Maya Forstater claims she has been threatened with arrest and has been at the centre of a 10-month Metropolitan Police investigation because of a June 2023 tweet in which she said a transgender doctor “enjoys intimately examining female patients without their consent.”
The feminist campaigner, who runs the charity Sex Matters, complained that while she has been interviewed under caution by police and has since had an investigation “hanging over my head for almost a year,” it was “plain” that officers “had given no consideration to the contents of my blogpost” about the doctor in question.
The tweet follows a September 2020 blogpost, when Forstater questioned whether the patients of Dr. Kamilla Kamaruddin—who ‘transitioned’ from male to female as a doctor in 2015—were “really empowered to say ‘no’ if they did not wish to be … intimately examined by the doctor,” or “to say they wanted to have [a] chaperone.”
This article was posted after Kamaruddin wrote elsewhere about being permitted by patients to perform “more intimate examinations [after transitioning] that they did not let me to do when I was a male GP.”
Forstater told The Times that she is the victim of “bullying and harassment” because of her views, and that she is considering legal action against the police.
I think the investigation shouldn’t have even got as far as questioning me. My tweet isn’t even something that would get deleted by Twitter, let alone for it to be a crime. Being threatened with arrest and then having a police investigation hanging over my head for almost a year now has been very stressful.
The newspaper reports that London’s Metropolitan Police emailed Forstater in August last year saying she was “currently being investigated for an allegation of malicious communications.” When the activist found out the investigation was in relation to her tweet on Kamaruddin, she said she stood by her words and was asked by officers if she knew her post might be viewed as “transphobic.”
Forstater added that despite her legal representative writing to the police to say the investigation was not unjustified, this is ongoing and “I still don’t know if I will be charged and prosecuted.”
A spokesman for the force said:
Since this allegation was reported in June 2023, a number of enquiries have been carried out by officers. These enquiries are ongoing. While it is right that we carry out a full investigation, we do recognise the length of time this has taken so far and the impact it will undoubtedly have had on all parties.
Kamaruddin also told the Times: “I, of course, have not put any material about this process into the public domain and regret that this has happened. I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to comment on the process at this point in time.”
