Suffolk Police have apologised for the way they handled complaints about a blog article that disagreed with the claim that 'transwomen are women'.
Margaret Nelson, a retired Humanist celebrant, wrote on her blog that transwomen are still biologically male regardless of the gender they choose to present as.
She also criticised transgender activists for denouncing as 'transphobes' anyone who disagrees that being a transwoman is equal to being a natal female.
'These absurd beliefs are nonsensical and deny all the evidence to the contrary,' she said.
She continued: 'There is a very small number of people who are described as intersex, because their anatomy isn't typical of a male or female, but their existence doesn't validate the claim that a man can be a woman or vice versa.
'They are very different from transgender people. So no, in life or in death, trans women are not women, no matter how many times you say it's so. It's simply impossible to change your sex.'
After publishing her blog, she said she had received a phone call from Suffolk Police warning her that the post and some of her tweets had caused offence to transgender people.
Commenting on her own blog post, Nelson wrote: 'Seems it's offensive to state the truth about gender, and that there are people who'll track you down and report you to the police for doing so.'
After sharing about the phone call on her Twitter page, Suffolk Police tweeted her to say that the only purpose of the phone call had been to make her aware of the complaints.
'Hi Margaret, we had a number of people contact us on social media about the comments made online. A follow-up call was made for no other reason than to raise awareness of the complaints,' they tweeted.
But the response triggered outrage on social media, with Reddit users voicing anger that police resources had been spent following up complaints about Nelson's blog, despite no laws being broken.
'Tearing officers away from twitter and making them work on solving actual crimes is apparently too much effort,' wrote one Reddit user.
Comments left on Nelson's blog post took a similar view, with one person writing: 'It seems bizarre to me that there are offensiveness police. You must have such a low rate of actual crimes to spend police time letting people know their posts were offensive.'
Suffolk Police later backtracked and said they had contacted Nelson to apologise to her for the way in which they had handled the complaints.
In a statement posted to their Twitter page, they said they would also review their procedures for dealing with similar complaints in the future.
'We accept we made a misjudgment in following up the complaint,' they said.
'As a result of this, we will be reviewing our procedures for dealing with such matters.
'We are sorry for any distress we may have caused in the way this issue was dealt with, and have been in contact with the woman who wrote the blog to apologise.'
