arrest me if you want to ask me your questions. Here I am.

The police did tell Ceri’s solicitor that, in fact, they weren’t going to arrest but they were sending the complaint straight to the Public Prosecution Service of Northern Ireland. I am recording this on 5th December. A few days ago, she tweeted that the police had knocked on her door in the morning to read her her rights and tell her they are going to report the matter to the Prosecution Service, which Ceri thought they had already done anyway. As she says, the process is the punishment. It seems that all police officers in Northern Ireland are armed. Later in the day of Ceri’s tweet, her wife tweeted that she was still upset that her 9-year-old had been the one to open the door and find a police officer on her doorstep. Why the hell did they send an officer without warning to their doorstep? Disgraceful!

According to Ceri, she tweets about safeguarding children, lesbian love, the erosion of boundaries due to queer theory, women deserving their own sports, etc. When she faced a wall of death threats, rape threats, threats of sectarian violence, violent pornographic photographs and videos, homophobic abuse and calls to go back to where she came from – Ceri is English – on her Twitter account, she reported them to the Police Service of Northern Ireland and they took no action.

Kate Scottow

Now to the episode that is most relevant to my case and was dealt with by the English police. Kate Scottow made headlines after she was visited at her home by police on 1 December 2018 and arrested in front of her two children. Her crime, according to the newspapers, was referring to a man as a man – calling him “he”. But because he claims to be a woman, this was described as “misgendering”.

I did not believe this story initially. I actually thought she must have done something quite serious because the police considered it necessary to send three officers to arrest her. They seized her phone and laptop and held her in a cell for seven hours before questioning her. When she eventually was interviewed by the police, she was asked about seven messages posted on social media. Seven! Six of them were tweets, which she admitted to posting – the seventh was on an internet forum, which she denied.

The six tweets were directed at a man who holds a Gender Recognition Certificate, the same notoriously litigious trans activist as Marion Millar had directed one tweet to.

And Kate was eventually charged under s.127 subsection 2 of the Communications Act, 2003, which legislates against causing annoyance and needless anxiety to someone by means of electronic communication.

The only tweet that could reasonably be called abusive called the complainant “a crook using the trans façade to ensure they aren’t caught. A pig in a wig”. Another one called him  “a very sick individual” and Kate had also called him a racist more than once because he had tweeted to someone, “You know not so long ago people like you had no civil rights!”. The other thing he objected to, of course, was her not using his preferred pronoun. In court he said – or rather yelled – that it was “harassment” and “violated his dignity as a woman”.

So, after she was arrested, the complainant got an interim injunction prohibiting Kate from publicly posting anything else about him and more specifically “misgendering” him. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop her. By the time the case reached court the number of tweets involved had increased to a grand total of 16. If I recall correctly, the complainant said about nine of them didn’t even offend him but they were in breach of the injunction.

In February of last year, 2020, I attended her two-day trial at St Albans Magistrates’ Court and I returned a week later to hear the verdict. She was found guilty. I subsequently made a video sharing my thoughts. In a nutshell, I was disgusted but not particularly surprised at the verdict as I had long since come to the conclusion that, when it comes to conflicts between trans activists and women’s rights activists, the police and criminal justice system in England and Wales are not on our side.

I wasn’t sure back then about Scotland or Northern Ireland but I am now.

Months later, I discovered that I had been quoted in the Sun newspaper after the verdict saying:

We are using up police resources and the court system for insults…I genuinely feel people should be allowed to insult each other and if you don’t like it you should stay off social media…

Now, I have no recollection of speaking to any British journalists but that’s probably an age thing. In any event, I absolutely stand by that comment. Insults do not concern me – I reserve the right to insult anyone I think deserves it and I defend other people’s right to insult me, however much I might dislike it. I’m pretty much immune to it by now anyway. Imagine if everybody who insulted anyone on social media got prosecuted! Well, it just couldn’t happen – the resources aren’t there. So the police are very selective and, if I may say so, very biased in deciding which cases they will proceed with.

And yet – as I discovered later – the individual I reported to the police called me a hypocrite for what I said to that Sun journalist and I assume that this is because he is unable to distinguish between an insult and a lie – by which I mean telling deliberate falsehoods about someone knowing either that it definitely isn’t true or that there is no evidence to support it. That, as an allegation, it wouldn’t stand up in court.

Lies, especially when they are told with the intention of stirring up hatred against someone – which is what this person did otherwise why do it? – they do concern me.

Having been persistently lied about by countless nutters since 13 September 2017, which is the day I was assaulted by three young men in Hyde Park, I had already received quite detailed – and free – legal advice and I knew I had a case for a civil action against a number of individuals. However, in order to take out a libel suit, you have to be prepared to risk a hell of a lot of money and while, if you win, you would supposedly recover your costs and then some, what if the people you sue don’t have two pennies to rub together? What if they lose the roof over their heads? And what if they have children? I was never interested in getting money from these people – I just wanted the abuse to stop. Telling vicious nasty lies about people is abuse and those who lie about me are abusers.

The other thing you have to be prepared for if you do decide to sue is a hell of a lot of stress and ultimately it felt that, if I successfully sued any of them, it could be a bit of a hollow victory in that it could be twisted and used against me because that is the kind of thing they do. JK Rowling – with every justification – gets a couple of lawyers’ letters sent out to people or newspapers making false and disgusting allegations about her and she’s painted as the villain because she has the funds to do that.

This despicable individual is an infamous Twitter bully who has posted countless nasty, vicious tweets mostly about women – including a few about me – over several years now. He has just faced a Medical Practitioners’ tribunal, which found his fitness to practise impaired and suspended him for a month, which I admit is more than I expected. In fact, having seen the stuff that he and his mate posted about one of his victims – a woman called Caroline Farrow – I don’t think he should ever work as a doctor again. That’s my opinion. I’m deliberately being careful what I say about people because I do expect this series of videos to be targeted by the bullies.

Now, as I understand it, Caroline did seek help from the police several times and they failed her.

Anyway, this doctor previously had to apologise for comparing JK Rowling to a very famous man who notoriously took advantage of his celebrity status and reputation for charity work to sexually abuse countless children of both sexes and many young women, some of whom were extremely vulnerable.

This other despicable individual – Morgane Oger,  a Canadian trans activist who campaigned for the defunding of Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter – describes JKR as a bully for threatening to sue for this most disgusting smear imaginable. These are the kind of people we are dealing with in this war.

I have no doubt that all I’d need to do to silence the bullies who target me is get lawyers to write letters – they’re not going to try to defend the indefensible in court. But lawyers’ letters don’t come cheap and I don’t see why I or anyone else should have to fork out to stop people lying about me. But I never say never.

And if a feminist like Kate Scottow was going to be treated like a dangerous criminal for such a small number of tweets – “unkind” and “annoying” as they may have been – why wouldn’t an ongoing hate campaign against a feminist at least be given due consideration? As I told Venice Allan on camera at a protest outside the court after the Scottow verdict had been delivered, I would certainly be talking to the police about some of the harassment I had been putting up with over the previous two and a half years. It would be an opportunity to expose the police for what was clearly a failure to provide a consistent service for those of us who are victims of bullying and harassment.

OK, that’s the end of part 1. In part 2 (posted here) I will explain why I selected that particular individual to report and I’ll show some of the abuse he metes out. Bye for now.

Published 17.12.21

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Feminists vs Gender activists – a story of police bias: Part 4

Here is the transcript for the last video in this series. The video can be viewed here. Please share them if you can.

Welcome to the fourth and final part of my account of what happened when I reported a bully to the police. In the first three parts, I explained everything that went into my decision to go down that route. In this part, I show the police reaction, which stands in stark contrast to how they react when men report feminists to the police.

On 14 September 2020, I filed a complaint online about the man who had been defaming and abusing me online for three years to Merseyside police, without any expectation that I would hear back from them. I imagined that a couple of months down the line, I would be chasing them up, only to be dismissed. That’s how much confidence I had in the police.

In fact, it didn’t happen quite like that.

I was pleasantly surprised when, a mere 13 days later, I received an email from a woman detective constable telling me she had been “allocated” my report of harassment and asking me when would be convenient for me to give a statement by telephone because of the 200-mile distance.

I’m going to change the names of the police officers I had dealings with for my own protection because I don’t trust the police. So I will call her ‘Jane’ and (Update 2023: I’ve decided to give their real names now because I don’t care any more.) DC Jan McGrath seemed very sympathetic. She clearly didn’t have a clue about the conflict over gender ideology; she didn’t know the meaning of the term ‘TERF’ – apparently she hadn’t undergone the indoctrination provided by the Mermaids charity, which I have blogged about in a blog post entitled: The Thought Police are coming.

We fixed a time for her to take a statement from me the following day and, as arranged, she phoned me and started taking it. This was not the first time I’d given a statement to the police but it was the first time I’d done it over the phone and it was terrible. The line was crackly and obviously I was required to go into minute detail about what this man had been doing but I also needed to explain a lot of the basics about the conflict between us and them.

After a few minutes, realising how hopeless it was, she asked me what I wanted to happen, to which my answer was, “I just want him to stop and I want him to delete all his tweets lying about me”. So we agreed that she would contact him to tell him what I wanted and that if he didn’t comply, I was prepared to testify against him in court, which I absolutely was and I still am.

I also said that – as a gesture of goodwill – I would remove his name from my blog apart from the post about the assault at Speakers’ Corner and the page on which I have the screenshots of the Facebook conversation I referred to in Part 2 of this series of videos. I did that – I removed his name from all the other blog posts and I replaced it with words like “a certain trans activist”.

Eventually, on 3 November 2020, I received an email from DC McGrath saying:

Hi Maria I have made contact with him today and have discussed the situation with him. I have advised him with regards to removing any kind of tweets etc with regards to you. He has agreed that this is the best course of action all round and has agreed to do that.

Can I ask that over the next few days you check to see if this has happened and that you are happy with this course of action. If you could email me in the next week to let me know and I can close the case. Also as you have mentioned could I ask that you make sure that you have removed any mention of him on any of your social media please.

Hope fully when all this has done this will be the end of all your concerns with regards to him.

Kind regards

How wrong she was!

Of course, I went straight to Twitter to check and this is what I saw:

I just had a lovely little chat with a police officer, quite bemused that Maria Machlachlan decided that with everything going on, with resources stretched with DV & kids and all the increased harm stats during covid…she demanded something be deleted off the internet.

I’ve still no idea what it is, none of us have….. but she claims to have finally deleted blog posts about me.

Which she hasn’t.

So we’ve agreed Maria can present her list of demands, and I’ll present mine.

Which also saves me the bother of contacting the police myself. So all in all, a productive and welcome intervention….

Hopefully Maria can now reflect on her behaviour, and she can delete some of the relentless abuse of me, instead of wasting police resources making malicious claims against me.

DARVO Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender – a manipulation strategy commonly used by psychological abusers.

This individual has never once posted evidence of me abusing him in any way because no such evidence exists. When I have referred to him at all, it is over something he has said or done and I have provided receipts – he has no receipts. By the way, although I had mentioned him in several blog posts exposing his hateful comments I have never written a post specifically about him and only him and I did not give any undertaking to delete any entire blog posts – just to remove his name from all but the one of them, which I did.

So of course I immediately emailed DC McGrath and told her what he had tweeted. She responded:

Hi Maria, Thanks for letting me know.

I have just tried to contact him but no answer!! I have sent a text asking for contact asap to discuss this.

Will let you know how I get on.

Regards

I didn’t hear from DC McGrath again. A couple of days later I looked at the bully’s Twitter and saw that he had posted several tweets about me. Here are a few of them:

It wasn’t, of course, fair comment or in good faith – it was a total invention, which deliberately omitted the crucial part of my first assailant – Tara Wolf – running at me and swiping my camera. He retweeted it numerous times, that narrative – all 25 stills of it – knowing it wasn’t true. Here is another:

Another falsehood. My website is not hosted in Iceland and there is nothing on it that is illegal or against mainstream ISP terms and conditions. This is a ridiculous allegation and anyone who believes it is a moron.

Translation: “Contrary to what I had told the officer I would do, I immediately went onto Twitter and totally misrepresented our conversation. I got caught out so of course I had to delete my tweets.”

So we have the entitled white male bully who thinks he can colonise womanhood, analogising feminist resistance with racism and turning those he is oppressing into oppressors. I did not, of course, make the press arguing with trans people. I made the press because I was assaulted by three of them and nor did I demand that the police intimidate a trans person on my behalf. I complained about a relentless hate campaign being waged against me by this man and I did so in the knowledge that much milder harassment of a trans-identifying man by a feminist had resulted in her conviction.

Of course, when you have no moral compass and have been lying without care for the hurt and harm those lies may cause to another person’s life, then you won’t see that you’ve done anything wrong. But as he has made abundantly clear, he doesn’t even think that we are human so the effects of his actions won’t impinge on his conscience at all. That is trans activism.

So now he is accusing me of abusing his community – not to mention the supposedly relentless abuse of him. Receipts? There are none. Receipts of his abuse of me and my community. Too many to count.

Days went past and I chased DC McGrath up. I got no response. I was admitted to hospital for an emergency appendectomy, which was OK but didn’t help with how I was feeling. I also had other things going on caused by this cult that was having a profound and negative impact on me. Only after my husband, who was extremely concerned about me, emailed DC McGrath did I finally receive a response on 18 November:

Maria,

Oh, so we’ve dropped the friendly “Hi Maria”. Now it’s like the headmistress talking down to the child. She tells me that her supervisor has reviewed the complaint and that:

Social media platforms are generally run by companies outside of the UK who do not have to provide any information to police unless the matter is terrorism-related.  Requests for details of persons posting on these sites are therefore inherently difficult and on most occasions impossible.  The comments made are not of a threatening or criminal nature and due to them being on a public social media platform cannot constitute harassment.

Have you got that everyone? Someone can repeatedly tweet whatever vicious falsehoods they like about you, they can tweet hundreds of times over several years but that’s not harassment. Tell that to the Hertfordshire police who locked Kate Scottow up, the Scottish police, the Northern Irish police because they seem to see things differently.

She continues,

If he had been contacting you directly via text message, email, phone or letter then this may constitute harassment if there were no reciprocal contact.  In these type of instances reported to Merseyside Police our advice would always be to completely remove yourself from all social media platforms. Regards.

Given that she already had all his details and had contacted him and had spoken with him, this response was extraordinary. It was like she’d been brainwashed and had forgotten everything I’d said or written to her, like she’d forgotten she’d already contacted the offender in this case and that he’d agreed to delete his tweets and then lied about their conversation on social media. It was just incredible.

I responded to that effect and, as for the total nonsense about their “not being harassment due to being on a public social media platform”, I copied and pasted text from the relevant legislation ­ s.127 of the Communications Act 2003, which refers to the ‘improper use of public electronic communications network’ and I pointed out that social media platforms are not exempt from its provisions. And to say that publicly posting hundreds of defamatory comments deliberately inciting hatred of me and causing needless anxiety and depression over a period over three years “cannot constitute harassment” is ridiculous and is disproven by the case earlier that year when Kate Scottow was convicted under the same legislation for doing a tiny fraction of what my tormentor had been doing to me. 16 tweets, only seven of which offended the complainant! She got convicted, which at that time meant she had to abandon her career hopes for posting a small number of mildly derogatory tweets ­ none of which deliberately lied about her target, called him a ‘Nazi’, an anti-Semite, a lesbophobe or an obsessed stalker or anything remotely to what the bully had called me.

And, finally, I said that I was appalled that the advice of Merseyside Police should be that victims of abuse and defamation should just give in to bullies’ attempts to silence them, while the perpetrators are free to continue their abuse, especially at a time – meaning lockdown  – when, for many of us, social media is a major source of social contact.

And I asked that her supervisor contact me directly.

Later that day, I heard from DC McGrath’s supervisor, a detective sergeant who I will call ‘Bill’. Again, not his real name, DS Mike Astbury. Onmy website, I provide screenshots of the whole of the correspondence I had with the two most important emails I received from Astbury. All I’m going to do here is give a timeline and a summary of what was said in our exchange.

So on 18th November 2020 I received the first email from him, from which it was clear that he did not take the matter seriously, he had not properly read the full crime report that I had submitted in the first place and he gave the very strong impression that he was looking for an excuse to dismiss it. He did say that if I had any evidence to support my allegation of a crime, to forward it directly to him.

On 24th November 2020. I sent my response to DS Astbury’s’s email to me in which I expressed my dismay that he had “misunderstood” my original crime report and pointing out that, as a result of my reporting and DC McGrath contacting him, the bully was now posting more crap about me. So, in fact, reporting to the police had left me in a worse position than before.

I also said that I was attaching two documents – one of which showed about 100 of the bully’s tweets about me. I asked him to let me know if he had any problem accessing it because it was large. (These tweets are now viewable in pdfs here and here).

And I reminded him of what I said about Kate Scottow. How can you have a situation where police in a different part of England will arrest a woman and for her to end up with a conviction for doing a couple of handfuls of tweets under the same legislation as Bill saying that for the much greater offence committed against me there was no case to answer?

On 1st December I emailed him again asking if he could at least acknowledge receipt of that email I had sent him a week earlier.

On 8th December I emailed him again saying it had now been fourteen days since I’d emailed him could he please at least acknowledge receipt.

I know the police are busy and I’m tempted to add a facetious comment about how much time all that celebrating diversity must take but I won’t. But simply acknowledging receipt takes next to no time and I just found it incredibly rude that he couldn’t even be arsed to do that.

The next day 9th December 2020 I finally received an email from Bill saying he acknowledged receipt and had been unable to view the documents!

I responded very quickly saying I had turned the documents into pdf files and I was sending two emails attaching one document to each. I asked him to let me know by return whether he had received the documents and could view them and that if he wasn’t prepared to assist ­and I was absolutely sure by this time that he wasn’t ­then could he provide a full explanation?

I got a reply very quickly saying he’d received the emails and that his rationale sent on 18th November 2020 still stands.

The police will not investigate this matter any further.

That rationale had been that we must prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the annoyance was caused by sending “a message that he knows to be false”. Like this one for example:

Like 300 others.

I had provided an abundance of evidence that the bully was tweeting stuff about me he knew to be false. It was obvious that Astbury had not read this evidence. In the time it took to get back to me, he would barely have had time to even skim it. I don’t believe that he even glanced at it. He had already made up his mind that he wasn’t going to spend time on the complaint of some woman being bullied by a trans-identifying man and I absolutely believe that had it been the other way round – if the complainant had been a trans person complaining of defamatory tweets by a feminist – it would have been a different story. Why wouldn’t I think that, given the other cases that I have talked about where exactly that has happened?

Now, I really didn’t know what I could do. I just could not see how it could be possible that Kate Scottow could be convicted for a much lesser offence than my bully, who doesn’t even get interviewed under caution. I was still in the process of considering my options when something wonderful happened. The very next day after getting my knock-back, Kate Scottow’s conviction was quashed on appeal. I hadn’t even known it was being heard at that time. My heart lifted – I was so happy both for Kate and for the fact that what I still perceive as an injustice against me was sort of less of an injustice without Kate’s case to compare it with.

I still believe that my bully’s repeated harassment of me is in breach of that particular piece of legislation and that Merseyside police – or at least that one particular Detective Sergeant Mike Astbury – failed in his duty. It should have been up to the Crown Prosecution Service to decide whether there was a case to answer – not that one prejudiced and ignorant police officer.

The police are not on the side of those being bullied by gender fanatics. They don’t want to know about that ­yet they will treat women like Kate and Kellie-Jay and Marion Millar and Ceri Black like criminals for nothing.

As I’ve said before the British police are the trans cult’s goon squad.

Having said that, I would urge anyone being bullied in this way to report it to the police and when they dismiss it, publicise it. Complain about it. Expose their failure to do their duty, expose their bias, expose their contempt for women because otherwise, nothing will change.

The bullies will keep on abusing and defaming us with impunity. Never forget that the reason they do this is that they know they can get away with it, whereas what they can’t do is defeat us using reason and evidence and humanity. Mostly they don’t even try. My bully has never once engaged with any argument I’ve made on my YouTube channel – all he ever does is lie and express hate for anyone brave enough to speak up against gender ideology and against bullies like him and I’ve no doubt the approval he gets from other cultists gives him a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.

Poor man.

That is all.

 

Published 17.12.21 Updated 11/12/23

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Labour MP compares opposing gender ideology to apartheid

For the first time in the short history of my Youtube channel, I will be putting a transcript of this video on my blog. If you’re reading and would prefer to watch me saying this stuff (recommended), click here for the video. Even if you prefer reading to watching, the more subscribers on Youtube I get, the more Youtube promotes my videos so please consider subscribing to help me reach new people. 

It is the week of the annual Labour Party conference and Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has started it in memorable fashion, responding to Andrew Marr in a TV interview today:

This exchange was preceded and succeeded by Keir Starmer babbling about the trans community being the most marginalised and abused. This is one of those go-to phrases that are used nowadays to divert attention from the fact that you’ve just said something so absurd, so appalling and so revealing about your utter contempt for women, which has become a hallmark of the Labour Party.

Let us remind ourselves how three years ago in Liverpool the woman definition billboard designed and paid for by Kellie-Jay and put up near that year’s Labour conference venue got taken down after complaints that the truth might cause some men to get all hurty feels.

And let’s remember how two years ago gender activists – including Labour Party members – behaved outside a feminist meeting that was held in Brighton during the week that the Labour Party was holding its conference there. It was an unofficial fringe meeting held by Women’s Place UK, a campaigning group that involves many Labour Party members, trade unionists, women from the same socialist feminist tradition that I come from myself.

Dozens of protesters stood outside the venue, taunting, abusing, screaming and throwing water at people going in, many of whom were old enough to be their mothers and grandmothers and had spent their adult lives fighting for women’s rights. The aim of these pseudo-fascist thugs was to try to intimidate those attending and they succeeded to some extent because some women were too scared to go in. Those that did  – over 100 of them – had to endure shouting and banging on the windows of the venue for over three hours. The police stood around outside just allowing it to happen.

Watch Julie Bindel reporting.

It was the worst behaviour I’d seen so far from the gender nutters in this country but many Labour Party members publicly applauded this behaviour. I only saw one Labour MP publicly condemn it and I knew then I wouldn’t be voting Labour again in the foreseeable future – unless my local MP proved to have the courage and integrity to take a stand against the misogyny of what appeared to be most of his party.

He didn’t.

Every major political party has sold women out on the issue of women’s rights compared to men’s rights to adjudicate on what it means to be a woman but the biggest betrayal comes from the Labour Party, supposedly the natural home of the genuinely progressive left. There is nothing progressive about giving men the right to claim to be women. It is an anti-woman policy.

Now, two years after that, a woman MP, Rosie Duffield, who does have the courage and integrity to stand with women, who dares to recognise the importance to women’s safety and dignity of single-sex spaces, who dares to speak up against the indignity of being reduced to our body parts and who had the temerity to say that only a woman has a cervix, won’t dare to attend her own party conference because of the sheer hatred and the threats from the same kind of misogynist scum that intimidated and abused feminists and allies at that meeting two years ago. She doesn’t feel comfortable because of the woman-hating thugs of the regressive left, some of whom evidently find the Labour Party to be their natural home these days.

Now, there’s something I’ve been wanting to say about my local Labour MP for some time. Now seems a good time to do it.

A couple of months after those awful scenes in Brighton and in the run-up to the General Election held in December 2019, my husband, Alan, contacted our MP, Barry Gardiner, about a couple of issues of concern, including how women’s rights and protections would be affected by proposed so-called “reform” of the Gender Recognition Act in favour of gender self-id.

He finally received a reply at the end of July the following year – eight whole months later! The reply is viewable here. Here is one sentence:

Delays in reforming the GRA have created a hostile environment for LGBT+ people and I am committed to protecting the rights of the trans community who often suffer some of the worst violence and hate crime.

A hostile environment?

He has no clue what it has been like having to endure the gender extremists’ lies and the mockery and the hatred and the gaslighting and the harassment and the bullying; the attempts to silence and intimidate people who disagree and get them fired from their jobs – including even trans people – regardless of the fact that they have themselves and their families to support.  People who consider themselves to be on the political left do this.

Some of the worst violence? Indeed they do – as do men and women who are not part of the trans community. Murdering a woman because she’s a woman isn’t even called a “hate crime” – not even if she was murdered by a partner or ex-partner who hated her, which accounts for 62% of all cases of femicide in the UK. But that is just run of the mill. Not a “hate crime”.

That passage was typically vague unevidenced politician-speak. It came as no surprise to us to discover that Alan was not the only constituent to receive the exact same response to concerns raised on the same topic. In light of what had been happening to women expressing those same concerns both online and at real-life meetings around the country and most recently at Brighton and involving his own party’s members, this was an unbelievably crass response.

His whole email had no redeeming features but the inclusion of one paragraph served to make me angrier than had any email or letter I’ve ever received before. This is the paragraph:

Every identity has its gatekeepers: those who determine who does and who does not belong. I am old enough to remember the human suffering caused by the race classification boards in apartheid South Africa. Gender identity too has its gatekeepers.

Yes. He really did that. He used the analogy of the race classification boards in South Africa for those of us who refuse to go along with a lie and accept as women –  just because they want us to – those members of the sex class that has historically oppressed women. In other words, men.

I too am old enough to remember the human suffering caused by apartheid in South Africa. In fact, learning about apartheid as a schoolgirl during the heavily-protested Springboks rugby tour of Britain in 1969-70 profoundly impacted the development of my political sympathies and steered me resolutely and extremely leftwards.

Learning that there was a country whose people had been dispossessed, exploited and abused by European colonists over the centuries and which had – only a couple of decades earlier – instituted a system of racial segregation based on white supremacy, blew my mind. Seeing footage of the conditions Africans were forced to live under in their own country by their white colonising self-appointed rulers, broke my heart.

I vividly remember my feelings of helplessness at the time of the Soweto uprising in 1976 when so many Africans were killed. I wanted so much to do something. I did the only thing I could think of: I joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement, I gave it what little financial support I could afford and I worked as an admin volunteer on some campaigns for both the AAM and the then outlawed African National Congress.

Some words from a one-time president of the ANC, Albert Luthuli:

I would like to tell you what Apartheid really means to us. It means that instead of our children being educated, they are indoctrinated. It means that our men cannot move from country to town and from one part of town to another without a Pass. Now our women too will be unable to leave their houses without a Pass. It means that 70 per cent of my people live below the breadline. It means that in my own province of Natal, 85 per cent of our children are suffering from malnutrition. Believe it or not, it means that by law, it means that our people cannot aspire to do any work other than ordinary manual labour. It means massive unemployment. What Apartheid means is a long tale of suffering. In a word, it means the denial of dignity and ordinary human rights.

Now, bearing in mind what Barry Gardiner said, “Every identity has its gatekeepers: those who determine who does and who does not belong,” can anyone tell me what the brutal oppression of the majority of the population of South Africa by the minority rulers of European heritage, has to do with “identity”. I mean, those people were not oppressed because of how they identified. They didn’t have any choice. They were oppressed because of what they were – Africans ranked at the bottom of the four-tier racial classification system in their native country.

Right, let’s talk about “gender identity”.

Barry Gardiner doesn’t define it but this definition from the Office for National Statistics is concise and I doubt Barry Gardiner can do any better:

Gender identity is a personal internal perception of oneself and, as such, the gender category with which a person identifies may not match the sex they were registered at birth. In contrast, sex is biologically determined.

In other words, it’s a feeling. A feeling that your personality, your tastes, your natural inclinations either fit the stereotypes that are culturally imposed on the basis of whether you are male or female or they don’t. Or they do some of the time, but not others. Or you feel that some of the expectations of one sex fit you and some of those of the other sex do. That probably goes for most of us actually, but we don’t all feel the need to deny our sex and to pin some fashionable but ultimately meaningless label on ourselves.

Gender identity is regressive nonsense!

We are now at a stage when you don’t even have to try to look like the opposite sex, you don’t have to have any medical interventions at all to be accepted by the wokeists as what you say you are – and that is the inevitable result of widespread institutional and policy capture by gender identity ideology. If you feel like a woman, by God, you are a woman! Womanhood is reduced to a feeling – that is what the Labour Party wants enshrined in law.

What was the point of all those struggles, all those campaigns to liberate women if we were just going to end up with the absolute madness of legislating that people should be accepted as the other sex – and pretending that it’s about gender identity?   The absolute madness of asserting it is wrong to say only women can have a cervix? The madness of comparing resistance to a misogynistic ideology that is erasing women as a sex class to policing people’s ethnicity and wanting to establish white supremacy?

It’s not about gender identity, it is about men’s sexual rights, it’s about mental health and it’s about young women wanting to escape the horrors of womanhood.

Like the victims of apartheid, women are not oppressed because of our identity, we are oppressed because of what we are – in our case female.

That is all.

 

Published 26.09.21

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“Is this the Scotland you want for your children?”

Last night police were called to the Doctors bar in Edinburgh. Five officers turned up and ejected a group of about a dozen women who’d been quietly sitting eating, drinking and enjoying each other’s company.

Apparently one of the women had been wearing a T-shirt proclaiming that “women won’t wheesht”, which naturally offended the woman-hating member of the bar staff, who is a self-confessed porn-addicted autogynephile.

You may be getting a sense of déjà vu here. It isn’t the first time people have been offended by T-shirts bearing anodyne slogans worn by women who have been victimised as a result.  First, there was Rebecca Wershbale then the National Theatre debacle. In the latter, the group who were discriminated against initiated legal action. One member of the group eventually posted that the action was discontinued after “constructive conversations” with the theatre.

But that was in England.

Scotland is a place where a woman can be arrested and charged for tweets that are so innocuous they don’t even break Twitter’s draconian anti-women rules under which countless women – including me and some of our male allies – have been permanently banned, while the accounts of hateful, abusive bullies are allowed to remain. Last week I had the pleasure of meeting the woman in question – Marion Millar – and many others who had gathered in Glasgow to support her on the day her plea hearing was supposed to take place, having already been rescheduled from a month earlier. A few days before the rescheduled date, the hearing was postponed again but those of us who decided to go anyway had a wonderful day. Continue reading

Peter Tatchell doesn’t “understand what the fuss is about”

In deciding on the title for this post, I was spoilt for choice of goofy quotes delivered by Peter Tatchell on Talk Radio a couple of nights ago, during his discussion with Kellie-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker. In the end, I plumped for the above extraordinary and revealing admission from Tatchell because it highlights the question his appearance on the show must surely have raised in many minds:

Why on earth was this bloke invited to speak about “trans rights”?

When Kellie-Jay observed that they “couldn’t find a member of the trans community to speak this evening” and rather sweetly expressed her gratitude to Peter for agreeing to do so, she earned a swift rebuke from the show’s host, Kevin O’Sullivan:

That’s not a fair thing to say, we thought long and hard how to do this.

All the more surprising then that Tatchell was invited instead of a trans-identifying person who could at least speak for him or herself, if not for all trans people.

Continue reading

Antifa and allies need to cease harassing feminists by Helen Steel

Many thanks to Helen for these words, which originally appeared as a post on Facebook.

I was horrified last night watching the footage of ‘antifa’ attacking people who had attended an advertised protest outside Wi Spa in Los Angeles after women complained of a man exposing his penis in the women’s area of the facilities.

When antifa and other anti-fascist groups started, they were about defending communities from racist and fascist violence and attacks. It is sometimes necessary and reasonable to use violence to defend yourself or others from physical attack. In the 70’s-90’s fascists were graffitiing and firebombing the homes of black people, firebombing left-wing and anarchist bookshops, physically attacking black people in the street, attacking trade unionists and anti-racists, gay-bashing and so on. The police did nothing to stop those attacks and in fact regularly colluded with the racists/fascists. In those circumstances there was little alternative but for people to join together to fight back in order to stop fascists attacking people, so groups like antifa were created. At the end of the 90’s a fascist detonated bombs in Brixton, Brick Lane and a gay pub in Soho, maiming and killing people. By what measure are some on the left falsely comparing women fighting against sexism with racists and fascists? There are no feminist dictators, there is no campaign of violence and intimidation by women.

Continue reading

American “Humanists” cancel Richard Dawkins over their Gender Delusion

This morning I woke to the news that the organisation laughingly known as the American Humanist Association (AHA) has withdrawn the ‘Humanist of the Year Award’ given to Richard Dawkins in…wait for it…1996!

Here’s the backstory: Ten days ago, Richard Dawkins tweeted this.

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.

I wasn’t irked by this comment as some were – including many on our side of the biggest cultural conflict of our time. We expect high-profile scientists to stand up for science against an ideology based on post-modernist pseudoscientific claptrap but we expect them to do so sooner rather than later. We have been disgusted by those – such as Alice Roberts, current President of Humanists UK – who’ve sold out and we’ve been dismayed by the silence of others, including Dawkins. Some responded irately on the belatedness of his intervention while others saw the framing of his comment as cowardly fence-sitting.

Continue reading

If Sarah’s killer is trans, will Sisters Uncut support him?

If the man – assuming it is a man – who murdered Sarah Everard identifies as a woman, will they mobilise in support of him…sorry, ‘her’ when ‘she’ stands trial?

Will they defame and abuse the real feminists, the ones who understand that the oppression of women by men is rooted in biological reality, the ones who support all female victims of male violence, regardless of what the perpetrators claim to be?

Will they accuse us of targeting, harassing and doxing the poor trans ‘woman’ whose behaviour, in spite of his having that mystical essence that entitles him to claim womanhood as his own, bears an uncanny resemblance to that of a vicious woman-hating thug?

Continue reading

Nasty bullies strike again

Ruth Pearce

I owe a debt of gratitude to Prof Alice Sullivan for raising awareness that one of the people invited to give evidence to the Women and Equalities Commons Select Committee, as part of their Inquiry into proposed reforms of the Gender Recognition Act, is one Ruth Pearce who, the day after I was assaulted by three male trans activists, tweeted this.

I was aware of this tweet at the time and included it in my original account of the assault.

(Note that the intended recipient Of Pearce’s tweet was Ada Cable who played no small part in the hate campaign against me.)

When I saw Alice’s tweet I decided to contact the Committee directly to complain about Pearce’s inclusion. Only then did I check Pearce’s Twitter timeline for any more tweets and I was horrified to discover this thread. This tweet in particular stands out.

Continue reading

Guest post: A very ordinary woman leaves Labour #labourlosingwomen

I don’t know when Labour fell headlong down the gender ideology rabbit hole – to my shame, I was all but oblivious to this until about two and a half years ago. What became clear though, was that inexplicably, Labour had fallen in love with a neo-liberal, postmodern, anti-materialist ideology that was antithetical to Socialism. I thought Corbyn would see through this nonsense. Not a chance. Introducing himself with ‘pronouns’ prior to the last general election was … well … surprising. As well as stating the bleeding obvious – we all know you’re a bloke mate!

The manifesto offered a glimmer of hope – although how on earth they thought they could deliver their promise to reform the ‘Gender’ Recognition Act AND defend women’s rights under the Equality Act 2010 was baffling. Nevertheless, we breathed a sigh of relief. There was some recognition that sex – and women as a sex class – actually existed. Like good Socialists should, they acknowledged material reality.

A leadership contest predictably followed the election in December 2019. Most of the leadership and deputy candidates enthusiastically endorsed a ‘trans’ pledge solemnly declaring witches should be burned at the stake.  Starmer did not sign – and so again there was a glimmer of hope. Continue reading

Cancelled cartoonist has produced a book: 2020, the year we were all cancelled!

“We are not deliberately creating ‘hateful’ images, but making legitimate points about important issues in the news, to show different angles, and initiate discussion.”

Stella Perrett

Earlier this year I wrote a blog post about how the Morning Star newspaper had caved in to pressure from its trade union paymasters and apologised for a cartoon entitled ‘Endgame’, which had appeared in its print edition. I didn’t realise at the time that the paper had, as a result of the debacle, dispensed altogether with the services of the cartoon’s creator, Stella Perrett, who’d been contributing cartoons for free since 2015. Here’s a reminder of the cartoon, which is no less pertinent now than it has ever been.

Continue reading

I’m in the mood for ranting…

Paul Ilett describes himself as a “best-selling author”. If you find that interesting, I’ll leave you to check out the novel he once wrote.

A couple of nights ago, he took it upon himself to conduct what he later described as “an interesting experiment”. This involved posting an absurd and unsupportable statement, which he undoubtedly knew would anger and offend countless women and some men.

His challenge to anyone thus offended, however, was not that they should explain why they felt as they did nor that they should attempt to engage him in a civil exchange of views in the hope of developing greater mutual understanding. Instead, he asked anyone who disagreed to ‘simply block’ him.

Many of those who are active on social media will be familiar with seeing the assertion that ‘transwomen are women’ followed by a wearisome demonstration on the part of the poster of their total inability to offer anything remotely resembling a coherent substantiation.

Almost invariably, anyone who invites an explanation of how someone born male can be a woman will be blocked, usually well before they’ve subjected the poster to anything that could be described as abuse.

Continue reading

Remembering Magdalen Berns, one year on

Magdalen created by Prints by Wright. Click on the pic to visit their Instagram page.

A year ago today, on hearing of Magdalen’s death, I wrote and posted a personal tribute to her. Soon afterwards, I was honoured to be invited to her funeral by her mother, Deborah Lavin who, sadly, was to survive Magdalen – the youngest of her three children –  by just nine months.

At Magdalen’s funeral, I met some of those close to her and heard so much more about her than she’d ever revealed by either her online persona or her presence at the occasional meeting and in the pub afterwards. On this first anniversary of her death, I’d like to share some more reflections of her.

Magdalen had a genuine willingness to listen to the argument, to be fair, not to misrepresent. She never once twisted an argument, misrepresented something, pretended someone meant something they clearly didn’t – was never disingenuous or dishonest in her arguments, would genuinely try and get the truth.

Continue reading

Bullies use false anti-Semitism allegations to whip up hatred against women

The dictionary provides us with a concise definition of anti-Semitism as ‘hostility and prejudice against Jews’. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – an inter-governmental organisation set up some years ago to focus on issues related to the Jewish holocaust – provides a comprehensive list of examples. The mention of George Soros’ name and objecting to any of his political and philanthropic activities doesn’t feature in that list of examples.

Yet opposition to some things that George Soros does is reason enough for a swathe of trans activists to accuse women they hate of bigotry and anti-Semitism.

Caroline Farrow

Catholic journalist and commentator, Caroline Farrow – about whom I have written one post already, on the occasion of her being sued by the notorious transgender litigant, Stephanie Hayden – is the latest to be defamed in this manner.

Her accuser is none other than the repugnant and obsessed James Billingham, about whom I have also blogged previously. In this instance, Billingham uses his sock-puppet, @TheOnlySprout, to tweet a screenshot of a Facebook post by Caroline promoting a CitizenGo petition, which was launched after an article written by Soros himself in the New York Times: Mark Zuckerberg Should Not Be in Control of Facebook.

Continue reading

Oops! I’ve offended the trans cult again

Yesterday I posted a new video in my series about awful arguments by trans activists. This one is entitled, ‘It’s all your fault’ and it’s about the extraordinary phenomenon of trans cultists blaming feminists and others who oppose transgender ideology for the fact that sometimes gender non-conforming women get mistaken for men and the mental gymnastics involved in attributing this mundane fact of life to ‘transphobia’. Everything I say in the video is my opinion which, in the absence of any serious challenge, I stand by.

Continue reading

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