The persecution of Marion Millar and Kathleen Stock

Marion Millar’s nightmare is over. The Scottish accountant facing prosecution for ‘transphobic’ tweets has been told the Crown is discontinuing its case against her. Millar stood accused of acting in a threatening or abusive manner and in a way aggravated by prejudice relating to sexual orientation and transgender identity. At issue were a series of tweets which, it was claimed, were of a ‘homophobic and transphobic nature’.

Millar, a member of the women’s rights group For Women Scotland, has been involved in the debate over reform of the Gender Recognition Act in Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon’s devolved government is firmly aligned with trans rights organisations and their efforts to prize gender identity over biological sex in law, public policy and even the census. The decision to bring a prosecution against Millar prompted anger and a pushback from women in Scotland and around the world under the slogan ‘Women Won’t Wheesht’.

Her solicitor David McKie said today:

‘My client is very pleased to have received confirmation that the case against her had been discontinued by the Crown. She had intended to defend the charge against her vigorously had it had proceeded to trial and this decision brings a very stressful period to an end. In her view, it is the right decision for a whole number of reasons, not least of which is the cost to the public purse.’

It seems beyond doubt that something went very wrong in this case. Yes, the Crown can decide at any point that it’s not in the public interest to pursue an action. But it’s not clear what has changed since Millar appeared at Glasgow Sheriff Court in August to prompt this rethink. 

A cynic might speculate that the police and procurator fiscal went all-in for prosecution — one of Millar’s messages was alleged to involve a police officer — and the Crown Office only latterly grasped that proceeding could lead an already embattled agency into politically incendiary territory and another slew of bad headlines.

Whatever the reason, the end of Millar’s prosecution should not be the end of the matter. Dropping the charges does not undo the immense distress Millar will have been under for months. Nor does it fully thaw out the chilling effect on free expression of the original decision to charge her. Some who share her perspective might look at what she’s been put through and conclude in favour of a bitten tongue and an easy life. (Others will be all the more determined to fight.)

Millar was fortunate, in a sense, in that she’s an educated, professional woman, is involved in a women’s rights organisation, and had her case taken up by Joanna Cherry QC. The SNP MP has become one of the foremost gender-critical voices in Britain and is reviled inside her own party for it. Had she not agreed to head up Millar’s legal team, the outcome might have been very different. 

Not all women — or men — who think like Millar have the financial means, personal fortitude or institutional support to withstand the prosecution process. There are only so many crowdfunders. Graham Linehan can only thump out so many blogs and articles. There's only one Joanna Cherry and she can't be in every courtroom.

Trans people should be afforded the same rights and protections as everyone else. A reduction in adult waiting times for gender identity clinics, which are currently scandalously long, is much needed. This, at least, is a more urgent priority than unleashing the cops on radical feminists and getting the word ‘mother’ removed from government documents. 

But the dominant, mainstream mode of trans activism prioritises censorship, bullying, intimidation and institutional and linguistic capture. These things have to be fought because they are destructive of open, pluralistic societies.

While there is room for compromise in practice, the gender identity debate comes down to a stand-off between two convictions that are philosophically irreconcilable: one, that self-described gender identity defeats the biological reality of sex; the other, that sex is immutable and defines an important class of women’s rights. 

One side believes the answer to this conflict is censorship — including through criminal prosecution — because it believes there should not be a debate. It believes the other point of view is ‘hate’, violence, incitement to violence, and encouragement to suicide. Gender identity, and particularly self-identification, is not an idea. Ideas can be tested, queried, challenged, debunked. Self-identification and the orbit of gender theory around it is to be learned by rote and recited without question. It is catechism.

Millar’s good news comes on the same day that Kathleen Stock announces her resignation from Sussex University. Stock is a well-regarded professor of philosophy who was awarded an OBE last year for services to higher education. She has been the target of a long-running campaign of vilification by students and others for her beliefs about gender. 

Like Marion Millar, Professor Stock is a gender-critical feminist. Unlike Millar, they weren't out to get her imprisoned; they were after her job. The university belatedly made a half-decent defence of her freedom of speech. But a much swifter intervention, rather than the spineless coddling of budding tyrants, might have secured for a mediocre institution the continued presence of a sharp, sprightly thinker. It’s difficult not to consider professor Stock’s resignation and observe that the finest minds at Sussex University have resigned all at once.

You can try to force women like Marion Millar and Kathleen Stock to say the catechism, whether through law, social ostracisation, the threat of dismissal or the removal of their communication platforms. You can disrupt their meetings, bawl obscenities outside their conferences, hide their books in bookshops, run them off campus, and petition every brand with a Twitter account to disassociate from them. Some will break under the pressure but the sight of them doing so will only fortify the will of others.

That’s the ultimate weakness of orthodoxies: the more fanatically they are enforced, the more heretics they create.