When did believing in biology become a thoughtcrime?

Crime must have been swept from the streets of Brighton, with domestic abuse and muggings happily consigned to the past. Because there is surely no other rational explanation as to why officers from Sussex Police took a 300-mile round journey from the south coast to the rural town of Trowbridge in Wiltshire last week.

The trip was taken to investigate some apparently hurty words spoken by Kellie-Jay Keen – a women’s rights campaigner and founder of Standing for Women (SfW). (For full disclosure, Keen also happens to be a friend of mine.)

The focal point of her SfW campaign is reminding people that the dictionary definition of ‘woman’ is ‘adult human female’. This statement of biological fact is deeply offensive to men who like to pretend they’re women and to their fanatical enablers.

The alleged offence took place on 18 September last year at an SfW rally in Brighton. The identity of the delicate flower who reported Keen is unknown. But he or she was apparently offended by Keen’s words, which were spoken in public in front of scores of uniformed officers – none of whom felt it necessary to intervene at the time.

A week after the rally, Keen was informed by an officer that ‘somebody has made an allegation… about a hate crime’. The officer made it clear that should Keen not attend a voluntary interview at the police station, she would be arrested. With the threat of being led away from her family home in handcuffs hanging over her, Keen consented to be questioned under caution.

And so, on Friday last week, Keen was interviewed inside Trowbridge police station, while a crowd of around a hundred sincerely pissed-off women (and a handful of equally cross men) gathered outside. They sang, held banners and gave speeches, to express both their support for Keen and their fury at the barmy priorities and disturbing overreach of the police.

One speaker, called DJ Lippy, pointed out that, while the rape conviction rate in Sussex has fallen to three per cent, the force has ‘increased its standing in the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme by 19 points’. Others made supposedly hurtful, ‘transphobic’ statements, such as ‘women don’t have penises’. Notably, some of those in the crowd, including barrister Sarah Phillimore and campaigner Jennifer Swayne, have also previously had encounters with the police. Both were pulled in for questioning in separate incidents, after daring to express ‘gender critical’ views – in other words, they said that biological sex is real.

The date chosen for Keen’s interview was almost exactly five years after her first brush with hate-speech laws. Back in 2018, she was questioned by police about the content of eight tweets. One of these focussed on Susie Green, the then CEO of controversial trans-kids charity Mermaids. It referred to the sex-reassignment surgery that Green’s 16-year-old son underwent in Thailand as a castration.

According to Keen, Green was triggered by the word ‘castrated’, despite having been public about her decision to take her child for sex-reassignment surgery. Obviously, this operation involves the removal of testicles. Officers travelled 500 miles from West Yorkshire and back to interview her for these tweets. The Crown Prosecution Service opted not to proceed with the case.

It’s fair to say the police seem mildly obsessed with Keen, chasing her across county lines to investigate her comments. This repeated questioning of her looks like an attempt to intimidate her into silence – to make an example of her and to send a warning to others who might dare to say ‘transwomen are men’.

It is clear that Sussex Police are more afraid of upsetting the trans ayatollahs than they are mindful of their reputation. Indeed, shortly after the SfW rally in Brighton, the same force made a spectacle of itself by referring to a trans-identified male paedophile as a woman on social media. When Twitter users responded by pointing out his sex, the force replied: ‘Sussex Police do not tolerate any hateful comments towards [anyone’s] gender identity regardless of crimes committed.’

If the police do not want their reputation to plummet any further, perhaps they should get back to tackling actual crime, instead of trying to please trans activists.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.