Full text of my speech to the Belfast protest today.

Video to follow later

I’m here to stand against the protection racket that is the diversity champion’s scheme, and to call for employers to join the flood of others who have left it.

But I hope you don’t mind if I take this opportunity to speak about what’s been happening to me over the last 48 hours instead of the speech I originally prepared.

You may know this already, but a man has managed to persuade the police to invite me to an interview, under caution, regarding my twitter account, @femmeloves.

So what kind of offensive, criminal content can you expect to see on my account?

I speak from my heart about love and boundaries. I talk about recovering from childhood sexual abuse. I speak about child protection, and how to safeguard children from the kind of monsters who put their hands on me when I was still a little girl. When I was vulnerable and lost and frightened and alone.

Before I found my voice, and the courage to raise it. Before I lifted up my bowed head, looked straight in the face of what happened to me, and healed my broken heart.

Before my wife put her strong arms around me, and kissed me, and in the perfect, secret circle of her arms, a sacred circle that no shame can enter, I found myself safe in the only home I have ever known. I talk about that too, about the love between women. I say that men should leave lesbians alone.

I talk about the erosion of boundaries which is inherent in the form of queer theory. I say that women deserve our own sports. I argue that vulnerable women, in shelters and prisons, should not be housed with males. I say with passion that dysphoric people like my beautiful wife should not be rushed down the affirmation route, and that wrong sex hormones and cosmetic surgeries should be an absolute last resort for the treatment of what is, at its root, a mental health condition. I argue that if you are swinging your penis about in the women’s changing room, you are not a dysphoric trans person. You are a predator.

If it were not prohibited by the twitter terms of service, I would tweet out the plain fact that men cannot be women.

Perhaps naively, when I first joined this fight, I thought that the police would protect every day working families like mine, talking on topics like these. So when I faced a wall of death threats, rape threats, threats of sectarian violence, violent pornographic photographs and videos, homophobic abuse, and calls to “go back where you came from,” on my twitter account, I reported them to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. They took no action.

But one phone call from a man who has a history of using the police service as his own personal enforcement arm against women he disagrees with, and the PSNI have threatened me with arrest if I don’t attend voluntarily to be interviewed under caution.

I have excellent legal representation. My solicitor is confident that there is no case to answer. That I won’t ever go near a court room, although he does think I will have to be interviewed one way or the other.

Don’t worry about me. This isn’t about me.

This is about the dirty tactics of a movement which delights in intimidating and bulling their opponents into silence, using fair means or foul.

Enough.

This has gone far enough now.

The complainant cannot be allowed to continue to weaponize police forces across the country, to silence voices he disagrees with, whilst he capers and gloats and feigns terror because he’s triggered by tweets.

He is a bully. I do not pander to bullies. I do not cower before bullies. I put them on notice, and I employ all legal means to have them stopped.

My solicitor informs me that there are various channels open to me, so the complainant can expect to hear from me in due course.

But it isn’t just the complainant I’m putting on notice. It is the police service of Northern Ireland, it’s Stonewall, and it’s the massive fraud they call the Diversity Champions Scheme.

The police have questions for me? Good. I have questions for them.

Questions like, “What influence does being a member of the Stonewall diversity champions scheme have on the way you police this issue?”

Questions like, “When I reported death and rape threats to you, you told me to withdraw from the debate and stop tweeting, so did you offer the same advice to the man who complained against me?”

Questions like “what underpinned your decision to interview me under caution for tweets about child protection, whilst you completely ignored direct threats on my life.”

I have a long list of other questions for the PSNI, and they can expect to hear them from me in the form of Freedom of information requests in the coming days.

My solicitor is helping me explore other possible actions, including a complaint to the ombudsman.

In the meantime, I have a message for the PSNI.

I’m politely declining your invitation to be interviewed voluntarily under caution at the station.

Come and arrest me if you want to ask me your questions. Here I am.

Come and arrest a lesbian woman, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, a campaigner for women and children, for the crime of tweeting about how to protect children from grooming and sexual predation. Put this survivor in handcuffs and put me in a room. Go ahead. Ask your questions. Make yourselves the tools of a man who, with his army of vindictive and spiteful followers, has terrorised women across the nation, all the while making claims about his own victimhood.

But before you come to arrest me for offences under the malicious communications act, for homophobic and transphobic hate crime, I ask you to read my tweets. Read the thread that has caused such offence to that man, not a single word of which has violated the Twitter terms of service, or mentioned him by name. Go ahead and read my pinned tweet as well. Scroll through all my tweets. They are all there for you to see. See if you can find a single word of hatred that I have written. You will not.

In the meantime, I’m going to save you a job.

I’m going to plead guilty ahead of time.

If it’s bigoted to say that there is a sacred duty on adults to safeguard children from paedophiles, predators and perverts, then I’m guilty.

If it’s transphobic to call people out for saying “it’s a women’s penis” to excuse a male predator exposing his genitals to children in the women’s changing room room at a spa, then I’m guilty.

If it’s malicious communications to raise my voice and stand, fierce and unafraid, in defence of women and girls, then I’m guilty.

If it is a crime to write from my heart about love and boundaries, in Northern Ireland, in 2021, then it is a crime I’m very proud to be guilty of.

If those are imprisonable offences, then off to prison I will go.

But this isn’t about sending me to prison. It won’t get that far. This is an attempt to intimidate me, to bully me into silence, to shut me up. I’m here to tell you now, if you haven’t worked it out already, it isn’t going to work. I’m not going to be cowed. I’m not going to be trodden down. I’m not going to be beaten. I’m not going to appease bullies, cowards and misogynists, and I’m definitely not going to shut up.

And I’ll finish with this. A message from me to the complainant, to the PSNI and to Stonewall.

You have picked a fight with the wrong woman.