Here we go again. Another woman in Britain is facing a police investigation – and potentially, a jail sentence – because she wrote things online about sex, gender and a person who changed gender.
So far, so familiar, but this tale has a significant feature. The woman is a journalist. A British police force is investigating a journalist over words that she published.
Caroline Farrow, 44, is the subject of an investigation by Surrey Police over tweets she sent referring to the adult child of Susie Green, head of Mermaids, a charity concerned with transgender children. Farrow says the investigation arises because she ‘misgendered’ the child, who was born male but now identifies as female.
Farrow is a columnist and occasional TV commentator. She writes and speaks from a Catholic perspective about a number of issues including education, family policy, euthanasia and gender. Her political and religious stance makes her relatively unusual among women who question transgender orthodoxy; a significant number of ‘gender critical’ feminists are on the left of politics, while others profess no particular political or religious affiliations.
I point this out here because some people are keen to suggest that anyone who challenges the trans rights agenda is automatically a right-wing culture warrior possibly in league with Christian conservatives in America. There will no doubt be those who cite Farrow’s faith as proof of that thesis. In fact, I’d suggest it proves the opposite: it shows you can find women (and men) who worry about gender issues right across the political and social spectrum.
Farrow told me that on Monday this week an officer from a police station in Guildford had contacted her to tell her she was to be interviewed under caution in relation to tweets she sent last year some time after September, when she appeared on ITV’s Good Morning Britain with Susie Green of Mermaids, a charity.
Farrow said:
‘I am being interviewed under caution for misgendering Susie Green’s daughter. It’s all rather Orwellian and rather scary.
‘The thing is, I can’t even remember what I said. My tweets automatically delete after two weeks, so they are [investigating] me for tweets which have been deleted but which caused offense to Susie Green.’
She believes the force are investigating potential ‘malicious communications’, which would mean a possible breach of the UK Communications Act 2003.
Section 127 of that Act relates to the ‘improper use of public electronic communications networks’ and says a person is guilty of an offense if he
‘(a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or (b)causes any such message or matter to be so sent.
A person can also offend under s127:
‘if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he (a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false, (b) causes such a message to be sent; or (c) persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.’
Someone convicted of such an offense can be fined, or jailed for up to six months.
Surrey Police confirmed that an investigation is indeed underway, and has been for some time:
‘We received an allegation on October 15 2018 in relation to a number of tweets which were posted in October 2018.
‘A thorough investigation is being carried out to establish whether any criminal offenses have taken place.
‘A 44-year-old woman has been asked to attend a voluntary interview in relation to the allegation as part of our ongoing investigation.’
Farrow says the heart of this issue is ‘misgendering’. She says the police told her that in her tweets, she had ‘misgendered’ Susie Green’s child and by doing so had potentially broken the law.
Susie Green is the CEO of Mermaids, a small but influential charity whose activities include providing a helpline for gender-variant children and their families, training course, and ‘lobbying and advocacy’ on transgender issues.
Green can speak from personal experience of this issue, and has done so. One of her children is Jackie Green, once described by the BBC as ‘world’s youngest transsexual’.
Jackie Green, who identifies as female, was born male and was once known as Jack. After hormone treatment in the US to prevent the onset of male puberty, Jackie Green underwent ‘penis inversion’ surgery in Thailand at the age of 16, the youngest person ever to undergo such a procedure. (That was in around 2010. Thailand has since changed the law to set a minimum age of 18 for such surgery.)
Some transgender people find references to their former gender distressing. They say ‘deadnaming’ (using their previous name) or ‘misgendering’ (using the pronouns of their natal sex, not their identified gender) are upsetting. I do not know if Jackie Green takes that view.
I do know that Susie Green has made several public comments about her child’s past anatomy and gender identity, including in a 2012 BBC documentary (Transsexual Teen, Beauty Queen) when she said this:
‘Having the anatomy of a boy was a constant reminder that she still wasn’t who she wanted to be.’
The documentary also includes some footage of Susie Green discussing the detail of that inversion surgery, with what appears to be a degree of amusement. See this for the clip in question:
This is Susie Munchausen-by-proxy Green, laughing about her child’s puberty blocked micro-penis pic.twitter.com/5vj2DLjs5q
— #istandwithJKRowling (@bloominanna) December 16, 2018
In 2015, Susie Green wrote an Independent column about her family’s experiences, which begins thus:
‘At four years old, my child told me that God had made a mistake, and that he should have been a girl.’
In summary, Susie Green has publicly stated the fact that Jackie Green was born physically male, and publicly used a male pronoun in reference to Jackie Green on at least one occasion.
Meanwhile, Caroline Farrow says she is under investigation by the police for referring to Jackie Green as Susie Green’s son.
Since the investigation is ongoing and some of the details remain unclear, I will say no about this for now, other than to repeat the core fact of the case:
A British police force is investigating a journalist because of words that she published.
Update 3/20 2:30p.m. ET: After this article was first published, the BBC has broadcast an interview with Susie Green of Mermaids, and shown images of the tweets by Farrow that were the subject of Green’s complaint to the police. Both are worth discussing in some depth.
Among the tweets, sent on October 4, 2018:
‘Susie Green is in breech [sic] of Samaritan policy on how suicide should be discussed and broached in media. What she did to her own son is illegal. She mutilated him by having him castrated and rendered sterile while still a child.’
‘Susie Green may feel that giving her son off-label illegal medication aged 11 and drastic surgery was the path of least harm in her circumstances but she shouldn’t project and impose it on other vulnerable kids as best practice.’
‘I think it’s time everyone called out Susie Green and Mermaids policy out for what it is. Child abuse.’
To be clear here, Susie Green has never been convicted of any crime, denies absolutely any sort of ‘child abuse’ and insists that her actions have all been taken with the best interests of her child in mind.
Having now reported those tweets, it may be useful for me to expand on the facts about Jackie Green I set out earlier. To be clear, we know the basic facts of Jackie Green’s history because the Green family have put them in the public domain in a number of media interviews over the last seven years:
Before the age of 16, Jackie Green received hormone treatment at a private clinic in the US. Such treatments were not have been available on the NHS at the time and current NHS rules forbid cross-sex hormone treatment to children under 16.
At the age of 16, Jackie Green traveled to Thailand to undergo sex-realignment surgery (something her mother has described in a television interview as involving the removal of the penis). Such surgery is not permitted below the age of 18 in the UK. While this was legal for a 16-year-old in Thailand at the time of Jackie Green’s surgery, Thailand later changed its law: it is today illegal in Thailand to carry out such surgery on anyone under the age of 18.
According to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, ‘having genital reconstructive surgery will prevent you from having biological children without the use of a surrogate or interventional fertility treatments.’
Susie Green was then interviewed by the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire. She confirmed that she had complained to the police about the tweets, because she found them ‘deeply upsetting’.
She also said that she has now withdrawn the complaint, because she did not wish to be restricted in her ability to comment by any legal process, and because she did not wish to give Farrow more publicity.
Interestingly, Green appeared to confirm that she had complained to the police about Farrow because Farrow is a journalist with a public platform. She also talked about the role ‘misgendering’ had played in her complaint, appearing both to deny complaining because of ‘misgendering’ while also saying that it was indeed a reason for her complaint. (I’ve bolded some notable parts of her comments.)
She said:
‘Every day my daughter is misgendered online…this was a journalist who had a public platform who used that to send very deliberately malicious and nasty messages.
‘It’s not just the misgendering, it’s actually the context that she puts it in to, and that she calls me a child abuser.’
Green was asked if she had complained because Farrow had ‘misgendered’ Jackie Green.
She replied: ‘No.’
She was then asked if she had complained because of Farrow’s comment about child abuse.
She replied:
‘Yup – and the stuff around mutilation. And the fact she repeatedly refers to my daughter as a boy, but that’s not the key point here.’
She also said that she believed that Farrow had broken the law by referring to Jackie Green, prior to surgery, as male:
She said: ‘Saying that Jackie before surgery is male and should be referred to as a boy is completely wrong and goes against the Equality Act 2010.’
In the light of those comments, I think it is useful to offer a new summary of this case:
Caroline Farrow is a journalist who says she is the subject of a police inquiry because she referred to Susie Green’s male-born transgender child as male. Susie Green says she complained to the police about Caroline Farrow’s comments for a number of reasons, one of which was that Caroline Farrow misgendered her child. She also says that another factor in her decision to complain was the fact that Caroline Farrow is a journalist. And the police responded to her complaint by launching an investigation into Caroline Farrow.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
