Category: Free Speech

Free speech and cancel culture

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Free Speech Personal Testimony

The mobbing of Debbie Hayton

It is a well-known fact that the moment one steps out of line in their social group, consequences will inevitably occur.

However, in this age of social media, coupled with an increasingly aggressive progressive politics, “stepping out of line” now simply means speaking realities and truths that cause the slightest discomfort to the “group.” Consequences can often be dire.

Without question, a modern social line that is absolutely not to be crossed is that of sex and gender. Anything from expressing concerns about the safety and future of children being pressured into hormone therapy, to simply asserting the biological reality of differences in sex are met with immediate hostilities and extreme abuse.

Even being transgender or experiencing gender dysphoria is not a protection from the imminent cancellation that follows expressing a dangerous opinion such as “women are adult human females.”

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Free Speech GRA Reform Labour Party Trans Health

What Labour gets wrong about transwomen

The transgender crisis that has engulfed the Labour Party has now lurched into a new and previously unimaginable phase. When the hitherto unknown group, the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights (LCTR) launched its egregious manifesto last week, peak-lunacy seemed to have been reached.

Following demands for compliance — including “pledge 4: Accept that trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary people are non-binary” — they condemned what they considered to be transphobic organisations, naming Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance and calling for transphobes to be expelled from the party.

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Free Speech GRA Reform Labour Party

As a trans Labour party supporter I’m exasperated

It has been a trying week for the Labour Party. The leadership contenders are falling over each other in an astonishing bid to make themselves equally unelectable by a membership who are becoming exasperated with what many now view as transgender nonsense. I say that as a trans woman who is a member of the Labour Party.

Have they not learned from Jo Swinson? In December, the former Lib Dem leader’s election campaign went up in smoke on the altar of transgender ideology. Her inability to define the word “woman” is a masterclass in how not to do live radio.

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Free Speech GRA Reform Labour Party

Do Rebecca Long-Bailey and Angela Rayner have a problem with trans people like me?

Jo Swinson’s dismal election campaign was unlikely to have been helped by her inability to define the word woman. But if there are any lessons from Swinson’s ability to alienate people on the subject of gender, it seems Labour is determined not to learn them.

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Free Speech

In defence of the LGB Alliance

They gathered at a secret location under the cover of darkness. Total confidentiality had been maintained, even between friends who embraced each other as they arrived to discuss gay rights. But this was not some socially conservative society under the thumb of a repressive regime. Nor was it a secret society in Victorian London. It was London in 2019.

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Free Speech GRA Reform

Aggressive protests like that in Brighton mean the real causes of transphobia go unaddressed

“We had women arriving through the crush in tears. One woman had liquid thrown at her as she tried to enter. Even the men who attended were shocked at the scale of the harassment because they’re not normally subject to this.”

Those were the words of a WPUK spokeswoman, reported in this newspaper [The Morning Star]. Shockingly, the context was a meeting to discuss women’s rights on the fringe of the Labour Party conference.

How on earth did we get here: to a place where women meeting to discuss sex-based rights and the trafficking of women and girls are accused of hate speech and denounced as “TERFs?” TERF stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist,” but it has become a dreadful slur — akin to bitch or whore.

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Free Speech Legal

A collapsed case shows the perils of policing ‘transphobia’

The bizarre stories of censorship and bullying by trans activists frequently made baffling reading. But the spectacle of Miranda Yardley, a self-identified transsexual, ending up in the dock for apparent ‘transphobia’ (all at the behest of a non-trans person) really takes the biscuit. An author would struggle to pitch such an incredible scenario at a publisher but, to quote Mark Twain, truth is stranger than fiction. Our post-truth world is off the scale.

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Free Speech GRA Reform

The difficulties of questioning the transgender dogma

While Westminster understandably has its mind on other things, the transgender debate – which you might have expected to calm down after last year’s consultation on the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) – rumbles on with its trademark ferocity. And as two stories have this week have shown, its proponents continue to take no prisoners.

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Free Speech

Plea to Trans Lobby

Sir, As transsexual people we are dismayed by the escalation in harassment, threats and abuse directed at women and women’s groups in the name of “transgender rights activism” (“Trans lobby sent me death threats, claims professor”, Dec 6). In the past few years violent rhetoric on social media has spilt over into real life too often. After the harassment of Julie Bindel and the Working Class Movement Library, the physical assault on Maria Maclachlan and the recent use of “masked-up” tactics at a feminist meeting in Bristol, we are horrified by the intimidation and abuse directed at the human rights expert Rosa Freedman.

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Free Speech GRA Reform

A Woman’s Place is a Safe Port – a transsexual perspective

[Transcript of the Speech I gave at A Woman’s Place is a Safe Port, a meeting organised by Woman’s Place UK in Liverpool on 25th September 2018 to coincide with the Labour Party Conference]

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