Tough Millwall cave in to transgender ‘bullies’
The famously hard-edged football club has cancelled a feminists’ meeting as claims spread of intimidation by transgender lobbyists
Andrew Gilligan
March 11 2018, 12:01am,
The Sunday Times
Millwall football club buckled under a barrage of phone calls, emails and tweets.
They are renowned as English football’s toughest club, their shirts proclaim they “fear no foe” and their fans chant: “No one likes us, we don’t care.” But even Millwall have given way in a drive by transgender activists to “bully and silence” their critics.
Feminists who hired the club’s conference suite for a meeting last week about “how concerns raised by women are being shut down through threats, harassment and accusations of transphobia” say Millwall cancelled the booking after pressure from transgender lobbyists.
The event was to protest against potential legal changes allowing people born male to “self-identify” as women. Feminists say the move threatens women’s spaces and rights.
Venice Allan, the meeting’s organiser, said: “I got a call from the club saying they’d never seen anything like it — constant phone calls, emails, tweets. They were really spooked. It wasn’t exactly ‘No one likes us, we don’t care’.”
A Millwall spokesman said the event “was cancelled mutually with the organisers. We were pulled into a drama that we didn’t really feel we should be part of.”
The cancellation came as it emerged Therapy Today, the official journal of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), has been bombarded with protests by trans activists after publishing a letter saying some young people were identifying as trans through “youth culture” and “social contagion” and being encouraged to “medically alter their bodies” even though they might later change their minds.
More than 500 people signed a statement attacking the letter as “transphobic” and saying that “affirmation of a child’s . . . gender identity is non-negotiable”. The statement added: “This is not a free speech issue. Therapy Today is not a tabloid newspaper or TV talk show.”
Within days the editor, Catherine Jackson, published an apology for the “serious error of judgment on my part”.
The letter’s author, Stephanie Davies-Arai, of Transgender Trend, an organisation questioning the diagnosis and treatment of children as transgender, said: “Things are in a bad way when even a letter in what is supposed to be a forum for debate can be suppressed,” she said. “Attempts to bully and silence are revealing only of the fact that this new dogma cannot withstand scrutiny.”
BACP said it had apologised “because the letter was not compatible with our responsibilities as a signatory of the memorandum of understanding on conversion therapy”, a document that treats anything other than affirming a child’s transgender identification as akin to controversial “gay cure” therapies.
Meanwhile, a woman who criticised a transgender charity on Twitter has been questioned under caution by police and told she will be arrested if she tries to leave the country. Kellie-Jay Keen- Minshull accused the group Mermaids of “suppressing free speech”.
She had accused Mermaids, which calls for children to be allowed irreversible sex-change treatment the NHS currently prohibits, of “prey[ing]” on gay teenagers and of “mass child abuse”. Mermaids declined to comment.
@mragilligan