A publisher – in fact Hachette, which publishes JK Rowling – asked the trans-cult group Mermaids to check an article for thought crime. The Times reports:

JK Rowling’s publisher invited the transgender activist group Mermaids to review an article in a magazine for A-level law students, which summarised a High Court test case on freedom of expression.

To review an article! Mermaids! Why??!!

The case made headlines in February when the judge likened police to the Gestapo or the Stasi for the way they responded to Harry Miller, 55, a businessman accused of sending transphobic tweets on social media.

Humberside police visited Miller’s place of work and told him his tweets would be recorded as a “non-crime hate incident”. They included a poem about transgender people and one saying: “I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don’t mis-species me.”

Not a police matter, we thought at the time and still think. Not even close to being a police matter. Also, about all those actual threats that are tweeted at women day in and day out? That the police cheerfully ignore from one decade to the next?

Management at Hodder Education, part of Hachette UK, referred the article on the ruling to Mermaids, asking it to suggest “examples we can use to counteract the tone and opinions in the piece” and to suggest changes to “anything you feel is untrue, unfair and/or offensive”.

…

In response to the invitation to suggest changes, the head of legal and policy at Mermaids sent four closely typed pages, including a comment that the article “doesn’t come over as balanced”.

Even before this, Hodder had heavily edited the court report, removing two-thirds of the original, explaining: “We also have to be very careful how we present certain views.”

Publishers and cops have never carried on like this about women or immigrants or the working class – why are the rules so different for trans people?

The author, Ian Yule, protested to the publisher that he had not introduced personal opinions in the article, which was intended to update A-level pupils and their teachers on the court ruling.

“This article contained little or no commentary by me, and no comments whatsoever on the issue of transgenderism,” he said. “My article did not express my own thoughts or beliefs but was a straightforward and accurate report of a High Court judgment.”

He added: “If the judgment of a respected High Court judge is likely to upset such students and their teachers, they have no business studying or teaching this subject.”

In its justification for the intervention, a Hodder editor told him: “The claimant’s [Harry Miller’s] views and the judge’s [Mr Justice Julian Knowles’s] comments about transgender issues would be offensive to most of our readers and our staff.”

Why? Why are people’s offensOmeters set to go off so easily on this subject and this subject alone? Why? Why? Why?

The publisher’s behaviour so angered Yule that he resigned as chairman of the editorial board of A-Level Law Review. He wrote to colleagues: “In the process of ‘reviewing’ my article [Mermaids] effectively destroyed it.”

And what business Mermaids had reviewing it in the first place is unfathomable.

 James Benefield, a senior executive at Hodder, had sent Yule the Mermaids review and told him: “Mermaids have requested quite a few changes here. It is important we do follow all of the attached advice — not only is it from a trans-specialist organisation, it is also from the company lawyer who felt they were best placed to review the piece.”

What exactly is a “trans-specialist organisation”? Mermaids is a fanatical activist organization, one that energetically encourages people to get mutilated to match their fantasies about being the other gender. It’s ludicrous to treat them as some sort of experts who need to vet articles on court rulings.

He stated that it was “an issue of balance rather than of censorship or freedom of speech” and made a mysterious reference to “various occurrences in other things we’ve published”.

Balance? Balance? So we can’t just have X’s take and Y’s take and leave it at that, we have to make them “balanced” so that they say the same thing?

Hodder said: “In editorial disputes, it is good practice to go to an external body for a second opinion. We approached a couple of organisations for this. [Yule] chose not to engage with the Mermaids review or, for the most part, our edits. We work with many different organisations and individuals to review content, including authors, academics, charities and special interest groups.”

What was the dispute? Was there a dispute before management at Hodder decided to let the wackos at Mermaids “review” an article about a court ruling in case Mermaids thought it was icky?

People have lost their damn minds.