What is beyond the lie becomes unreachable

The evidence from Melanie Newman's Tribunal hearing against the Met is alarming; a lie that is common currency in the criminal justice system is especially harmful

On Monday 10th March 2025 the tribunal hearing began to investigate Melanie Newman’s accusations against the Metropolitan Police Service. You can follow the live tweeting of Tribunal Tweets for more detailed background.

Broadly, Newman as a serving police officer, argues that the MPS had not merely allowed but encouraged discrimination against women who believe that sex is real and it matters, by routinely inviting misogynistic activists to ‘train’ the police that any belief in sex as a salient organising category in society was gross ‘transphobia’ and hate.

It seems like Newman did all she could to get the MPS to take her complaints seriously. It would not, and with by now bleak predictability, we fire up yet another Employment Tribunal. The only people happy about this are likely to be the lawyers, whose earnings are secured. The rest of us see simply another bleak carousel ride of discrimination and victimisation, dressed up as moral righteousness.

Ms Newman’s statement is grim reading

47. I felt like an incognito Daniel in the lion’s den. I struggled to square the MPS’ demands that officers challenge comments in private WhatsApp conversations with the unchallenged public endorsement of hostility towards GC people I had witnessed. Given the applause and positive comments in the chat it seemed likely that the audience did not recognise what was said as discriminatory, perhaps because they were not aware of an alternative view or perhaps the speech accorded with their existing views. Either that, or they were acting with impunity. This was especially disconcerting as there were personnel from hate crime policy, HR, legal and CPIE present. I thought these staff would likely be aware of the Forstater ruling and of the societal divide over these issues. I also assumed intelligence staff present - such as Kit Moore - would likely be aware of the risk of public disorder and the need to calm rather than inflame community tensions. I felt that the event, and in particular painting GC women as a threat to trans safety, increased the risk to anyone openly GC. It was extraordinary to me that no-one else seemed to see that.

Of particular note is an online session she attended where mention of Kellie Jay Keen aka Posie Parker, caused an outbreak of ‘hissing’ from the audience. One of the MPS advisers opined on social media that it was ‘hilarious’ to witness Ms Keen, being surrounded by an inflamed mob in New Zealand. The MPS witness in the tribunal after prodding was able to admit that it was ‘plausible’ that Ms Keen was afraid for her life at that moment.

Keen was afraid she would be crushed to death. One woman at the event had her skull fractured in an unprovoked assault by a man. The main instigators of the violence were trans identifying men.

While all this was going on I was fielding messages from two trans identifying men who had booked to stay in my spare room via Air B and B. They had apparently seen my ‘adult human female’ sign in the hallway and ran away. They asked for an immediate refund and said they would not feel safe in my home, and were particularly vulnerable as they were ‘fleeing’ from the United States. I replied that anyone who was clean and tidy was welcome in my home and that I disagreed it was reasonable to feel ‘unsafe’ because of my views - but of course their feelings were their feelings and I wouldn’t attempt to argue with them. I hoped they would find somewhere else to stay.

As far as these exchanges go, it went well - we were all polite to one another, Air B and B refunded their money and doesn’t (yet) appear to have hoicked me from the site for any hate crime.

But I found it very hard to have sympathy with their claims to feel ‘unsafe’. Did they mean uneasy because we had different ideological perspectives on sex and gender? Or did they mean they genuinely considered there was a real risk to their physical safety? That I would try to hurt them?

I think both are sadly likely. Both responses are unreasonable and corrosive. Two young white men, college educated, from one of the wealthiest countries in the world, who can afford international travel, benefit from immense privilege. To declare that it is ‘unsafe’ to be exposed to different views or to suggest that those who hold the different views invariably want to hurt you, must make life an exhausting prospect. But this is what these men are being told. That when women disagree with them, these women want to ‘erase’ them. They are victims of an ongoing ‘genocide’.

They are being told this in the UK by training sessions organised by our police forces, who are then keen to go out and arrest women who hold these ‘unsafe’ views. Documents disclosed in the proceedings show we have only escaped investigation as domestic terrorists because we are ‘extremely smart’ and manage to stay on the right side of the law. The fact that we have escaped arrest and imprisonment because we are right, never appears to cross their minds.

Therefore, I cannot put all the blame on these young men for adopting the narrative that they are uniquely vulnerable, uniquely ‘unsafe’. It is the narrative that almost every public body in most of the western world has been pumping out for years now.

I am frequently told that UK ‘statistics’ show a ‘huge’ rise in hate crime against trans people, but when I try to dig down into the information supplied, often I can see no distinction between what is a mere report, what was investigated and what resulted in conviction. Given that for many years we have been told that merely feeling offended is a criminal offence and will be recorded as such, I can place no reliance at all on those assertions.

Government statistics support my concern that ‘crime’ is used to mean simply anything reported and recorded as a crime.

Police forces have made significant improvements since 2014 in how they record crime. They have also improved their identification of what constitutes a hate crime. Because of these changes, police recorded crime figures do not provide reliable trends in hate crime since 2014. Figures from the police should also not be seen as a good measure of prevalence since not all hate crime is reported to them. The figures do, however, provide a good measure of the hate crime-related demand on the police. For more information, see Section 3: Police recorded hate crime data sources and quality

Conviction rates from West Yorkshire Police illustrate my point February 2025 FOI 2366406-25 Transgender Hate Crimes | West Yorkshire Police

But also while fielding messages from my erstwhile guests and Air B and B support, I was listening to a podcast about Harriet Tubman, her flight from slavery, how she rescued her siblings, how she did all of this with a significant brain injury after being assaulted by a white man. I read about the 8 year old girl in Pakistan who has just died after being raped, and the outrage on the streets about the continuing failure to protect women and girls from male sexual violence.

And I wonder if this narrative about trans identifying men being so uniquely vulnerable is one that is actually very comforting for them. Rather than being part of a privileged and hence ‘uncool’ group, they can claim the attention and the benefits of being a desperately vulnerable cohort - and all the better because it does not involve any actual pain and suffering.

I don’t want to dismiss or be careless about the discrimination that people are likely to face if they are seen as ‘different’. But this narrative that women who believe that sex is real and it matters are ‘dangerous’ has to stop. It’s at best a childish fantasy, at worst part of a truly malign effort to damage women’s rights and women’s safety. A few gobby anonymous accounts on social media cannot be taken as proof that law abiding and reasonable women have suddenly gone mad en masse. Particularly not when we win almost every court case about that discrimination and victimisation that we initiate.

Like any other lie it takes massive effort to scaffold and inevitably diverts attention from real issues. That this lie is routinely and frequently told by our police forces is particularly chilling - how can we trust them to protect us when they show time and time again that they are in thrall to one specific misogynistic ideology?

I offer grateful thanks to Melanie Newman and all the women who have felt they had no choice but to put their head above the parapet. I hope that their efforts and sacrifice will not be in vain. We have to stop bending the knee to a lie.