My 15 minutes of fame, and what it was about

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

George Orwell 

A post I wrote over a year ago, Death doesn't misgender. You die as you were born, attracted the ire of transgender activists who'd presumably found it through my Twitter profile while they were taking exception to what I'd written there. On February 4th I had a phone call from a woman police officer who told me there'd been complaints about the blog post and some tweets, including one that read "Gender is BS". During a brief conversation we established that I'd done nothing illegal and had no intention of self-censoring to avoid upsetting whoever had complained, and we left it at that. Then I tweeted about it, and things went mad. Fellow gender critics shared my tweet, which attracted a lot more followers (from a couple of hundred to over four thousand), and I had another phone call, this time from James Kirkup, who writes for The Spectator, among other publications. He wrote about it. Subsequently the story was shared in various other newspapers, in the UK and abroad, and in podcasts and on ITV regional news. And it was all because of a very brief, non-threatening phone call. The publicity resulted in a call from a Detective Chief Superintendent, who rang to apologise and tell me that they'd "got it wrong". I've seen no reason to tweet any differently since then, and several people, including a professional pathologist, agreed that my blog post was entirely accurate; you do die as the same sex as you were born.

I got off lightly. Some police forces appear to have had "training", which is more like indoctrination, from organisations who give the impression that they're experts, but aren't. They're pressure groups staffed by people without any appropriate professional qualifications. West Yorkshire, Humberside, Liverpool and Sussex police have all had visits from these people. Some have apparently been motivated by a small minority of transgender officers, maybe even only one or two. Consequently they've acted as conduits for complaints from trans activists who spend a lot of time trawling through the Internet on the lookout for anything to complain about. As the law on so-called hate crime is rather woolly it's relatively easy to make an allegation of "causing distress" - one of the indications of a "hate incident" - and they do. So while I was let off with the suggestion that I might be more careful, in other words not upset anyone, others haven't been so fortunate. Death threats have been made, as well as complaints.

One benefit of the hoo-ha, as far as I'm concerned, is that I've met some lovely people online, feminists and allies, who mostly have a healthy sense of humour and of the ridiculous as well as being angry about the absurdity. It's struck me that transgender activists seem to lack a sense of humour and are generally unhappy people, which is sad.

I was going to write about transgenderism and what's wrong with it on my other blog, but no point in that when others have done so much better than I. A comprehensive account by Helen Joyce is one of the best. It's a long read, but worth it.

My next post here will be about dead-naming, as I thought it appropriate in a blog about death. Watch this space.

CSIs and their bags

I've been fascinated by TV shows about forensic scientists for ages, though the original CSI series on CBS hasn't been nearly so good since the departure of Gil Grissom, played by William Petersen. He specialised in forensic entomology, the use of insect evidence. Insect larvae, for example, may be found on bodies that have been exposed to the open air, and the time of death inferred from their stage of development and the environment they were found in, including the effect of the weather. Some of the offshoot series, including CSI Miami and New York, have verged on the ridiculous. In Miami, a lead character called Horatio seems to spend all his time striking poses with sunglasses on, to lend gravitas, while the New York's laboratory has more CGI than CSI - highly unrealistic. One of the things than all these shows have in common is the murder bag, a CSI's portable laboratory, full of swabs, evidence bags, test tubes, Luminol sprays (to detect blood), and sundry other pieces of equipment.

Most crime shows now seems to feature the hunt for DNA evidence, but it's only fairly recently that this has become common practice. It was a British scientist, Alec Jeffreys, who developed the technique of DNA profiling. It was first used in 1986 to solve two rapes and murders in Leicestershire. I thought it was interesting that a Google search for DNA profiling led to an American site about the technique that refers to America cases, but makes no mention of the British invention. Most people probably imagine that it was an American invention. The story of the Leicestershire cases was recently dramatised by ITV, called 'Code of a Killer'.

As a fan of forensics, I'd be very interested to see an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection - Forensics; The Anatomy of Crime. One of the exhibits is a murder bag from the 1970s. Since then, murder bags have been commercially produced and contain an increasingly sophisticated collection of tools. It's not as easy to get away with murder as it used to be.