A leading feminist campaigner has said police have been investigating her for almost a year over a social media post she wrote about a transgender doctor from a gender critical perspective (Telegraph, Times).
Maya Forstater, the director of gender critical campaign group Sex Matters, told the Times that the Metropolitan Police is examining a post on X, formerly Twitter from June 2023 in which she said Dr Kamilla Kamaruddin “enjoys intimately examining female patients without their consent”.
The alleged offence is punishable by up to two years in prison.
It came after Dr Kamaruddin, who transitioned from male to female in 2015 and now works at a gender services clinic, wrote an article for the British Journal of General Practice, titled “What it’s like to be a transgender patient and a GP”, in which the former GP said: “A lot of my patients were quite conservative – many female patients wore long clothes, or the hijab – but they allowed me to examine them despite my change.
Elsewhere in the article, Dr Kamaruddin commented: “Every single one of them refused my offer of a chaperone even when they knew that I am transgender,”
NHS policy is that patients can choose to see a male or female GP, and the General Medical Council advises that chaperones should also be routinely offered to patients of any sex.
Separately, Kamaruddin had written: “I had a fear that my patients would treat me differently [i.e., post transition] as they might not agree with my new identity due to prejudice and ignorance.”
In a blog piece from 2020 that responded to these claims, Forstater questioned whether Dr Kamaruddin’s patients were “really empowered” to say ‘no’ to being intimately examined, if this view was seen as “prejudiced and ignorant”. She also asked if the patients could say ‘no’ to a chaperone, if declining the option was celebrated as a sign of positive affirmation, and pointed out that Dr Kamaruddin was listed as “female” on the GP practice’s website.
Three years later, in June 2023, Forstater posted to X about a magazine featuring the doctor, and included a link to her 2020 blog piece. In the accompanying post, she said: “And the magazine front cover features Dr Kamaruddin, who enjoys intimately examining female patients without their consent.”
Forstater revealed earlier this week that she received an email from the Metropolitan Police in August last year informing her that she was being investigated for “malicious communication” but was not told why.
The following month she was interviewed under caution by police at Charing Cross police station. She says she was threatened with arrest if she did not voluntarily attend the interview and she is still waiting to hear the outcome of the criminal investigation.
Forstater believes she is the victim of “bullying and harassment” because of her views and has not ruled out legal action against the police.
“I think the investigation shouldn’t have even got as far as questioning me,” she told the Times. “My tweet isn’t even something that would get deleted by Twitter, let alone for it to be a crime. Being threatened with arrest and then having a police investigation hanging over my head for almost a year now has been very stressful.”
She added: “Despite my solicitor following up with written representations giving chapter and verse on the law, arguing that the investigation is unjustified and pressing for resolution, I remain under investigation.
“I still don’t know if I will be charged and prosecuted. It was plain when I was interviewed that the police had given no consideration to the contents of my blogpost about Dr Kamaruddin.”
Ms Forstater came to prominence for winning an employment tribunal after successfully arguing that she had been discriminated against on the basis of her beliefs have lost her job over the publication of gender critical messages.
The tax expert and international development researcher was contracted as a visiting fellow by the Centre for Global Development Europe (GCD) when in 2018 she posted several tweets and had a discussion with a staff member expressing her belief that sex is immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity.
She also expressed her opposition to proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) that would allow transgender people to achieve legal recognition of their acquired gender based only on self-identification.
When GCD failed to renew her contract at the end of 2018, she brought claims for discrimination and victimisation at the Employment Tribunal. Although her initial claimed failed, she appealed to the Employment Appeal Tribunal, which in 2021 overturned the tribunal ruling, finding that her gender critical beliefs were protected by the Equality Act 2010.
In Maya Forstater v CGD Europe and Others: UKEAT/0105/20/JOJ the judgment noted:
“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. Both beliefs may well be profoundly offensive and even distressing to many others, but they are beliefs that are and must be tolerated in a pluralist society.”
