‘Orwellian’ treatment of trans poem tweeter
A TWITTER user is to make a complaint to the Home Secretary after police investigated him for retweeting a poem which suggested transgender women are still men.
Harry Miller is furious at his ‘Orwellian’ treatment by an officer who rang to check his ‘thinking’ after he had ‘liked’ a limerick which includes the lines: ‘You’re a man. Your breasts are made of silicone... And we can tell the difference... Your hormones are synthetic.’
In all, the company director – a former policeman – had posted about 30 tweets on transgender issues when he was called by a police officer, who introduced himself as ‘representing the LGBTQ community’ after being contacted with a complaint.
According to Mr Miller, 53, of Nettleton in Lincolnshire, the complainant was an unknown member of the public who had found him via his plant management company and decided ‘if I employed trans people at all, it was not a safe space for them’. The officer, PC Mansoor Gul of Humberside Police, told Mr Miller he had seen 30 of his tweets.
When asked if any contained ‘criminal material’, the policeman read the poem.
Mr Miller said: ‘A cop read me a limerick over the phone. I said, “I didn’t write that”. He said, “Ah, but you liked it and promoted it”. I asked why he was wasting his time on a non-crime. He said,“It’s not a crime, but it will be recorded as a hate incident”.’
Mr Miller added: ‘The cop told me that he needed to speak with me because, even though I’d committed no crime whatsoever, he needed, and I quote, “to check my thinking”. Seriously.
‘Finally, he lectured me. He said, “Sometimes, a woman’s brain grows a man’s body in the womb and that is what transgender is”.’
Mr Gul told The Daily Telegraph: ‘I said to Mr Miller that the limerick is the kind of thing that upsets the transgender community.
‘I warned him that if it escalates, we will take further action.’
Humberside Police said all hate incident reports are taken seriously.