Female football fan suspended for tweeting ‘trans women are men’
A FOOTBALL fan claims her club suspended her membership after police investigated tweets saying ‘trans women are men’.
The woman, a 34-year- old who lives near Newcastle United’s ground, said she first heard about the inquiry in an email from the club’s security complaints team at the end of last month.
The club said her £37-a-year membership was being suspended as ‘standard practice’ because her alleged ‘malicious communications’ under investigation ‘contravene our ground regulations’.
The woman, who has asked not to be named, voluntarily attended an interview at Northumbria Police’s Forth Banks station on Friday.
She recorded the interview with an officer after being advised to do so by campaign group WeAreFairCop. According to the transcript, the woman was questioned for posting online:
▪ ‘Just your daily reminder that trans women are men’;
▪ ‘This period of time where people are mutilating children will be looked back in history with disgust. I’ll be able to say I never agreed with this’;
▪ Responding to someone who said ‘ Reality is transphobic’ with ‘Yawn’;
▪ Telling someone who said they were a woman they were not.
The transcript records the officer telling her that she is being questioned over alleged breach of the Malicious Communications Act.
The officer reads out the posts, asking her of each of them: ‘Do you think this could be seen as offensive?’ The woman, who said she was alarmed by the questions, answered ‘no comment’ to everything.
The Sunday Telegraph reported yesterday that Newcastle United’s decision to suspend the woman because of the police probe meant she had missed out on priority tickets for big matches.
The woman, who works in hospitality, said that although she understood the police inquiry had been dropped, her club membership remained suspended.
She said: ‘There’s a part of me that feels like I’ve done
‘They’ve put her through hell’
something wrong. I’m a good person and the last thing in the world I would want to do is to hurt someone with my words.’
Harry Miller, spokesman for WeAreFairCop, said of the investigation: ‘They do this to terrorise members of the public. They have put this woman through absolute hell.’
A spokesman for Northumbria Police said: ‘It would be inappropriate to comment.’