Journalist Faces Hate Crime For Using WRONG Gender Pronoun
Journalist Faces Hate Crime For Using WRONG Gender Pronoun. Jordan Peterson said it, you could be arrested for using the wrong pronoun. Many said it was silly but now in the UK we have seen many stories of people being arrested for misgendering.Now we have a story of a religious journalist facing an investigation for using the wrong gender pronoun. The conundrum here is which do we protect the religious or the trans individual?Does social justice prioritize religion or identity and depending on which, why?
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A journalist in the UK is currently facing a hate crime investigation because she misgendered someone on Twitter.
And this isn't the first time we've heard of someone being investigated or even arrested for using the wrong pronoun on social media.
But what makes this story interesting is that this journalist is a Catholic and says, according to her religious beliefs, a person cannot change gender.
We now have another circumstance where we have to figure out the priority on a protected class.
In the US, in many jurisdictions, religion and identity are both protected, so who gets priority?
We recently saw a story about the UK, in the city of Birmingham, where Muslim activists shut down an LGBTQ education curriculum because they said it went against their religious beliefs and it was offensive.
How do we determine which group is going to be protected?
It would seem that as we expand more and more rights, we actually just start to interfere with different rights.
It also would seem that Jordan Peterson was correct when he said this kind of legislation can lead to you being arrested because we have seen some stories.
Today, let's take a look at what's going on with this journalist, let's take a look at the issue of religion versus identity, as well as some other stories of individuals being arrested for misgendering people.
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The first story from The Guardian, Catholic journalist investigated by police after misgendering trans women.
Caroline Farrow allegedly used wrong pronoun on Twitter to describe Jackie Greene.
A devout Catholic journalist has said she is being investigated by police after she called a transgender woman a man on Twitter.
Caroline Farrow appeared on ITV's Good Morning Britain alongside Susie Greene, whose daughter Jackie Greene is transgender, to discuss Girlguiding's decision to let children who have changed their gender join the organization.
On Tuesday, Farrow tweeted that she did not remember said tweets, adding,
I probably said he or son or something. All I have been told is that following an appearance
on Good Morning Britain, I have made some tweets misgendering Susie Green's child
and that I need to attend a taped interview. Farrow, who is married to a priest, said,
I have pointed out to police that I am a Catholic journalist commentator,
and it is my religious belief that a person cannot change sex.
She added that she would happily do jail time for her right to say that people cannot change sex.
Using the wrong pronoun could be an offense under the Malicious Communications Act.
Which makes it a crime to send messages that are indecent or grossly offensive, threatening, or contain information which is false or believed to be false if the purpose for sending it is to cause distress or anxiety.
Quite literally, it is illegal to troll in the UK.
Now, for those that aren't familiar with the exact definition of trolling, it is saying things to elicit an emotional response, and that's what they're claiming.
If you lie or say things to cause distress, It's actually illegal in the UK, and people have been arrested for it.
Most notably, Count Dankula, for those that are familiar, because he made a video where his dog did a Nazi salute.
Although no one was actually offended, the police filed the charge against him on their own without complaint.
They claimed that it was grossly offensive, and thus he was arrested.
But let's read on.
Breaking the law carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison.
Farrow said the police's decision to launch an investigation was an outrage.
She tweeted, I can't sleep.
I am so furious.
Farrow argued she had done nothing wrong, and the mistake was inadvertent and Freudian, as she tries really hard not to misgender people.
Surrey police confirmed on Tuesday they received an allegation over tweets by Farrow on 15 October.
A police spokesman told the Daily Telegraph, a thorough investigation is being carried out to establish whether any criminal offenses have taken place.
The story adds, in February, a teacher who was accused of misgendering a child was told by police she had committed a hate crime.
The teacher reportedly refused to acknowledge that the pupil self-identified as a boy and failed to use the pupil's preferred pronouns of he or him.
Last year, it was reported that a teacher was suing a school after he faced disciplinary action for referring to a transgender pupil as a girl.
Joshua Sutcliffe from Oxford said he was investigated after he said,
well done girls, to a group that included a student who identifies as a boy.
Last October, a transgender lawyer launched the UK's first dead-naming case
in the High Court against father Ted's screenplay writer after he referred to her
using her birth name. The transgender activist Stephanie Hayden is suing Gran Linehan,
the co-writer of the comedy TV series For Defamation and Harassment,
after he allegedly published a series of tweets deliberately misgendering her
by using her previous male name, otherwise known as dead naming.
Now this story is not the first story.
It was only a month ago we saw from the Daily Mail Mother 38 is arrested in front of her children and locked in a cell for seven hours after calling a transgender woman a man on Twitter.
Police officers detained Kate Scotto, 38, at her home in Hitchin.
More than two months after her arrest, she has had neither her mobile phone or laptop returned.
The complaints made by activist Stephanie Hayden led to the arrest of Mrs. Scotto.
The original story brings us to an interesting conundrum in intersectionality and in expanding civil rights.
This from just a few days ago, Parkfield School protests called off as LGBT lessons ended.
A school at the center of a row about teaching LGBT rights says it will not resume the lessons until the resolution has been reached with angry parents.
Weekly protests against the classes have been held outside the gates of Parkfield Community School in Birmingham.
After a meeting on Tuesday, the school said it wanted to continue working with parents to find a solution.
What's not mentioned in that BBC article, however, is that it was predominantly Muslim parents who signed a petition for the subject to be dropped from the curriculum.
This leads us to a rather interesting conundrum.
In the instance of the Parkfield School, the LGBT curriculum was ended because predominantly Muslim parents were protesting every week.
They were actually chanting shame because the school was teaching kids it was okay to be LGBT.
Now, along with these Muslim parents, there were some conservative Christians.
Why is it that in this case they allow many religious conservatives to actually protest against LGBT education?
Would that not fall under the same category as hate speech that we would find when this journalist who's Catholic accidentally misgendered an individual?
Why is it that in one circumstance one thing is okay and the other it isn't?
The reality in my opinion is that no one really knows.
There is no answer.
They're trying to protect all marginalized groups, but you can't.
If Muslims want to protest against LGBT individuals, which side is considered to be hateful?
If someone says that LGBT rights should be taught in school, is that the institution oppressing the religious minority?
If the religious minority shows up in protest targeting the LGBT curriculum, are the religious conservatives oppressing the LGBT community?
How do you determine who is oppressing and who isn't?
One thing we are seeing, however, in the UK is the expansion of policing of speech, which in my opinion is rather frightening.
Back in 2016, we saw this story in Wired.
Met Police's £1.7 million hate crime unit to tackle social media.
The online hate crime hub will be involved in the filtering and identification of crimes on social networks.
Because yes, in the UK, saying naughty words is actually illegal.
We then saw in March of 2018 The priority being placed on hate crime.
This story from the BBC.
Hate crime police priority as social media cases soar.
A rise in online hate crimes has prompted a major police campaign.
After the number of hate crime files created last year reached almost 6,000, Police Scotland is urging young people to be greater than a hater.
Many cases involved social media being used for bullying with fake accounts created to perpetuate abuse.
Now police want young people to consider the damage caused by abuse related to race, sexuality, gender, disability, or religion.
But once again we are faced with the conundrum of which group gets priority.
Certainly there are religious people who completely disagree with the sexuality or gender identity of certain individuals.
Which group in that bracket are we going to protect?
And then finally, at the end of 2018, we saw this story.
Fighting on Twitter.
In the UK, you could be arrested for that.
This story by Katie Herzog, referencing Gran Linehan.
She says he was laying in bed on Sunday morning in December, when his kids yelled at him that there was someone at the door.
He threw on what he'd call a dressing gown and headed to the front door, where he saw an officer with the Norwich Police Department.
The officer asked if he could come in.
Linehan initially refused and asked what the visit was about.
What it was all about, the officer explained, was Twitter.
I don't believe you can actually protect every single identity, every category.
As I mentioned earlier, religion doesn't necessarily mesh well with certain lifestyles.
In the United States, we do our best to try and protect everybody, but how do you handle this without free speech?
In the UK, they're arresting some people and not others, they're allowing some protests, but not certain curriculums.
In some circumstances, a religious person is investigated for a hate crime, In other circumstances, they're allowed to gather and protest a school teaching kids about LGBT rights.
Why is one okay and not the other?
It would seem completely arbitrary.
But where things start to get crazy is that you can't even debate the issue.
You can't even question what's being done.
Otherwise, you could find the police showing up to your house, and you could be arrested.
As I noted earlier in the Count Dankula case, no one actually complained about what Dankula did.
In fact, it was a viral video most people actually found funny.
Yet he was arrested, charged, and convicted over making a bad joke on the internet, and it's still used to smear and defame him to this day by activists who want to see an authoritarian state arrest people.
It's impossible to stop people from being distressed or upset from hearing things or being insulted.
And the more they try to protect people from outrage, the worse things get.
It just doesn't work.
The only thing you can do is back off and realize the world isn't perfect.
And sometimes people say mean things.
Why mean words are a crime is beyond me.
But this is what we're seeing in the UK and it seems to be getting worse.
Now we have other countries, New Zealand and Australia, blocking websites.
Kind of like what Turkey did.
It's astounding to me, but it really does seem like we're headed towards a nightmare dystopia.
Fortunately for us in the US, we have the Bill of Rights.
Maybe that will keep us safe for at least a certain amount of time, but it definitely seems like with how Twitter is functioning and how they're biased against certain individuals and certain language, it doesn't matter.
You can't even argue these issues on Twitter.
We saw what happened to Meghan Murphy when she simply tweeted that men weren't women.
She got a suspension, which ultimately led to her being permanently banned from the platform.
Public discourse in the U.S.
is being privatized, and you have no protections.
So it's clear, debate is going away, authoritarianism is on the rise, and it's people on the left who are for some reason advocating for the expansion of the state to control what you can think, see, and hear.
To me, that's scary, but I don't see anything stopping it.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
How do you see this developing?
Do you think it's going to get worse?
Or do you think that eventually, because of the contradictory nature of some of these policies and laws, things will just implode and kind of go back to normal?
I don't see that trend happening.
I just see the privatization of speech getting worse, and the policing of speech getting worse.
But again, comment below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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