Journalist Jean Calder dared to see a film.

The other day I attended a screening in Brighton of the critically acclaimed film Adult Human Female. It explores the challenges posed to women’s rights by sexist trans activism, including the way that gender “self-identification” can be used by abusive males to target women and children.

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Women in this city, as elsewhere in the UK, have for several years been unable to freely discuss this issue without fear of sanction, harassment and threats. Elsewhere in the country, screenings of this film have regularly been sabotaged.

I did attend but not without hindrance because of the security measures in place. Every person who booked tickets had to be checked and the secret venue was only revealed an hour or so before the event to prevent attempts by misogynist trans activists to close it down.

There were ID checks and people gathered a good hour before the film began. The police had been alerted. The film went ahead and trans activists, who gathered elsewhere, never discovered where it was. However, there was an unacceptable cost in terms of time, expense and anxiety.

You shouldn’t have to feel like a member of the Resistance in Vichy France to see a feminist movie.

The women are not violent and have threatened nobody. Yet all too often they have been treated as aggressors by local police, who have explained their shameful failure to protect them from hate-fuelled attacks by describing their role as to “keep the sides apart”, cynically suggesting equality of violence and threatening behaviour.

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As local women wearily point out, men who challenge “gender ideology” are rarely attacked or threatened. Women are the target.

Almost as if trans ideology is misogynist to the core.

A friend of hers received an anonymous threatening letter about the film because he works in a building.

The letter, apparently widely distributed to possible venues across the city to try to prevent the screening, alleges that the film is “transphobic” (it isn’t), names the Brighton Women’s Liberation Collective, then accuses groups showing the film of “calling for violence against the trans community” (something of which I saw no evidence).

It states that any venue showing the film will be “complicit in this violence” which, it says, is “real and widespread” against “trans women especially” (the film offers evidence to challenge this emotive and often-repeated assertion).

The letter concludes: “Should you choose to go ahead with the screening, be assured that we will make it known far and wide that your venue has knowingly helped to promote transphobic ideas and therefore been complicit in violence against the LGBT community.

“In a place like Brighton I’m sure you can imagine this will not go down well. We hope that you take this strongly into account and that no further action is required.” (my emphasis)

How do you take something “strongly” into account? It’s Trumpspeak with extra added menaces.

Earlier this month, Conservative MP Miriam Cates and Labour’s Rosie Duffield and Karin Smyth spoke out in Parliament against the Scottish Nationalist Party and Green Party’s controversial proposals to legally mandate self-identification in Scotland. This would have removed women’s right to female-only spaces, such as toilets, refuges and hospital wards.

Unlike male colleagues making similar objections, the women MPs were met by barracking and aggression, in particular from Brighton Kemptown’s enraged Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who shouted them down, jabbing his finger and actually crossing the floor to glare at and physically intimidate Miriam Cates. Both she and Rosie Duffield are survivors of abuse.

Despite general outrage and the expressed unease of Labour women, such as MP Jess Phillips, Russell-Moyle has faced no censure from Keir Starmer and explained his actions by reference to a “failure to control” his “passion”.

They always explain their actions that way.

Since then, Rosie Duffield has published an article, The Labour Party Has a Woman Problem, which has been widely praised and discussed. Regrettably, there has been no comment at all from our local politicians.

This conspiracy of silence cannot be allowed to continue. Women and girls make up half the population and, however much Brighton and Hove chooses to forget it, sex remains a protected characteristic enshrined in equalities legislation.

Oh well, it’s only women.