Helen Joyce is an author and a gender critical activist who recently discovered that she’d been quietly listed as a criminal by the UK police. She wrote a story this week about how that happened. It all started with a public debate facing off against some trans rights activists.
It was a miserable evening. [Freda] Wallace drank throughout, insulted me and insulted the audience. He bragged of having sex with lesbians as a “sperm-producing female” and f***ing men with his “female penis in fetish clubs”.
She wrote about the debate, posted a few tweets about it and then forgot about until a year later.
A year later friends alerted me that another trans-identifying man, Lynsay Watson, was claiming on social media to have reported me to the police for sexually harassing a trans woman.
Watson, a former police officer, had been sacked for gross misconduct in 2023 after a campaign of online harassment against a friend of mine, Harry Miller — more about that anon. The police would soon be at my doorstep, Watson gloated…
My “crime”? Four tweets about Wallace at that event, reported by Watson because Wallace, the delicate flower, was “greatly upset”. In them I called Wallace a man, he/him and a fetishist — all true. I also called him “Fred”.
The claims against Joyce were processed and they decided she had committed no prosecutable crime. That should have been the end of it, but in the UK it is not. The police had recorded it as a non-crime hate incident.
…they had recorded an actual crime — criminal harassment — flagged with the hate crime aggravator “transgender”. It was coded “outcome 15”, police jargon for when a crime has been committed, the suspect has been identified and the victim supports prosecution, but “evidential difficulties” make it impossible to investigate.
Joyce isn’t the only person who has been recorded as having committed a non-crime hate incident on the word of the same trans activist.
Amongst the other people I know who’ve been reported by Watson are another journalist, a criminal barrister and a retired senior police officer with an unblemished record. One “crime” — referring to a murdered trans-identifying boy as a boy — was immediately dismissed by police.
All of this traces back to a law originally designed to record racial hate incidents so that police could spot patterns. Over time, other groups including trans women were added to the list of protected categories covered by the law. That mean, in practice, that any trans person making a complaint was automatically treated as potentially worthy of being recorded for posterity even if police decide no crime has been committed.
The definition of “hateful” merely requires hostility or prejudice, which aren’t strictly defined, but Home Office guidance says they can be as minor as “unfriendliness” or “dislike”. The person making the report doesn’t have to have anything to do with the incident, and the police don’t have to check that it actually happened.
It’s a perfect situation for ideologically motivated activists looking to abuse the system to punish their political enemies. Joyce points out that the current law leaves a mark against people who haven’t been prosecuted or found guilty and gives added credibility to people based on identity rather than facts. Both of these seem to go against the legal ideals that everyone is equal under the law and that people are innocent until proven guilty.
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