Mick Hartley

Harry Miller, a former police officer and company director, got a call from Humberside police early last year. They told him that they'd logged a retweet of his as a hate incident, and warned him about "his thinking" – even though it was admitted that no crime had been committed. His retweet was of a poem – well, a bit of doggerel – which addressed a hypothetical trans woman as a man.

James Kirkup wrote about the case at the time – Is it now a crime to like a poem about transgenderism? He quotes Miller's account of what happened:

Spoke to PC from Humberside, introduces himself as representing the LGBTQ community on a report of hate speech by me. They’d found me via my company, had been all over the website & decided if I employed trans people at all, it was not a safe place for them & work should know.

Cop said he was in possession of 30 Tweets by me. I asked if any contained criminal material. He said…. No. I asked if any came close to being criminal… and he read me a limerick. Honestly. A limerick. A cop read me a limerick over the phone.

I said, I didn’t write that. He said, ‘Ah. But you Liked it and promoted it.’ I asked why he was wasting his time on a non crime. He said, ‘It’s not a crime, but it will be recorded as a hate incident.’

So, I’ve added to a statistic, even though there is no crime, which brings me to my next point. The cop repeatedly called the complainant ‘the victim.’ I asked how there could be a victim if, as he’d established, there was no crime. He said, that’s just how it works.

My comment was that by framing the complainant as ‘victim’, this made me, by default, ‘criminal.’ I asked him to desist from using it.

This is where it gets incredibly sinister. The cop told me that he needed to speak with me because, even though I’d committed no crime whatsoever, he needed (and I quote) ‘to check my THINKING!’ Seriously. Honestly.

Finally, he lectured me. Said, ‘Sometimes, a woman’s brain grows a man’s body in the womb and that is what transgender is.’ You can imagine my response…

Lastly, he told me that I needed to watch my words more carefully or I was as risk of being sacked by the company for hate speech.’

There's more at the Fair Cop site.

Miller didn't take this lying down. He's taken legal action against the College of Policing, the professional body for the police service in England and Wales, and against Humberside police. In the meantime he and his family have been threatened with rape and murder.

Kathleen Stock was one of those who submitted a witness statement to the judicial review prompted by Miller's action. Now, in her talk Hate speech and the statements “trans women are men” or “male”, given at the Make More Noise: Hate Crime event, in Manchester this last Saturday, she looks at the background to the Miller case and in particular at the Macpherson Report on the Stephen Lawrence killing, which is where the idea of logging "hate incidents" first arose. As she makes clear, in the context of the environment in South East London at the time, where police didn't take racist abuse seriously and where racist abuse was closely linked to racist violence, the logging of racist abuse as "hate incidents" had clear merit.

Now though, in the different context of the trans debate, it becomes more problematic. It's based on the belief that, just by saying that trans women are men, the speaker can reasonably be thought of as showing seriously hostile psychological intentions or motives.

Stonewall’s definition of transphobia is:

“The fear or dislike of someone based on the fact they are trans, including denying their gender identity or refusing to accept it.”

So: refusing to think of a trans woman as a woman, for instance, is automatically “included” as being based on “fear and dislike” and so “transphobic”.

Or see the very first sentence of Foreword to the CPS new publication “LGBT Bullying and Hate Crime Schools Guidance”, which says”

“Homophobic and transphobic bullying and hate crime attack people’s right to feel safe and confident about their sexual orientation and their gender identity”

That is — snuck in there alongside the entirely appropriate sentiment that people should feel “safe” and “confident” about their sexual orientation (which is, after all, not just an identity, but a fact about oneself) — the CPS seem to be quite casually construing disagreement with the idea of someone’s gender identity as “bullying and hate crime”. […]

Generally speaking: following Stonewall’s lead, in public policies across the UK, as in Humberside Police’s case, we see the assumption that consistent claims that trans women are “men”, or “male” (as opposed to one off “mistakes”) must be so hostile as to count best as bullying, or harassment or at worst as hate crime.

But to my mind, this is an exceptionally risky assumption, liable to result in injustices (not to mention the suppression of speech about really important matters to do with biological sex).

To remind you — to count as hate speech, it’s not enough to be wrong. It’s not enough just to be rude or offend. You have to have manifestly seriously hostile intentions.

Arguably no sentence, on its own, removed from context, automatically implies seriously hostile intentions. Surrounding context is always relevant. However: the best candidates we have are words whose main function is to insult people, based on their membership of some social group — that is, slurs and pejoratives designed to target one section of society but not others. Words which target ethnic groups, like the N-word or the P-word; words that target females specifically, like “bitch”, “slut”, or “whore”; words that target sexual orientation, such as “faggot” etc. Even here, these words can occasionally get used playfully and non-contemptuously in different contexts — men or women can be affectionally called “bitch”; people belonging to social groups can use slurs ironically and non-hatefully to refer to themselves — but most of the time, and particularly when used by someone from a different group, slurs and pejorative words function to convey hostility and contempt. That is their main linguistic role.

So here’s the crucial contrast: the words “man” and “male” are not slurs or pejoratives. They do not typically function in sentences to convey hostility or contempt. Calling someone a man, for many speakers, is intended to be a completely factual description of their biology. Calling a trans woman a “man” or “male” is, for many speakers, intended to be a completely factual description of their biology (remember again — we aren’t arguing about whether this is actually a fact; we are talking about linguistic intentions). In short, as I argued in my witness statement to the judicial review, we cannot automatically assume intentional hostility from any claim that a trans woman is a man or male. […]

My final point is this. Recently it was reported in the Independent (my italics) that:

“hate crimes have risen by 10 per cent in a year across England and Wales to a new record high, amid a surge in attacks on transgender people…Of the total of almost 103,400 hate crimes recorded by police in 2018–19, three-quarters were racially motivated — a category that includes xenophobia. But the largest increase was seen in transgender hate crimes, which rocketed by 37 per cent to 2,333 incidents.”

In a separate article, it was reported that 1 in 10 of these generally is prosecuted.

The first thing to say about this is that I presume the reporter means “hate incidents” not “hate crimes” — as in perceived hate crimes — so here again we see the problem with CPS terminology misleadingly and confusingly describing perceptions of hate, as “hate incidents”.

A second thing to say is that, if saying that “trans women is men” is being perceived as a hate crime by lots of people, as it clearly is, with the encouragement of major LGBT organisations and public institutions, then it is not surprising at all that there is a “surge” in what they are calling “transgender hate crimes”! Whether, under these circumstances, we should take this surge seriously as evidence of an urgent social problem is another matter.

The third and final thing I want to say here, is this. When I think about how the police’s hate incident process was originally and, I think, honourably introduced to try to deal with the sort of pernicious, violent, rampant, genuinely hostile and overt racism displayed in Greenwich in 1993, and elsewhere; and when I think how this process has become hijacked, manipulated, and debased, so that precious police resources which could have been used to tackle genuine racists, are being diverted into pursuing people for stating what they think of as purely factual beliefs about human biology; when I think of all this, as well as about the cost of it to the health of the public conversation about biological sex, I get very angry indeed. And I think you should get angry too.

To fire off a string of racist abuse online is one thing – and can reasonably be classified as a hate incident, especially given the likelihood that such attitudes could lead to violence. Calling a trans woman a man, or a trans man a woman, may be regarded as offensive by some (but not all) in the trans community, but is – contra Stonewall – generally an expression of belief in biological realities, not a call to arms. Obviously.