I'm not, as you might initially think, talking about the recent police intervention into the situation regarding Downing Street parties and the Sue Gray report. (Though there are some good questions to be asked around all that – such as what were the No 10 officers doing or thinking when said parties were taking place to start with: just turning a blind eye?)
No, I'm talking about some very concerning cases just this month which seem to involve the police attempting to curb people's freedom of thought and expression in relation to sex and gender issues.
Case number one: in Wales, Jennifer Swayne (53), a women's rights campaigner, was arrested for "an alleged hate crime" (as The Times put it) after she put up posters about trans women in prisons, posted stickers to do with related issues, and said that "humans never change sex." Gwent police raided her home and removed – without explanation – a book of academic essays on the "theory and practice of trans-gendering children."
Case number two: police in Scotland visited the home of the founder of a charity which supports women who have suffered domestic abuse. Nicola Murray, of Brodie's Trust, was interviewed by police after "being reported for hate crime, after stressing its female-only services" even though "no offence had been committed" (The Times again).
Of course, sometimes there is more to these cases than meets the eye, and that is always an important caveat to keep in mind. But in general terms, in the case of Jennifer Swayne, it is scientifically indisputable that "humans never change sex". As the distinguished biologist and science professor Lord Winston said on BBC TV last year, "I will say this categorically - that you cannot change your sex, your sex actually is there in every single cell in the body."
Or, to put it another way, and to remind you of the biology you learnt at school, "individuals having two X chromosomes (XX) are female; individuals having one X chromosome and one Y chromosome (XY) are male" as Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it. There are occasional variations – known as intersex conditions, but these are fairly unusual.
Interestingly, Swayne has herself received support from Mallory Moore, who describes herself as a "trans woman... and researcher." Moore describes Swayne as "a transphobe" and believes that some of Swayne's stickers – such as "Are you happy for your 13 year old daughter to shower next to an adult man?" – were "unambiguously intended to arouse violent sentiment towards trans women." Well, many of us might disagree with that particular take on it.
But, nonetheless, despite believing that Swayne is a "transphobe," Moore is still critical of how the police have handled her, and said she wanted to "affirm [her] solidarity with Jennifer Swayne against police abuse." She said she herself had been "treated roughly by the police" and added: "When the police are kidnapping women for placing stickers... none of us is safe to speak up." Many of us might echo that.
The second case is just as concerning, if not more so. The context is that Nicola Murray's organisation, Brodie's Trust, had announced that it would no longer refer women to Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) as it had lost confidence in that organisation. This decision was made after statements by Mridul Wadhwa, a trans woman who became its chief executive in 2021, who said that "bigoted" victims of sexual violence should expect to be "challenged on their prejudices". The Brodie's Trust statement said about the ERCC: "We cannot in all conscience send vulnerable women to the service in its current state."
Murray was told by police – get this – that she had not committed a crime but that they needed "to ascertain what your thinking was behind making your statement". You might want to just slowly re-read that sentence. Yes, you have not misread it. The police wanted to "ascertain her thinking" – even though she had not committed a crime.
Scottish National Party MP Joanna Cherry – a QC – quite rightly described this as "the stuff of totalitarianism." And Roddy Dunlop QC, Scotland's most senior advocate, whose legal experience is arguably second to none in that country, said the incident was disturbing, adding: "We don't have the thought police in this country. Or at least we shouldn't."
These cases are not isolated ones, of course – others could be cited, such as that of barrister Sarah Phillimore, who in 2020 was reported to the police for comments on social media referring to transgender men as "men". As Phillimore said, she was victimised "for doing nothing other than exercising my rights to protected political speech..."
All this comes against the wider backdrop of a recent speech by the UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel who – whatever one makes of her policies and actions more generally – quite rightly urged police to stop recording so-called hate incidents that are not crimes, because of concerns about free speech.
And meanwhile, police are solving the "lowest proportion of crimes on record" with just six per cent of all crimes resulting in a charge in the year to September 2021, according to Home Office figures released a few days ago.
As Christians we should be hugely concerned about this continuing erosion of the right to free speech – and indeed to think freely! The facts speak for themselves – it scarcely needs me to spell out the chilling implications.
But at the same time, of course, we need to keep in mind the Christian imperative to love – and especially, in this general context, to love transgender people. As Mark Yarhouse, professor of psychology at Regent University – a private Christian establishment in Virginia – and director of the Institute for the Study of Sexual Identity, has written: "We will be tempted to join in the culture wars about sex and gender that fall closely on the heels of the wars about sexual behaviour and marriage. But in most cases, the church is called to rise above those wars and present a witness to redemption."
He adds, most crucially: "Certainly we can extend to a transgender person the grace and mercy we so readily count on in our own lives."
In sum: we must keep on speaking up for freedom. And we should keep on offering love, grace and gospel transformation to all those caught up in a society which is so disturbingly adrift from the moral anchors it desperately needs.
David Baker is Contributing Editor to Christian Today and Senior Editor of Evangelicals Now www.e-n.org.uk in print and online. He writes here in a purely personal capacity.
