By Inga Berenson

Freedom of speech took another big hit in the United Kingdom last month. In response to a complaint filed by Susie Green, CEO of Mermaids, the Yorkshire police interrogated Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull because of some tweets she posted in 2016 and 2017. Known on Twitter as ThePosieParker, Ms. Keen-Minshull is a stay-at-home wife and mother of four.

Mermaids is a nonprofit organization based in the UK. According to its website, Mermaids “supports children and young people up to 20 years old who are gender diverse, and their families, and professionals involved in their care.”

The offending words

According to Ms. Keen-Minshull’s account, Ms. Green objected to a tweet stating that “the CEO of Mermaids took her 16-year-old to Thailand and got him castrated.”

For this tweet and others criticizing Mermaids for promoting pediatric transition, Ms. Keen-Minshull was “interviewed under caution” for 40 minutes on February 23, 2018. She now awaits the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision on whether she will be charged. According to Ms. Keen-Minshull, the potential charges against her are “nuisance, public order, malicious communications compounded with a potential hate crime.”

On the crowd-funder site she has set up to raise funds for her legal defense, Ms. Keen-Minshull writes, “This fight is not whether you agree with my views on [the] transgender issue as much as it is that you agree that I have a right to air my views, a right to voice an opinion, a right to free speech.”

Without question, Ms. Keen-Minshull’s tweets were strongly worded, but were they untrue?

Unmasking euphemisms

It is not disputed that eight years ago Ms. Green took her 16-year-old child to Thailand to receive gender reassignment surgery, which was and still is illegal for minors in the UK and is now illegal in Thailand. (In fact, the legal age for SRS was raised to 18 not long after the Greens went there for the surgery.)

In a 2012 BBC 3 documentary, Ms. Green confirmed that her child underwent full GRS in Thailand. The narrator [4:15] states that Ms. Green’s child was “the youngest person in the world to change gender through surgery.”

It must indeed have been painful for Ms. Green to see a tweet in which someone says she had her child castrated, but the statement is not untrue. In fact, this type of surgery involves far more than castration, which refers only to the removal of the testicles in natal males. But Ms. Keen-Minshull used the word “castrated” to make an important point: GRS is a euphemism that conceals the drastic nature of this medical intervention.

And if it seems unfair that Ms. Keen-Minshull singles out Ms. Green, we must remember that she is not merely a mother who did what she believed to be right for her child. As CEO of Mermaids, she is an advocate for the use of these interventions in other people’s children. Mermaids has provided training and education to various UK government agencies, including schools and (interestingly) the UK police force. Mermaids representatives regularly attend Pride parades and other events to reach out to gender-nonconforming children and teens to inform them about transition. Ms. Green cannot reasonably expect that others won’t point out the full reality of these interventions if she is promoting them for other children.

Ms. Keen-Minshull also came under fire for a tweet that said Mermaids “prey[s] on homosexual teens,” alluding to the organization’s efforts to reach out to gender nonconforming and gender dysphoric children, many of whom (many decades of research have shown) grow up to be gay or lesbian.

The 4thWaveNow website has previously featured articles about Mermaids and its influence on UK policymaking, as well as their efforts to circumvent parents and appeal directly to children and teens.

Although our website hosts authors from both North America and the UK, 4thWaveNow is based in the United States, which protects the freedom of speech via the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution. If that were not the case, we too might have been interrogated by the police, because Ms. Green’s complaint (which we have seen but are not at liberty to share at this time) also cited a tweet we issued in the summer of 2017:

We decided to raise this question in our tweet, after seeing this one posted by Mermaids a few weeks earlier:

As parents of current or formerly trans-identified teens, we are concerned that Mermaids is trying to influence teens whose parents do not share the organization’s definition of “unsupportive.” (In fact, as parents who try to help our kids find ways to feel comfortable in their natural bodies – at least until they are adults, we are being supportive.) And the fact that Mermaids feels empowered to publicly state its intention to influence teens like ours is all the more troubling.

We and Ms. Keen-Minshull are far from alone in believing that Mermaids oversteps appropriate boundaries in advocating for transgender services for children. In October 2016, a court removed a seven-year-old child from his mother’s custody because she was found to have essentially groomed her child into a transgender identity. The mother had been receiving support from Mermaids. The court reportedly ordered the child should have no further contact with the charity. (See “The boy who ‘lived in stealth’: Judge challenges ‘emerging orthodoxy.’”)

Twitter’s role in the interrogation of Ms. Keen-Minshull

Although it’s troubling enough to think that a supposed democratic Western nation would interrogate someone for expressing her opinion, it’s even more troubling to hear that a US-based company revealed the person’s identity to the government. According to Ms. Keen-Minshull, the police informed her that they had obtained her contact information from Twitter.

This is not the first time that Twitter has shown its bias in the battle between adherents of gender ideology and those who see dangers in it. Gender-critical individuals have had their Twitter accounts suspended for merely stating that “transwomen are men” while adherents of gender ideology regularly direct misogynistic language like “cunt” or “Kill All TERFs” at people who disagree with them.

It turns out that individuals associated with Mermaids are also guilty of mud-slinging on Twitter. “Helen” (@Mimmymum), who has frequently stated she is a member of Mermaids, regularly brandishes the word “bigot” at those who don’t share her opinions. In a tweet referring to Dr. Ray Blanchard, an American-Canadian sexologist, best known for his research studies on transsexualism and sexual orientation, she writes:

Both sides of this debate are exercising their democratic right to express their opinions and their concerns about public policy, but it appears that both the UK police and Twitter have chosen to respect the rights of the one while disregarding the rights of the other.

Uncomfortable truths

Ms. Green and her organization suggest that those who oppose the transitioning of minors are motivated by bigotry and hate. They refuse to acknowledge that this opposition could stem from genuine concern for the welfare of children and outrage that organizations like hers promote transition so eagerly and misrepresent the realities of it.

In a segment on BBC Newsnight in November 2016, Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of the organization Transgender Trend, said that “the treatment pathway [for treating trans-identified children is] … cross-sex hormones…. It leads to children being sterilized and on medication for life.” When the interviewer asked Ms. Green if this were correct, she answered, “Well, no,” then changed the subject. (See “Should Mermaids be permitted to influence UK public policy on ‘trans kids’?”)

Yet this statement is correct, and it’s acknowledged to be so by clinicians who promote and administer these treatments. While the word “castration” may be jarring, Ms. Keen-Minshull used it because it exposed the reality that activists like Ms. Green would evidently rather conceal.

Ms. Keen-Minshull believes strongly, as do we at 4thWaveNow, that drastic interventions like these deserve public scrutiny. To be able to express our concerns about these interventions, we must be able to name them. If people no longer have the right to speak uncomfortable truths because others may find them offensive, a democratic society is no longer possible.

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