Police Commissioner: MP used ‘transphobia’ slur to silence me on women’s safety

Surrey’s Police and Crime Commissioner has accused Crispin Blunt MP of stifling the debate on the dangers of men accessing female-only spaces.

Lisa Townsend has hit back at Blunt, who is Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global LGBT+ rights, after he reported her to Surrey Police and Crime Panel for ‘transphobia’.

Blunt, along with several other men, complained about a JK Rowling tweet shared by Townsend, in which the author mocked the idea that male rapists could be logged as women by Police Scotland.

‘Sinister’

Townsend told The Daily Mail: “Saying that my words as a woman are disrespectful because I’ve chosen to stand up for women who have been raped and telling me I have to explain myself to three men, particularly a male MP from my own party, who’ve complained about my language, is ridiculous.

“It’s not the fact that these men, or anybody, think I’m wrong”, she added, “it’s the cancelling of a woman’s voice on an issue that really troubles a lot of women and men”.

She described Blunt’s use of his position, in seeking to “silence a woman on an issue that, he must surely know, matters to an awful lot of people” and “stop the debate altogether”, as “sinister”.

It seems perfectly OK, in some quarters, to put up signs saying ‘Die TERFs’ and all the awful, awful things you see, but it’s not acceptable for a woman to say: ‘I don’t believe transwomen are women.’

Males are male

The Panel judged Townsend’s tweet to not be “dignified or respectful”, but she continues to speak up for women’s sex-based rights.

The defiant Commissioner said that if a man wears dresses and make-up, “that doesn’t make you a woman”, adding “I’ve said it before and I’ll go on saying it”.

She continued: “You’ve got people like Professor — Lord — Robert Winston saying every cell in my body is female. Every cell in my husband’s body is male.

“There is no surgery, no hormones, no amount of documentation that gets you away from that.”

Death threats

Townsend revealed too that she had received multiple death threats for her public statements on women’s safety.

She said: “It seems perfectly OK, in some quarters, to put up signs saying ‘Die TERFs’ and all the awful, awful things you see, but it’s not acceptable for a woman to say: ‘I don’t believe transwomen are women.’”

She concluded: “I think the pendulum has swung too far but we will come back to a place that’s ultimately sensible — but we have to keep talking about it.”