February 6, 2019 (The Bridgehead) — Remember that incident a couple of weeks ago, when the police contacted a docker from Humberside about his decision to tweet a limerick highlighting the ludicrousness of transgender ideology? Well, it turns out that the British cops are planning to make a habit of this sort of thing. From the Spectator:
Margaret Nelson is a 74-year-old woman who lives in a village in Suffolk. On Monday morning she was woken by a telephone call. It was an officer from Suffolk police. The officer wanted to speak to Mrs Nelson about her Twitter account and her blog.
Mrs Nelson, a former humanist celebrant and one-time local newspaper journalist, enjoys tweeting and writing about a number of issues, including the legal and social distinctions between sex and gender.
Among the statements she made on Twitter last month and which apparently concerned that police officer: 'Gender is BS. Pass it on'.
Another:
'Gender's fashionable nonsense. Sex is real. I've no reason to feel ashamed of stating the truth. The bloody annoying ones are those who use words like 'cis' or 'terf' and other BS, and relegate biological women to a 'subset'. Sorry you believe the mythology.'
The blog, meanwhile, is mainly about death and funeral rituals: Mrs Nelson has officiated at many funerals. One of her blog posts, on 19 January 2018, challenges the statement that 'transwomen are women' on the grounds that a person's proclaimed gender does not change their biological sex.
Mrs Nelson wrote:
'If a transgender person's body was dissected, either for medical education or a post-mortem examination, his or her sex would also be obvious to a student or pathologist. Not the sex that he or she chose to present as, but his or her natal sex; the sex that he or she was born with. Even when a body has been buried for a very long time, so that there is no soft tissue left, only bone, it is still possible to identify the sex. DNA and characteristics such as the shape of the pelvis will be clear proof of the sex of the corpse.'
Mrs Nelson told me this about the call from the police:
'The officer said she wanted to talk to me about some of the things I'd written on Twitter and my blog. She said that some of the things that I'd written could have upset or offended transgender people. So could I please stop writing things like that and perhaps I could remove those posts and tweets?'
'I asked the officer if she agreed that free speech was important. She said it was. I said that in that case, she'd understand that I wouldn't be removing the posts or stopping saying the things I think. She accepted that and that was the end of the conversation.'
Mrs Nelson says the that officer made no suggestion that anything she had done was illegal. She says the officer gave no reason for the call.
She later asked the Suffolk force for an explanation, and received, via Twitter, this explanation:
'Hi Margaret, we had a number of people contact us on social media about the comments made online. A follow-up call was made for no other reason than to raise awareness of the complaints. Kind regards, Web Team.'
Shortly after this piece was published, Suffolk Police sent me a statement effectively admitting that they made a mistake by calling Mrs Nelson. A Suffolk Constabulary spokesman said:
“We accept we made a misjudgement in following up a complaint regarding the blog. As a result of this we will be reviewing our procedures for dealing with such matters. We are sorry for any distress we may have caused in the way this issue was dealt with, and have been in contact with the woman who wrote the blog to apologise.”
It's nice that the cops apologized, but how in the world did they think that harassing private citizens for expressing their opinions was a good idea? What possible justification did they think they had for letting an elderly woman know that her opinions on the transgender ideology — which, incidentally, are far more accurate than the dangerous drivel being pumped out by the mainstream media and their ideological puppet masters — were unwelcome? Think about it for a moment: Police officers actually contacted a member of public and asked her to stop tweeting her thoughts and suggested — a word that seems suddenly sinister in this context — that she perhaps might want to remove them.
Trans activists have managed to mainstream their movement in a mere half-decade, and now it appears that even law enforcement have chosen a side. And not only have they chosen a side, but they have even decided to police speech and let people know when their social media activity has attracted the attention of the cops. If that isn't a creepy sign of things to come, I don't know what is.
Published with permission from The Bridgehead.