James Kirkup James Kirkup

The journalist investigated by police for ‘using the wrong pronouns’ | 20 March 2019

Here we go again.  Another woman 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 US Christian conservatives. 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 station in Guildford had contacted her to say she would 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.

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James Kirkup
Written by
James Kirkup

James Kirkup is a partner at Apella Advisors and a senior fellow at the Social Market Foundation.

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