British Roman Catholic mother and journalist Caroline Farrow has faced horrific harassment from pro-transgender activists for her disagreement on transgender issues. Farrow spoke with PJ Media about this harassment and the local police response.
“I’ve just got a team of people, they seem to attach so much importance and so much weight to what I say and they’re just determined to shut down my point of view,” Farrow told PJ Media. “They feel that they can be as abusive as they like: they can target my family, target my children, and I deserve it because I’m full of ‘hate’ because I believe that men can’t become women.”
She recalled online harassment, with trans activists suggesting she prostituted herself out to anyone who supports her position. Other messages involved pictures of “enormous disgusting sex toys,” and repeated insults, referring to the journalist and mother as a c**t, hundreds of times over.
Others have made thinly veiled threats of violence against her. A man who identifies as a woman who “has been convicted of hitting people in the head with a golf club,” told her “he’s coming around here for a game of golf — clear intimidation.”
One website “discusses whether or not to disfigure my face with acid and disfigure my children’s faces with acid,” she recalled.
“I’m deemed to have asked for it,” Farrow remarked, bitterly.
The harassment did not stop with her, however. Activists went after members of her family, and even her ex-husband, whom she divorced 13 years ago.
“They’ve gone after my husband, they’ve gone after my children, they’ve tried to identify my children’s schools, they’ve published our address, my husband’s private mobile number,” Farrow said. “They’re probably targeting the kids’ schools as well. They tried to target my husband’s bishop.”
“My ex-partner — we broke up 13 years ago — they found out his identity, they were publishing his name, his photograph, his employer’s details,” she added. Her ex-husband asked her, “Why are these people after me because they don’t like my ex-wife?”
“There are people who are obsessively, obsessively hating on me,” Farrow said. “They spew hatred and abuse and vitriol, and if you dare to call them back out on it they threaten you with police and sue you.”
When the harassment started last May, the mother contacted police. She told PJ Media “they did nothing.” The harassment again ticked up in October, and she again contacted the police and they again did nothing.
“I was telling the police this, and it took them three months to interview the suspect under caution, and he said, ‘It isn’t just me. There’s a group of 8-15 of us,'” Farrow said. “The police thought that it wasn’t a high enough priority.”
Yet police called her to investigate her remarks after Susie Green, chief executive of the pro-transgender group Mermaids, complained that Farrow had “misgendered” her child on Twitter.
Farrow had a debate with Green on ITV’s Good Morning Britain in September 2018. The pro-transgender mother argued that if people who suffer with gender dysphoria (the consistent sense of identifying with the gender opposite one’s biological sex) are not accepted and affirmed as transgender, they will commit suicide.
Green took her 15-year-old son Jack to Thailand, where she had his testicles amputated on his 16th birthday — a procedure that was not legal for boys that age in the U.K.
“Susie Green is in breach of Samaritan policy on how suicide should be discussed and broached in the media,” Farrow tweeted in October. “What she did to her own son is illegal. She mutilated him by having him castrated and rendered sterile while still a child.”
“I think it’s time everyone called out Susie Green and Mermaids policy for what it is. Child abuse,” the Catholic mother added.
Green contacted police, who investigated whether or not Farrow’s tweets could be considered illegal under the Malicious Communications Act. Police called Farrow and she explained her religiously-based position on the immutability of biological sex. Green later withdrew the complaint.
However, in a Mermaids statement, Green condemned Farrow’s language as “online abuse.” She condemned both Farrow’s tweets and the tweets attacking the Catholic journalist. Yet the organization claimed that the very words she used should be off-limits.
“We welcome respectful and intelligent discussion about many topics involving transgender people, but the use of ‘child abuse’ ‘mutilation’ and ‘castration’ cannot, in any reasonable persons view, be considered to be acceptable,” Green wrote.
Green may find these words offensive, but that does not mean Farrow should not be able to speak them, and it does not mean the police should arrest Farrow for using them.
The Catholic journalist had deleted her tweets, but Green published them. Farrow told PJ Media that she could not defend herself because she was under police investigation, but she thought, “This is great — let’s everybody discuss whether you castrated your child.”
Green’s declaration that Farrow should not use the word “castration” for the procedure of removing a man’s testicles is absurd. Green may argue that the castration is good for her son’s mental health, but that does not make it not castration.
Farrow insisted that she is not advocating against “the right of individuals to live their lives how they want to. If an adult chooses to be trans-sexual, I’m not going to attack them for their decision. That’s entirely their choice.”
“But I shouldn’t have to validate their decision. I can disagree with them,” she insisted.
As for laws, “90 percent of trans women are intact males. That means the I shouldn’t have to be subject to that in my changing areas, and neither should my children.”
“I want my kids to have their own boundaries and say we want women-only spaces,” Farrow added. “My saying that is being called hateful. It’s about the way that some of these activists are trying to impose themselves in women’s spaces and erase women’s sports.”
She also objected to transgender activists “instrumentalizing children.” According to Farrow, transgender adults reason, “If I’d had puberty blockers and hormones and surgery when I was a child, it would have been better.” So transgender adults “use children to validate their own decisions.”
“Adults, you can do what you like, but women should still be able to have separate spaces,” and children shouldn’t be instrumentalized for this ideology, she argued.
She warned that if the Equality Act passes in the United States, “it will be illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of gender identity, so all female facilities would be basically gone.”
“It terrifies every parent. Here in the U.K., we’ve had guidances in schools that say if you’ve got a daughter and they’re uncomfortable with somebody having a male body, they’ve got to find a different facility. If your teenage daughter who has periods doesn’t want men in their changing rooms, they have to find another facility,” she said.
Farrow predicted that the push for children to identify as transgender and mutilate their bodies will eventually lead to numerous lawsuits from children who will later rebel against transgender identity and lament the damage done to their bodies. “I think in 20-30 years time, there’s going to be a whole rack of lawsuits, particularly with girls, since rapid onset gender dysphoria seems to be disproportionately affecting girls.”
She insisted that the lawsuits will give her “no pleasure,” however, because “every person who files a lawsuit will have had their lives wrecked. How awful, how tragic that so many people are going to have their lives ruined.”
Farrow pointed to the case of Jazz Jennings, the male who identifies as a woman, who got castrated, and who has been championed as a model for transgender identity.
“This treatment renders you sterile and you lose your libido,” she said. She lamented that a “whole generation will be deprived of a sex life and the ability to have children just so they can look like the opposite sex.”
Farrow also noted that lesbians — who are sexually attracted to women and are being told that they have to be interested in “a trans woman who’s still got a penis” — have allied with conservatives in opposing this movement. In this alliance, lesbians realize that social conservatives do not judge or hate them as they feared.
“What you do in your private life is fine with me, just don’t force me to celebrate it,” the Catholic mom said. “I think lesbians have been taken aback that conservative women like me are supporting them, we’re not judging them.”
“It’s topsy-turvy. It feels like it’s a bad comedy or a farce,” Farrow added. “Women and lesbians are used to having to fight for their rights. They see this very clearly as male oppression, so they’re not having any of it.”
Lesbians and feminists who oppose transgender identity have also faced harassment, being attacked and branded as “TERFs.” Their stories echo the struggles of Caroline Farrow.
When someone comes out against the transgender movement, harassment follows quickly. “They’re writing to your employers, they’re using the police as their personal militia, they’re trying to get you kicked off of social media,” Farrow told PJ Media.
Even so, “I’m determined to stand up to these people because there are so many other people who can’t,” she said.
Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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