Police apologise after Home Secretary wades into row over trans sex offender
metro.co.ukpolitics and denying biology’ by the Home Secretary after calling out a Twitter user’s ‘hateful comments’ against a jailed trans woman.Sally Ann Dixon was sent to prison for 20 years after being convicted of historic sex offences against five girls and two boys before she had transitioned.Sussex Police had insisted it would not ‘tolerate any hateful comments’ about gender identity ‘regardless of crimes committed’ in response to a tweet expressing gender critical views.The force told the female Twitter user to familiarise herself with what it regarded as hate on its website.But then Home Secretary Suella Braverman waded into the row, telling the force to ‘focus on catching criminals not policing pronouns’.And within hours Sussex Police said yesterday that its initial comment had been ‘inconsistent with our usual style of engagement’, and deleted the tweet.Dixon, from Havant, Hampshire, was convicted of 30 indecent assaults between 1989 and 1996, when she was known as John Stephen Dixon.The 58-year-old, sentenced at Lewes Crown Court on September 8, transitioned to female in 2004, according to the force.When police referred to her as a ‘Woman convicted of historic offences against children in Sussex’ in a headline, there was a backlash on Twitter from users unhappy that it had not been made clear that the crimes were committed when Dixon was a man.Responding to one female Twitter user, Sussex Police asked her to ‘familiarise’ herself with hate speech.
adding: ‘If you have gender critical views you wish to express this can be done on other platforms or your own page, not targeted at an individual.’That prompted SNP MP Joanna Cherry to tweet: ‘I think you could do with familiarising yourselves with the right to #FreeSpeech.
