Oh no, not annoyance
So a woman is actually being prosecuted for telling a man he’s a man. Sorry to link to the Mail, but naturally the better sources are looking fixedly in the other direction.
[Kate] Scottow, 38, will face magistrates on charges of making malicious communications over social media comments about trans campaigner Stephanie Hayden.
The Crown Prosecution Service said she had been charged over ‘persistent’ messages designed to cause ‘annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety’ to another person between September 2018 and May 2019.
There’s something of an infinite regression here, it seems. Is she being prosecuted for “misgendering” or is it for persistent tweeting at someone? The CPS quote looks as if it’s the latter, but if it is, then why aren’t there more prosecutions for persistent tweeting at someone? Because of the subject matter? No, because of the persistence. But then why…etc.
Last night, a CPS spokesman said the charge against Mrs Scottow had been authorised on August 21 ‘after reviewing a file of evidence from Hertfordshire Police relating to social media posts’.
She is due to appear at Stevenage Magistrates’ Court on September 18.
Her case comes six months after Britain’s first transgender hate crime prosecution was halted by a judge who declared: ‘There is no case and never was a case.’
Miranda Yardley, 51, said she was put through ten months of hell after being accused of harassing a transgender activist on Twitter.
But District Judge John Woollard dismissed the case after a one-day hearing at Basildon Magistrates’ Court in Essex, saying there was no evidence of a crime.
It’s interesting that women (for instance) get persistently harassed on Twitter all the time yet we don’t see prosecutions…do we? Carl Benjamin got bounced off Patreon and he lost an election, but he was never prosecuted as far as I know. Is there possibly a different standard for men persistently harassing women versus women persistently harassing men who say they are women? Or am I just imagining things.
And the harassment of women is much more severe and frequently dangerous than just calling a man a man. Rape threats. Death threats. Threatening the parents. Anything and everything a misogynist can think of, they do, and then shooters take up guns, leave long tedious manifestos about the evils of women, and go off to shoot lots of people.
But, well, women, right? Not harassment unless done by women.
I wonder if her lawyer will go for an absolute defense.
Looks like the Crown Prosecution Service in this case is going to need some
re-education and indoctrinationsensitivity training around trans issues from a qualified TRA instructor, along with a recalibration of their scale-of-charges-with-regard-to-offence meter. Everybody knows misgendering is actual violence. And over this period of time? Scottow should be getting a life sentence. She’s just lucky that the UK doesn’t have the death penalty. If she lived in Vancouver (or if she were to be transported there-I hear Australia is no longer a destination for this kind of sentencesentence), there would seem to be any number of eager volunteers willing to “overreact” and do what needed to be done in order to Make the World a Better Place.The cops seem to be hanging their hats on claiming that she created a second Twitter account and dropped truth-bombs on Mister Hayden from there. Apparently, the dainty little Mister Hayden is only able to swing golf clubs and is incapable of swinging his huge paws over to the BLOCK feature on Twitter which would have kept this woman from “harassing” him so horribly.
Amazing how real women are told “just block anybody who bothers you” yet a man who refuses to block and instead happily engages with his “harasser” over and over again suddenly needs smelling salts and a criminal charge filed.
Well, it’s true, us men are delicate, flower scented, snowflakes.
Actually, on reflection, it’s occurred to me that as a fairly liberal, progressiveness person, I get upset at people being treated unfairly, discriminated against and shitty behaviour in general. When people say mean things about me I either ignore it because (a) demonstrably untrue so who cares, (b) irrelevant even if true, so WTF, or (c) has a grain/shit ton of truth so have to own it. So many of the conservatives/right wing types I know are utterly indifferent to other people being treated unfairly, discriminated against and shitty behaviour in general. But by jeebus, say an even slightly mean thing about them and it is the literal holocaust. Then, without irony, they turn around and describe people like me as delicate while still wiping the tears from their cheeks.
“… then why aren’t there more prosecutions for persistent tweeting at someone?”
This is one of those ridiculously broadly worded UK laws. The law says: “a person is guilty of an offence if he/she […] persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network to cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another”.
This law dates from the time when “makes use of a public electronic communications network” meant telephoning someone in person. And one can see that if you do phone someone multiple times a day to yell at them than that’s not OK. The law was never intended to apply to social media (which had not been invented when it was passed).
Thus we are left with a ludicrous law, whose current application is now arbitrary and capricious. In other words, the authorities can take a dislike to someone (or succumb to pressure from complaints) and use this law against them.
One might hope that magistrates would always through such ridiculous prosecutions out, but as we’ve learned from the “rap lyrics” conviction and the Count Dankula case, sadly they don’t.