Gender critical website blocked for promoting “hate and terrorism”

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The website of the gender critical human rights organisation Sex Matters, which stands up for women’s single-sex spaces, as well as campaigning for clarity on the concept of biological sex in law and policy, has been blocked on Great Western Railway’s (GWR’s) Wi-Fi network for promoting “terrorism and hate” (Mail, Reclaim the Net, Telegraph, Times).

GWR passengers attempting to access the website of the group founded by Maya Forstater (pictured above, on the right, who in 2021 established a binding legal precedent that gender critical beliefs are protected by the Equality Act 2010), received a message that stated: “The domain is blocked by GWR because it’s associated with the terrorism and hate category.”

Dr Helen Joyce (picture above, on the left), the author of best-selling gender-critical work Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality and a director of Sex Matters, said: “Why does GWR classify a human rights organisation as so dangerous that travellers have to be protected from accessing its website? Sex Matters stands up for women’s single-sex spaces, child safeguarding and freedom of belief and speech. What is there to object to about that?”

Sadly, if you’re a radical trans activist, and you view any dissent from the basic tenets of gender identity ideology as ‘hate speech’, and any criticism of your actions as ‘transphobic’, then the answer to that question is “quite a lot”.

Last week, for instance, it emerged that a guidance document recently issued to public libraries across the country advises librarians to censor, hide or limit the purchase of “offensive” and “transphobic” gender-critical books – including Dr Joyce’s bestseller – to avoid “upsetting” LGBTIQ+ service users (Telegraph).

Earlier this year, a large group of trans activist students and their academic ‘allies’ at Edinburgh University were twice able to prevent the screening of Adult Human Female, a documentary which explores the impact of self-ID on the lives of women from the perspective of female prisoners, lesbians and academics, on the grounds that it is “hateful” and “transphobic” (Scottish Daily Express).

When the gender critical philosopher Dr Kathleen Stock was due to speak at Oxford University in May, the university’s LGBTQ+ society urged the Oxford Union to rescind its “misguided” invitation to this “transphobic” academic, whose views they regard as tantamount to “hate speech” (Telegraph).

Just this week, the SNP’s sepulchral Deputy Leader in Westminster, Mhairi Black, claimed gender critical campaigners who defend women’s sex-based rights are comparable to white supremacists, and that any “50 year-old Karens” who disagree with her extreme views on transgender rights cannot be “decent” people (Spectator).

And so on and so forth, the infinite agony of life in a pluralist liberal democracy stretching out before this maladjusted sub-section of society like some grim, industrialised conveyor belt, leading ineluctably to the Gulags.

In the case of GWR’s Wi-Fi network issues, the policing of sites that passengers are allowed to access is apparently managed for the train service by an outside provider that uses AI to scan websites and block them if they fall foul of a number of criteria, namely “hacking”, “adult content”, and “terrorism or hate”.

According to a statement issued by GWR, Sex Matters may have been blocked because AI incorrectly categorised it as adult content due to the number of times the word “sex” appears on the campaign group’s website.

It’s a nice, well-rounded little exculpatory tale, but doesn’t explain why passengers were notified that they were being denied access to the website not because of “adult content”, but very specifically because it was – as a salaried trans activist working for, say, an outside provider of AI-based IT services might have put it – “associated with terrorism and hate”.