Police raid home of disabled woman over ‘anti-trans’ posters, seize book: ‘like the Stasi’
Police in South Wales arrested a women’s rights campaigner for putting up stickers and posters in defense of women and children against trans-ideology and confiscated an academic book from her home.
Women’s activist Jennifer Swayne, who is disabled, calls her arrest last week for placing posters around Newport “absolutely ridiculous,” BBC reported, adding that she said police also took away an academic book of essays on “the theory and practice of transgendering children,” “hundreds of stickers” and “loads of notes” after they raided her home.
She said it was like “the bloody Stasi” — the state security service of the East German communist government in the 1950s.
Police in South Wales said they received six complaints about offensive posters and arrested Swayne on suspicion of criminal damage and displaying threatening or abusive writing likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress, The Telegraph reported.
The posters she put up were made at home, she said.
One poster read, “No child is born in the wrong body, humans never change sex.” Another said, “Respect women’s spaces.” Some posters said women were in danger in prisons from trans-identified sex offenders and called for “no men in women’s prisons.”
“I have never made a sticker with the word trans in it. This is about women at risk,” she was quoted as saying.
Last June, a U.K. high court judge ruled in favor of a woman, Maya Forstater, who was fired from her job at the Center for Global Development in 2019 because she stated on social media that men could not become women.
The judge, Akhlaq Ur-Rahman Choudhury, said in the written judgment that Forstater’s beliefs were protected under the Equality Act because they “did not seek to destroy the rights of trans persons.”
“Just as the legal recognition of civil partnerships does not negate the right of a person to believe that marriage should only apply to heterosexual couples, becoming the acquired gender ‘for all purposes’ within the meaning of GRA does not negate a person’s right to believe, like the claimant, that as a matter of biology a trans person is still their natal sex,” the judgment read in part.
In the United States, female inmates in the California prison system have said they are fearful and are at risk of being “prey for men” after the state began allowing men who identify as women to be transferred to women’s-only prisons.
As all sex inside the prison system is deemed non-consensual by default, the influx of men in women’s-only facilities only increases the risk of rapes and pregnancies, the radical feminist group Women’s Liberation Front, said last July.
At a captains’ meeting at the Central California Women’s Facility last year, a woman reportedly read a statement in which she implored prison staff for help, and said correctional officers disregarded their fears about having to share close quarters with a serial rapist.
“How do we feel safe in our community? When we reach out for help we get nothing. … There has been an assault on a woman and we still are silenced. We have had our hope taken away once again. Does anyone care that we are being forced to house with 6’2, 250-pound men with penises that are here for brutally raping women? We have been warned by the officials in this prison, more are coming with worse charges. Where is the safety concern for us? If we say we are in fear, we are the ones locked up,” the woman protested.