What roaring nonsense that hard-pressed police began to investigate two women having a transgender spat on Twitter

FIVE years ago, most of us wouldn’t have understood transgender politics. Now there is a growing movement, few in number, perhaps, but very loud in voice, whose members are apt to grab their opponents and give them a good shake.

For example, the Open University has just reportedly cancelled a prison reform conference after pressure from transgender activists. They took exception to the organiser’s advice on transgender prisoners.

These activists object to the notion that ‘trans women’ (people who were born men but have ‘transitioned’) pose a threat to ‘real women’ in prison. Some feminists think they might. There is a ferocious debate.

Well, to be accurate there isn’t much of a debate at all but an awful lot of name-calling and general lobbing of grenades. Transgender politics make the convulsions over Brexit look like an amiable stroll in the park.

The latest acrimonious stand- off concerns Caroline Farrow, a Catholic commentator, and Susie Green, a transgender- rights activist. It is significant because it illuminates the nature of a conflict which in this case — and not for the first time — is soaking up a lot of police time.

The two crossed swords after appearing together last September on ITV’s Good Morning Britain following a decision by Girlguiding to dismiss two leaders who refused to apply the organisation’s policy not to inform parents when a transgender child joins. AFTER an encounter during which there wasn’t much meeting of minds, the two ladies took to Twitter to continue their quarrel. In a flurry of exchanges, Mrs Farrow angered Ms Green by using the wrong pronoun to describe her daughter.

I should explain that this daughter (who is now grownup) was taken to Thailand by Ms Green aged 16 (when he was a boy) and had an operation for gender reassignment. Such a procedure was, and remains, illegal at that age in Britain, and has since become so in Thailand.

In a spirit of fairness, I should point out that the daughter, who is now called Jackie, aged 24 and living in Italy, is entirely supportive of what was done to her. She evidently does not see herself in any sense a victim.

To return to those tweets: offended by having had her daughter referred to as her ‘ son’, and possibly by the belligerent tone of Mrs Farrow’s outpourings, Ms Green lodged a complaint with Surrey police, who began to investigate a ‘hate crime’.

This is the same police force, I should say, which declared several years ago that it would stop investigating some minor crimes after being forced to make £25 million of cuts over four years and losing 250 staff.

Some of Mrs Farrow’s tweets were undoubtedly aggressive. For example, she wrote that Ms Green ‘had mutilated [her son] by having him castrated and rendered sterile while still a child’. Rude, yes, and possibly wrongly implying coercion. But a crime? I very much doubt it.

Let me add that this is not the first time that Ms Green (who apart from being a mother is chief executive of Mermaid UK, the country’s largest charity supporting transgender children) has turned to the boys in blue for a helping hand.

Last year she objected to a string of tweets from someone called Kel lie-Jay KeenMinshull, who wrote, rather bluntly one must say, that Ms Green ‘took her 16-year-old to Thailand and got him castrated’. Keen-Minshull was interviewed by Yorkshire police under caution.

Isn’t this all roaring nonsense? The police never tire of telling us how over- stretched they are, and yet find the time to interrogate two women for writing nothing more than provocative online communication to someone who holds the top position in a large charity, and must surely have learned how to take it.

Far be it from me to suggest that Ms Green was trying to gain publicity by referring these two matters to the police! And far be it from me to suggest that she recently asked Surrey police to cease their inquiry because she fears being embarrassed by this idiocy.

The fact is that many alleged hate crimes aren’t worth investigating, either because they are impossible to prove or no crime has occurred. According to recent figures, nearly half of investigations into hate crimes in some parts of the country are being closed without police identifying a suspect.

All the same, hate crimes are in many ways much more agreeable for the police to look into than cases of alleged assault or armed robbery or burglary, where in many places the clear-up rate is close to zero.

Might there be another factor, though? Is it possible that politically sensitive police chiefs are anxious not to be accused of that most heinous of modern crimes — ‘transphobia’ — as a result of not taking complaints from people such as Susie Green seriously?

Almost everybody — except pugnacious characters possibly yearning for the limelight, such as Caroline Farrow and KellieJay Keen-Minshull — is terrified of the transgender lobby.

Yesterday, Cambridge University rescinded an offer of a visiting fellowship to Jordan Peterson, a Canadian professor who has been critical of the transgender lobby, following a backlash from Left- wing activists and academics. HOW pusillanimous! How utterly supine! Mr Peterson is a famous intellectual with an impressive array of ideas, which is why Cambridge invited him in the first place. But the institution is plainly is frightened of being targeted by extremists.

The reason I don’t much respect transgender activists as a breed is not so much on account of their beliefs, though I don’t share many of them, as because of the bullying tactics they employ to silence those with whom they disagree.

The feminist Germaine Greer has been repeatedly noplatformed as a result of her stated belief that transgender women are ‘not women’. (She means that a male cannot become female in a complete sense.) Many other feminists who would have once seen themselves as radicals have suffered similar treatment.

Reasonable people can see how awful it must be to be ‘trapped in the wrong body’. But shouldn’t the decision to do something irrevocable about it be left until adulthood?

However happy Ms Green’s daughter is that she had a sexchange operation aged 16, I am shocked her mother let her undergo such a procedure when she was still a child.

I also suspect that most parents are queasy about the idea that children as young as 12 might be subjected to evangelising teachers when compulsory lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) sex education is introduced in schools next year.

Which is why I am sympathetic to the suggestion yesterday by Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom that parents should have a right to stop their children being ‘exposed’ to LGBT rights. Why not, if they fear their offspring might be indoctrinated by teachers with an agenda?

God knows, growing up seems to be more of an angstridden process than ever. Under a barrage of propaganda from committed activists, susceptible teenagers might be persuaded to take an irreversible path they could later regret.

Does it constitute a hate crime in the minds of Surrey police to say that? Possibly. Will I be no-platformed? Who cares? These, I believe, are the thoughts of millions of people who may feel intimidated by extremists in a transgender lobby shutting down debate.