Protected groups and the police

Helen Joyce at The Critic recounts her experience of being secretly logged as a criminal by the police at the behest of trans activists, who are seen as members of a "protected group". It's the same mechanism, and reputedly the same trans activist (Lynsay Watson), which resulted in the ludicrous arrest of Graham Linehan at Heathrow.

Her conclusion:

Trans lobby groups such as Stonewall have partnered with almost every force in the country and despite not being the law, gender self-identification is firmly embedded in police practice. Officers have been trained that calling a man a man, if he says he’s a woman, is “anti-transgender hate”. When the culprit is someone like me who believes that to the contrary, it’s essential in order to protect women’s rights, claims of “significant harm” are believed and repeat offences are not guaranteed.

The reason Watson was taken seriously and I wasn’t is because he insists men who say they’re women are women and I say the truth, which is that they’re not. The disparity is by design: a feature of the law, not a bug.

This can’t be fixed by abolishing non-crime hate incidents and applying “common sense”. It requires radical change in the culture of policing. No more partnerships with lobby groups, no more flags and badges, no more marking Pride Month, Transgender Day of Remembrance and the rest of the identitarian calendar. On trans issues it will take a deradicalisation programme, with officers retrained to understand that self-ID is not the law and factual statements about the two sexes aren’t hateful.

More fundamentally, “protected groups” have got to go. They’re unnecessary, and there’s no evidence they’re effective. There’s no need for them, either: offences against women and children are policed not by giving them special group status but by creating dedicated strategies and specialist teams.

Above all, creating special categories of people who can instruct the police to credulously record their claims about others offends against two fundamental principles: that we are all innocent until proven guilty, and equal before the law.