The British girls’s rights activist has reportedly been accused of a hate crime, and had a feminist e-book seized by police
Girls’s rights campaigner Jennifer Swayne was arrested for an alleged hate crime over the weekend, and had stickers and an instructional e-book seized by police, after she plastered her house city with posters essential of the transgender motion.
Swayne instructed the Instances that she was was detained for greater than 12 hours by police within the Welsh county of Gwent after she put up home made posters within the city of Newport with slogans resembling “Girl = Grownup Human Feminine,” “people by no means change intercourse,” and “no males in girls’s prisons.” The final slogan is seemingly a reference to a controversial Excessive Courtroom ruling final yr that cleared the best way for transgender girls – who’re biologically male – to be housed alongside feminine inmates in UK prisons. The ruling even applies to these convicted of sexual offenses.
Swayne accused the police of appearing “just like the Stasi,” after they raided her home and seized extra stickers and posters with comparable anti-trans slogans. Additionally they confiscated a e-book of essays essential of the transgender motion edited by feminist educational Dr. Heather Brunskell-Evans.
Gwent police mentioned they obtained six complaints relating to her poster marketing campaign, and described the messages on the posters as “offensive.” Swayne mentioned that one of many arresting officers described one sticker particularly – which learn “cervix – it’s a girl thang” – as “very hurtful.” She was arrested on suspicion of each vandalism and “displaying threatening or abusive writing prone to trigger harassment.”
Swayne mentioned she wasn’t instructed why her e-book was seized, and added that none of her posters even contained the phrase “trans.” She mentioned that in her opinion, the police demonstrated a “very slender, partisan view of what it’s respectable to have in your bookshelf. That’s harmful for liberal democracy.”
Her arrest comes amid a nationwide debate in Britain over the boundaries between free speech and hate crimes. Final yr, House Secretary Priti Patel instructed the School of Policing to advise forces throughout the nation to cease recording “non-crime hate incidents” as crimes, arguing that doing so has “a chilling impact on free speech and probably cease individuals expressing views legally and legitimately,” in keeping with a authorities supply.
Patel’s letter was celebrated by Honest Cop, a corporation that campaigns in opposition to the criminalization of speech. “This can be a step in the precise route,” Honest Cop co-founder Harry Miller mentioned on the time. “However the authorities ought to ditch the recording of non-hate crime incidents as they’re basically flawed and take away the presumption of innocence.”
Honest Cop has additionally publicized Swayne’s story, claiming that the conduct of Gwent police in her case quantities to “illegal police interference” below the legislation.
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