{"id":77249,"date":"2023-09-03T20:35:28","date_gmt":"2023-09-03T20:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/posterboyedit.com\/?p=77249"},"modified":"2023-09-03T20:35:28","modified_gmt":"2023-09-03T20:35:28","slug":"suella-braverman-flags-police-quizzing-oap-on-gender-rights-sticker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/posterboyedit.com\/world-news\/suella-braverman-flags-police-quizzing-oap-on-gender-rights-sticker\/","title":{"rendered":"Suella Braverman flags police quizzing OAP on gender rights sticker"},"content":{"rendered":"
Suella Braverman has voiced alarm at the case of a pensioner quizzed over a sticker which said ‘keep males out of women-only spaces’.<\/p>\n
The Home Secretary highlighted the episode involving a 73-year-old social worker as an example of police ‘straying into politically contentious matters’.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Officers apparently questioned the woman in her own home after she stopped to take a photograph of the sticker in the street.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It had been placed on to a LGBT+ pride poster which had the slogan Stand By Your Trans. Officers told the 73-year-old retired social worker that she had been identified from CCTV footage.<\/p>\n
The woman told The Mail on Sunday she was ‘in a state of shock’ when officers arrived at her door. The incident happened in Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire \u2013 the setting for BBC crime drama Happy Valley about no-nonsense policewoman Catherine Cawood. It comes after fury over police forces failing to send officers to investigate burglaries and other serious crimes.<\/p>\n
Last night, the woman said she had stopped to take a photo with her phone because she agreed with its message that transgender\u00a0women \u2013 who were born male \u2013 should not be allowed into women-only spaces such as changing rooms.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She did not share the image on social media and only took the photo to show to her partner when she got home.<\/p>\n
But several days later, while she was caring for her seriously ill female partner, two uniformed officers from West Yorkshire Police came calling.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The sticker had been placed on to a LGBT+ pride poster which had the slogan Stand By Your Trans. Officers told the 73-year-old retired social worker that she had been identified from CCTV footage<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Home Secretary highlighted the episode involving a 73-year-old social worker as an example of police ‘straying into politically contentious matters’<\/p>\n
‘They gave me a long lecture about the sensitivity of the issue, and how something like this could cause harassment and alarm to the community,’ she said. ‘They were investigating it as a hate crime, which is outrageous. I was in a state of shock.’<\/p>\n
The pensioner, who insisted that she didn’t put the sticker on the poster, said she believed she was reported to the police by LGBT+ community group Happy Valley Pride which had put up the Stand By Your Trans poster on an A-board outside the town hall in March.<\/p>\n
The group knew the woman’s identity from when she previously wrote to them with her concerns about transgender women being allowed into single-sex spaces. The woman, who said she had complained to West Yorkshire Police about her treatment, asked not to be named over fears of reprisals from online trolls and activists.<\/p>\n
‘I think they wanted to correct my thinking,’ she added. ‘They are getting involved in a very divided and toxic debate, but it’s not their role to arbitrate political disagreements. I felt as if they were trying to gag a dissenting voice by harassing me in my own home.’<\/p>\n
The police log, which she obtained via a data access request, stated that they had given her ‘words of advice . . . regards the harassment and alarm that this sticker could potentially cause to the community’.<\/p>\n
Posting on the X social media site today, Ms Braverman said: ‘This is exactly what I had in mind when writing to police chiefs and commissioning the\u00a0@HMICFRS review over forces straying into politically contentious matters.’<\/p>\n
West Yorkshire has the second-highest crime rate in the UK, but more than 90 per cent of cases go unsolved in the area, according to official figures.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ms Braverman has raised concerns about police getting involved in gender issues<\/p>\n
The same force provoked outrage last month when officers arrested a 16-year-old autistic girl in Leeds for suggesting that a short-haired police officer resembled her ‘lesbian nana’. Viral footage showed seven officers manhandling the girl, who cried out in distress as they took her into custody for a suspected ‘homophobic public-order offence’. The case was later dropped.<\/p>\n
Harry Miller, a former police officer, last night accused the officers of ‘thought policing’. He set up the free-speech group Fair Cop after he was investigated in 2019 for posting a limerick on social media suggesting that transgender women are still men. The case was later dropped and he won a High Court case against Humberside Police.<\/p>\n
He said: ‘How can a woman photographing a sticker cause alarm and distress to the Happy Valley Pride community? There is politically correct rot at the heart of West Yorkshire policing.’<\/p>\n
Stella O’Malley, psychotherapist and founder of international group Genspect, said: ‘It’s not the job of the police to decide that taking a photo is a hate crime.’<\/p>\n
West Yorkshire Police said it had recorded the matter as a ‘non-crime hate incident’, adding: ‘Words of advice were given regarding the placing of the sticker, as it was reported to have caused offence.’<\/p>\n