UK Judge Compares Police To Gestapo Over Probe Into ‘Transphobic’ Tweets
“We need to check your thinking,” police reportedly told 54-year-old defendant.
The London High Court has ruled a police investigation into allegedly “transphobic” tweets unlawful. The presiding judge, Justice Julian Knowles, likened the police methods used in the case to that of the Soviet secret police Cheka and the Nazi Gestapo. The police action amounted to a “disproportionate interference” with the freedom of speech, the court found on Friday.
Harry Miller, himself a former police officer and now a businessman, was reportedly harassed by the police at his workplace for poking fun at the notion of self-assigning one’s gender. “We need to check your thinking,” one of the officers told the 54-year-old defendant when they showed up at his workplace, Daily Telegraph reported. The local police also approached the directors of his company in an apparent attempt to intimidate him.
“I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don’t mis-species me,” Miller had written in one of his seemingly harmless tweets. He was also charged with ‘hate incident’ for retweeting a poem deemed offensive to transgenders.
Police Constable Mansoor Gul admitted ‘educating’ Miller on the transgender issue. “What you need to understand is that you can have a fetus with a female brain that grows male body parts and that’s what a transgender person is,” he reportedly told Miller.
The UK newspaper Guardian reported the Friday’s ruling:
Police officers unlawfully interfered with a man’s right to freedom of expression by turning up at his place of work to speak to him about allegedly “transphobic” tweets, the high court has ruled.
Harry Miller, a former police officer who founded the campaign group Fair Cop, said the actions of Humberside police had a “substantial chilling effect” on his right to free speech.
Miller, 54, from Lincolnshire, said an officer told him he had not committed a crime, but that his tweeting was being recorded as a “hate incident”.
In a strongly-worded judgement, Mr Justice Julian Knowles said the effect of police turning up at Miller’s place of work “because of his political opinions must not be underestimated”.
He said: “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society,” he said.
The judgement came as a disappointment to ‘trans rights’ activists who were hoping for a tough ruling against Miller. Helen Belcher, co-founder of Trans Media Watch, accused the judge of not understanding transgenderism. “I think it will reinforce an opinion that courts don’t understand trans lives and aren’t there to protect trans people,” Belcher said.
“It is a strong warning to local police forces not to interfere with people’s free speech rights on matters of significant controversy,” Miller’s layer said following the ruling.
In his tweets, Miller was responding to the proposed rewriting of the UK’s Gender Recognition Act of 2004, his lawyer said. The government is proposing to lower the age of legally changing one’s gender from 18 to 16. The revised law also reportedly wants to do away with the medical examinations currently required for a legal sex change.
The “self-declaratory model,” as proposed by the UK government, poses the grave threat to women, Scotland’s oldest Catholic newspaper, Scottish Catholic Observer, argued recently. “The dangers posed to women are highlighted by the case of Karen White, a biological male and convicted rapist who, following his incarceration, self-identified as female and applied to be moved to a women’s prison. White’s application was successful. He would later sexually assault a number of inmates at the prison,” the newspaper commented, referring to the case of the notorious 52-year-old British transgender inmate.
Despite the judge dismissing the case against Miller, saying, “The claimant’s tweets were lawful and there was not the slightest risk that he would commit a criminal offence by continuing to tweet,” he may not be returning to Twitter anytime soon. Miller’s account still remains suspended for violating Twitter’s rules.
UK: Black street preacher arrested for ‘Islamophobia’ (March 2019)
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Comments
Good for the judge. It’s time to make Orwell fiction again.
Oh, we understand “transgenderism” perfectly. You just don’t like when, in light of that understanding, we come to the eminently reasonable conclusion that it’s a bunch of looney.
How did we ever come to this? Transgenderism is possibly the most unpopular point of view ever foisted on the general population. Who exactly is funding and organizing this mental disorder? The “greys” who have, according to the ancient astronaut theorists, taken over our planet and secretly run our government? Or maybe the reptilians? This alien idea certainly did not originate from earthlings.
A Coastie! Is there some parasite that selects the weak-willed (Dem voters) to infect with progressivism? Need to ask George Noory… alas I miss Ian Punnett.
Yes, yes there is.
How did it come to this? We elected a COMPLETE freak as president, that’s how.
— and for TWO TERMS!
Some of us see not being on twitter as a reward and not a punishment. I was recently banned on a subreddit for being a smidge too “truthy” and I have enjoyed the extra free time immensely.
It is funny in that I have a Twitter account in my name that I very rarely use. Instead, I use aliases, which are routinely banned. Virtually any deviation from political correctness results in being banned. Meanwhile, Twitter is constantly badgering me to use the account with my real name.
I ignore them.
Social media platforms are dictatorships, being such they never listen to criticism, and do their best to create the impression that they have more support than is the case, by deleting all non PC opinions.
The modern, technological world is Too Much with us……….
Sex: male and female. Gender: masculine and feminine, respectively, sex-correlated physical and mental (e.g. sexual orientation) attributes. Transgender: state or process of divergence from normal gender distribution. Transgender spectrum (“Rainbow”) from homosexual to neosexual.
Why do I think about the old TV series Twilight Zone when I read about this?
The idea that there is such a thing as a “female brain” that manifests in such ways as a desire to wear dresses and make-up flies in the face of everything feminists have been preaching for 50 years.
Yes, but those feminists were wrong. It’s pretty obvious that there is indeed such a thing as a “female brain” and a “male brain”, and that there is a spectrum on which these lie, so that there are women with brains that are relatively masculine and men with brains that are relatively feminine. (The overwhelming majority of these are nevertheless satisfied with their bodies; while they might idly wish they were born the opposite sex they don’t imagine that they were.)
UK U-tuber Jeff Taylor has a good summary of this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4uVrveftys
The UK thought police are acting 100% like Nazi and Communists.
Remember everything the Nazi and Communists have done in the last was “legal” because the passed the evil laws that legalized their actions first. Think long and hard about that.
“Police Constable Monsoor Gul”. Need we say more?
Transgenderism: mental illness. Sue me.