UK Women’s Rights Campaigner on Bail Over ‘Humans Never Change Sex’ Posters

Police searched campaigner's home and seized stickers and posters

A police officer using a radio in the UK on Nov. 2, 2011. (David Cheskin/PA Media)

Late in January, women’s rights campaigner and disabled activist Jennifer Swayne, 53, went out on her mobility scooter with stickers and posters critical of trans ideology around Newport, South Wales. After receiving six complaints, the police stopped her and she was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and displaying threatening or abusive writing likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.

Superintendent Vicki Townsend told The Epoch Times that police received several reports in relation to posters containing offensive material appearing in Newport between October and January. Officers on patrol in Newport also saw a woman spraying stickers to two lamp posts.

The 53-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and displaying threatening or abusive writing likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress. After being detained for 12 hours, she was later released on conditional bail.

“We cannot confirm the content of the stickers as this falls into an active investigation, but the content of the stickers is directed towards the transgender community,” said Townsend.

The police told The Epoch Times that it released a public safety message intended to make the public aware of the dangers of potentially removing a poster after glass and pins had been stuck behind the posters.

However, Swayne denied sticking sharp objects behind stickers to The Times and said that it would have been impossible for her to do so “given that she had the use of only one arm.”

‘Woman = Adult Human Female’

Swayne said that the homemade posters included phrases included “no child is born in the wrong body, humans never change sex,” “respect women’s spaces,” and “Woman = Adult Human Female.”

She also told the publication that she was not transphobic. “I have never made a sticker with the word trans in it. This is about women at risk,” she said.

The police confirmed that Swayne’s home was searched. The police seized stickers, posters, and a copy of Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body, by Dr. Heather Brunskell-Evans and Professor Michele Moore.

The book concludes that what it regards as a medical and social trend for “transgendering” children is “not liberal and progressive, but politically reactionary, physically, and psychologically dangerous, and abusive.”

Gwent Police said that it may not always be practical for an officer to make a detailed assessment, such as reading a book, during the search.

“Officers involved in a search will consider whether any items present at the address may contain information that is relevant to the commissioning of an alleged offence. Any item seized which is found not to contain evidence of an alleged offence will be discontinued from the investigation and returned to the individual as soon as practicable.”

Fair Cop

Fair Cop, the organisation, was set up by former policeman Harry Miller in response to what it called a “Big Brother” overreach of various police forces.

In December,  Miller won a successful legal challenge against a national policy that would have seen police forces record gender-critical views as non-crime “hate incidents. It continues to takes on cases from people who they believe have been criminalised for expressing opinions that don’t contravene any laws.

“Gwent Police locked up a woman for stickering and seized an academic book in its search for evidence of hate. These are the tactics of the Stasi. The Chief Constable must sack everyone involved and then resign,” Fair Cops’ Harry Miller told The Epoch Times.

Commenting on the Swayne case, Toby Young, editor of the Daily Sceptic as well as General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, the latter which set up to uphold free speech in the UK, said that “police should not be investigating thought crimes. 1984 is a dystopian novel, not a policing manual.”

Promotes Inclusion and Cohesion

In 2020, Gwent Police released a Joint Strategic Equality Plan for 2020–2024 report to ensure they could identify people “with protected characteristics, and that the work we do promotes inclusion and cohesion.” Last October, it was reported that there were 598 reports of transphobic hate crime in 2014–15 and 2,588 in 2020–21, a rise of 332 percent in the UK.

However, a 2021 report by the Law Commission published in December said those expressing gender-critical views defined as “a belief that sex is binary and immutable and that a person cannot change their sex” should be protected under a new “freedom of expression” clause.

But women’s rights campaigner Posie Parker (Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull) told The Epoch Times that “we are in a real episode of humanity in the West, an “unreality.”

“I think the police have to do these massive blunders, they have to reveal their hand before everybody understands what’s going on and that’s what they are doing. ... The police are getting more and more terrible and we know about the crimes such as violence against women they routinely ignore.”

She said that everything is skewed to “men who say they are women” and that it was “worse than old misogyny.”