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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Posie is being interviewed under caution

280 replies

Pandamodium · 17/01/2019 07:47

At the request of Susie Green. A public order offence has been mentioned.

What the shite is the world coming to.

OP posts:
Thread gallery
6
R0wantrees · 18/01/2019 09:34

Yes, see pg 25
tudortrust.org.uk/assets/file/TTT_Grants_List_2017-2018.pdf

Posie is being interviewed under caution
andyoldlabour · 18/01/2019 09:50

At what stage can the public, the concerned public, get the relevant Police and Crime Commissioner to act, because this whole charade has gone well beyond a joke, and it amounts to persecution of a totally innocent women who is being harassed by a sector of the community who do not care about anyone or anything which is outside their narrow minded view of the world.

R0wantrees · 18/01/2019 09:53

The concerned public can raise concerns at any point with the Police & Crime Commissioner.
There won't likely be much of a response when a case is ongoing but it might highlight the potential issues and encourage scrutiny.

R0wantrees · 18/01/2019 10:17

Meghan Murphy recent speech Vancouver Library Canada:
(there are clear parallels with the targeting of MM and PP)

concludes:
"We are now at a place where we are not only allowing men to dictate what a woman is, but to destroy hard-fought-for rights won by feminists, very quickly, without any public debate. We are putting women and girls in danger in order to avoid offending the feelings of a tiny minority of people, without a public debate. We are allowing women to be fired, threatened, harassed, smeared, silenced, intimidated, ostracized, and even beaten in order to accommodate the feelings of men. This is what’s actually happening, and I don’t care if this is shocking for some of you here, because it’s true, and I refuse to accept or repeat lies under threat, especially lies that are clearly hurtful.

We can support people’s rights and dignity, and provide them with the services they need without lying and without throwing women under the bus.

There is no need for women’s rights if women don’t exist, and if the source of their oppression is not their sex, but their feelings about femininity. No matter how a woman feels about gender, she will still experience this world as female.

Those who are speaking out about and asking questions about gender identity are not doing so to be cruel. They are not doing so because they’re hateful. They are doing so because they have real, genuine concerns that deserve to be taken seriously and addressed. And if you’re going to do everything in your power to bully and silence people who have those concerns, to tell women that advocating for their own rights makes them hateful, that your beliefs are the only beliefs that matter, and that those who don’t share your beliefs should be arrested or killed, then what is clear is that you are the fascist, you are the hateful, close-minded, oppressive one.

So, you are all free to disagree with anything I say here. You are free to share your opinions, you are free to believe whatever you like, whether it’s that the earth is flat, or that cats are great pets, but you don’t have the right to impose those beliefs on others under threat of violence or a jail sentence. You don’t have the right to threaten me, silence me, or criminalize me for telling the truth."

www.feministcurrent.com/2019/01/18/meghan-murphy-on-gender-identity-and-womens-rights-at-the-vancouver-public-library/

Ereshkigal · 18/01/2019 10:20

The ‘crime’ will be whatever loosely defined stuff they think will fit - it’s usually malicious comms but I think she said public order offences?

And technically the crime could be criminal damage for stickering. So #stickerwoman could be framed as a "hate crime" and there were attempts to, AFAIK.

OldCrone · 18/01/2019 10:31

Public order offences seem to cover quite a broad range of actions.

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/section/154

Intentional harassment, alarm or distress.
(1)A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he—
(a)uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b)displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.

This appears to describe much of what is posted on twitter. But reading the next bit, it seems that you can say what you want about someone from your own home (or any other 'dwelling') as long as the other person is also inside a 'dwelling'.

(2)An offence under this section may be committed in a public or a private place, except that no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation is displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and the person who is harassed, alarmed or distressed is also inside that or another dwelling.

(3)It is a defence for the accused to prove—
(a)that he was inside a dwelling and had no reason to believe that the words or behaviour used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation displayed, would be heard or seen by a person outside that or any other dwelling, or
(b)that his conduct was reasonable.

So maybe you can say whatever you like on twitter or youtube, under the assumption that anyone who sees it is inside a 'dwelling'? Not a lawyer, though, so maybe it's more complex than that.

theOtherPamAyres · 18/01/2019 10:33

the relevant Police and Crime Commissioner to act

The PCC has no jurisdiction over police operational matters. In any case, the misuse of police resources to harass uppity women and allies is a phenomenon that goes beyond one particular force.

I will take an educated guess about the outcome:

(1) the CPS will find that there is no evidence of a public order offence. Again.
(2) the police on the ground are floundering around with allegations of transphobic hate crimes. They will continue to pass cases to CPS for advice, knowing that the advice will be "no offence". Again.

There is an impasse that will only be resolved by a review of the hate crime of transphobia (hostility to a transgender person; stirring up hostility to transgender people). The people to do that are the Attorney-General and the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Perhaps there needs to be a petition to the Minister of Justice and Home Secretary.

MsJeminaPuddleduck · 18/01/2019 10:38

Rowentrees - thanks for posting the Megan Murphy excerpt. What a powerful piece of writing

R0wantrees · 18/01/2019 10:51

MsJeminaPuddleduck

See also Lee Lakeman's inspirational speech from the same event :
(extract)
"But it is also important to put this achievement and discussion in its proper perspective:
the murder of women, that is mostly the murder of wives and prostitutes, by men continues even as we speak

the violence done to women and even more often to impoverished or racialized women continues to be without social consequences to those men

as continues the harassment by men up to and including murder of women especially Aboriginal women who are forced to live in the public realm by poverty and lack of social supports like public transit and local public schools

as does continue unabated men’s harassment of women who try to use their legal rights and privileges to take their position in public institutions and political life… what Hannah Arendt speaks of as the very nature of public life;
the recent campaigns led by women victims of male violence and their feminist advocates to hold men like Ghomeshi accountable are still at their very earliest stages and so far have been stunted rather than assisted by legal procedures, by the police and courts as well as by the commercial media and by the social media.

The fight for equal pay is not achieved much less the fight for equal distribution of wealth and resources.

The right to welfare and social services,health services and education services has been so undermined as to barely exist for the poor women, for the immigrant women and for the Aboriginal women. To be among such women is to be criminalized for trying to get by.

Women do not have proper access to legal aid much less to adequate protections of the law and to security of our persons.

Childcare, the care of the sick and the old are still loaded on women even if more and more it is the loading on to immigrant women at low rates of pay and with insecure citizenship.

Women’s sexuality is under constant assault so that young women have even less sense of the entitlement to autonomy to sexual pleasure and to body integrity than my generation had won. Instead, from childhood on they are fed a constant diet of pornography in every media form.

The international talk of women’s rights is just that: talk. Unless women measure, protest and demand, nothing happens to ensure women’s rights as written on paper.

No political party and no public institutions have distinguished themselves as fighters for the liberation of women. Nor have they defended those who do fight for that liberation. I am old enough to remember the Montreal Massacre and what the governments did at that point and in this year of Me Too and various campaigns they have done the same… nothing of pro-woman effect

International studies now confirm that it is only in the presence of an autonomous women’s movement that policies and practices of the state start to reform toward the advancement of women.

“Women only” is a key practice of the independent women’s movement. In the 60’s we had to admit that if men where present in our groups they could sabotage the conversations by their very presence. This has not changed

In fact, for me this discussion of “inclusion” is really the conduct of the backlash against feminism." (continues)

  1. Our purpose as a movement and as an organization within that movement is not to give every woman the choice of which sex she would like to be or to promote notions that each woman should challenge herself to find or create freedom for herself on her own.
  1. These silly ideas have come with neoliberalism;
  1. our primary work is to focus on and take down the structures that prevent women from escaping gendered roles and gendered poverty and gendered racism,

  2. those structures that enforce gender with laws, norms and institutions including with male violence against women.

  3. Meghan sometimes says she is fighting for free speech. I am not. I don’t plan to put up with the hate speech of pornography or hate speech of racism and I’m not to willing to tolerate the hate speech against the poor.

  4. I am fighting for freedom for women and most of all for that freedom that de Beauvoir describes as the freedom that enriches the freedom of others." (continues)

  5. Consciousness raising and why it is important What is it?

Truthful talk between those suffering the same conditions that allows for naming and strategizing against that oppression by identifying its structures and institutions

A vital tool of the women’s movement for women’s liberty How we use it?

  1. Why we cannot “include”those wo claim to be transitioning from male to females in this process

Based on the body

Female relationships

  1. (local) (feminist progressives) (second wave)

To those who imagine you can bully us into submission you are clearly unfamiliar with the Canadian and BC women who defined feminism in this last fifty years of action."
tradfem.wordpress.com/2019/01/12/lee-lakeman-speaks-at-the-vancouver-public-library-january-10/

thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a3479722-Lee-Lakeman-Vancouver-Jan-2019-Thread-title-edited-by-MNHQ

R0wantrees · 18/01/2019 10:52

Also very powerful important speeches by Fay Blaney and her Auntie Florence:
extract from Feminist Current article:
"Meghan Murphy, "In case you weren’t able to attend the sold out Gender Identity Ideology and Women’s Rights talk at the Vancouver Public Library, it was, in a word, beautiful. On Thursday, myself, Lee Lakeman, and surprise speaker Fay Blaney spoke truth to power, shutting down any possibility of discrediting the independent, grassroots women’s movement. Blaney challenged the myth of numerous “genders” in Indigenous cultures, wielded by trans activists in order to justify post-modern, academic theories about “gender identity,” and claim them as “non-Western” for identity politics points. Blaney said, “There are people who are talking about how Indigenous nations had five genders. That’s absolute B.S.” Lakeman reminded “those of you who can imagine bullying us into submission, you’re clearly unfamiliar with us.” I argued that it is unnecessary to trample on women’s rights in order to also argue that those who step out of traditional gender stereotypes should not be harassed or discriminated, and indeed, challenging gender stereotypes is always what feminists have encouraged. No one in attendance could argue, with any integrity, that any of the panelists were “hateful” or interested in harming others."

The few trans activists who did attend limited their “protests” to giggling at concerns about fascism and cheering when Blaney — a long time Indigenous feminist activist committed to fighting male violence against women — shared that she had been pushed out of the annual Women’s Memorial March, which honours the lives of missing and murdered women lost in the Downtown Eastside." (continues)

www.feministcurrent.com/2019/01/11/vancouver-gender-identity-event-a-roaring-success-gidvpl

Ineedacupofteadesperately · 18/01/2019 10:55

Posie is wonderful. I am so thankful for what she's doing. I will also contribute to her cause (again) and any specific legal fund if needed. What is happening is so shocking. Thank you also to all the women on here joining the dots and shining the bright light of facts on the actions of the police.

OnTheDarkSideOfTheSpoon · 18/01/2019 10:58

The implications of regulating public fora are applicable here I think

Jack Dorsey Has No Clue What He Wants
A Q&A with Twitter's CEO on right-wing extremism, Candace Owens, and what he'd do if the president called on his followers to murder journalists.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jack-dorsey-twitter-interview_us_5c3e2601e4b01c93e00e2a00

theOtherPamAyres · 18/01/2019 11:00

A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he ....

This is the important bit of the offence. In interview, the suspect merely says: "My intention was to educate, inform and warn people about xyz" or "I was giving my opinion on a matter of public interest and public discourse".

The fact that someone takes exception to the words or style, is irrelevant. The intention to cause alarm or distress cannot be proved. End of.

If Mermaids consider themselves defamed or ridiculed then they should not call the police about a public order offence, but should take a civil action.

LangCleg · 18/01/2019 11:03

10. our primary work is to focus on and take down the structures that prevent women from escaping gendered roles and gendered poverty and gendered racism

So much this.

R0wantrees · 18/01/2019 11:07

And technically the crime could be criminal damage for stickering. So #stickerwoman could be framed as a "hate crime" and there were attempts to, AFAIK.

Except that the CPS would not prosecute the application of stickers by stickerwoman as criminal damage.

It may be alleged and then police may be under pressure to investigate.

During that time the allegation is used by TRAs.

Just as Guiliana et al used the fact that their allegations against Linda Bellos and Venice Allen were 'proof' of the crime that they claimed despite both the criminal and civil cases being eventually dropped.

During the time of investigation etc, those accused carry the allegation/s which restricts their voice/s being heard. It also serves to make others fearful of similar consequences.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3237264-Linda-Bellos-arrested-Title-edited-by-MNHQ-to-make-clear-that-she-was-in-fact-interviewed-under-caution

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3348613-Linda-Bellos-prosecuted-in-private-by-trans-activist-Thread-title-edited-at-OPs-request

OldCrone · 18/01/2019 11:19

The intention to cause alarm or distress cannot be proved.

Sadly, as I'm not a lawyer, I had missed that there is another bit of legislation here
www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64/section/5

This one is similar, but does not include the intent bit.

5 Harassment, alarm or distress.
(1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—
(a)uses threatening [F1or abusive] words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b)displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening [F1or abusive],within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.

But again, if Posie is guilty of anything, then so are a large proportion of the people posting on twitter. I'm sure I can find something written by Susie Green that I find distressing.

Badstyley · 18/01/2019 11:20

Two sentences? Oh didums, poor Susie, having to deal with two sentences that hurt her feelings.

God I think I need a full public enquiry to investigate all the hateful sentences that have been written and uttered about me. I think we’d better all have one. I’m off to ring the coppers now.

Posie is astute, and clever, and her cupboard of fucks would appear to be empty, and of course she speaks to people, people who live in the real world and don’t trouble themselves with pomo bullshit queer theory, and who’s cupboard of fucks are also empty. Of course she’s a terrifying opponent, especially if your cupboard happens to be full of skeletons and god knows what other horrors.

Oh and why did Mermaids even bother advertising for that post, I’m sure our friend Stephanie Hayden would’ve obliged. Oh wait, they were after a solicitor weren’t they...

And on the subject of said lawyer, I thought h** was taking MN to court or something?

theOtherPamAyres · 18/01/2019 11:30

Do we know the numbers of transphobic hate crimes resulting in prosecutions, cautions or restorative justice mediation?

We hear a lot about reports of transphobic crimes - but have CPS ever found one that met the charging standard and was prosecuted?

What about the ones that resulted in 'no further action' by either the police or CPS? What was it about those so-called hate crimes that meant that the case against the suspect was shelved after the interview?

A fact-check on the outcomes of reports to police would be interesting. (For me, if no-one else!)

SharkBastard · 18/01/2019 11:48

As the woman arrested last month, this is deeply concerning. Freedom of speech, freedom to protect oneself is under attack, along with our rights and safety. I admire Posie for continuing the fight, I stand with her, and I'll keep going too.

Every person I've spoken to and told about my treatment, they have been angry at the resources being used this way when there are serious failings to protect happening.

Thingybob · 18/01/2019 11:50

As the victim of (real) harassment I have always been shocked at the definition the police use.

Paraphrasing a bit, it's a course of action that could reasonably be expected to cause alarm or distress and by 'course' it needs to happen on two or more occasions.

So if I say

"Theresa May has a face like a smacked arse"

and the following day say

"Theresa May is trollop"

If she reads or hears that and is distressed by it then that could be interpreted as harassment. And, if my motive for saying it is because she is a lesbian (or I think she is) then it will also be a 'hate crime'

Just for the record I don't think either of the above about TM

R0wantrees · 18/01/2019 11:53

We hear a lot about reports of transphobic crimes - but have CPS ever found one that met the charging standard and was prosecuted?

What about the ones that resulted in 'no further action' by either the police or CPS? What was it about those so-called hate crimes that meant that the case against the suspect was shelved after the interview?

The other issue is that the 'proof' of escalation of 'transphobic hate crimes' is often through self-reporting surveys by Stonewall etc.

eg from BBC article previously linked:
"More than half young trans people say they have been the victim of hate crime in the last year, according to research from the Stonewall charity."

This is a different statistic again to the numbers reported and dismissed as many will not have been reported.

If Mermaids are running workshops telling children what constitutes a 'hate crime' are they being advised correctly?

Thingybob · 18/01/2019 11:54

'Do we know the numbers of transphobic hate crimes resulting in prosecutions, cautions or restorative justice mediation?'

I saw figures quite recently in a news report but cannot find them now and if I remember correctly few resulted in any prosecution but this was framed in the report as the police not taking hate crime seriously enough.

OldCrone · 18/01/2019 11:58

"More than half young trans people say they have been the victim of hate crime in the last year, according to research from the Stonewall charity."

What do the actual stats on 'hate crime' say? How many prosecutions were there? What forms did these crimes take - verbal harassment or physical violence? How many were reported to the police?

LiverpoolReSisters · 18/01/2019 12:02

*And technically the crime could be criminal damage for stickering. So #stickerwoman could be framed as a "hate crime" and there were attempts to, AFAIK.

Except that the CPS would not prosecute the application of stickers by stickerwoman as criminal damage.

It may be alleged and then police may be under pressure to investigate.

During that time the allegation is used by TRAs.*

Nothing came of Merseyside police so-called investigation. The reporting was used to intimidate, as was the subsequent attempts by Mayor Joe Anderson.

They can't silence all of us. Intimidation tactics won't work.

Thingybob · 18/01/2019 12:02

Does this help OldCrone

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46543874