SOME news items just take your breath away. According to a report from the Free Speech Union (FSU) in April, British police were making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive posts on social media.
This leads to thousands of people being detained and questioned for sending messages that cause ‘annoyance’, ‘inconvenience’ or ‘anxiety’ to others, and occurs in spite of guidance from Sir Keir Starmer, when Director of Public Prosecutions, that such messages should lead to prosecution only in ‘extreme circumstances’.
Convictions and sentencings are, however, much lower: in 2023 a mere 1,119 in comparison with around 12,000 arrests. Apparently this is due to out-of-court resolutions, or more commonly, ‘evidential difficulties’.
Lord (Toby) Young, director of the FSU, has accused the police of being over-zealous in this regard, stating that since ‘only 11 per cent of the violent and sexual offence cases were closed after a suspect was caught or charged in the year to June 2024 . . . it seems extraordinary that police are wasting so much time arresting people for hurty words.’
Thank goodness we don’t suffer from such police overreach here in East Switzerland, where the sensible majority tend to vote for the traditional Swiss People’s Party, and police are more incentivised to pursue illegal immigration and promote cultural practices such as being willing to shake the hand of a woman.
Oh! Wait a minute . . . It looks as if Swiss common sense might be starting to unravel. Emanuel Brünisholz, a wind instrument repairer from Burgdorf in Bern canton, is about to start a prison sentence for speaking out against claims that skeletons can be transgender.
The European Conservative has reported that Mr Brünisholz is sceptical of some academics who claim that the sex of individuals cannot be gauged from their skeletons. He replied that such claims were unfounded, and commented online that ‘if you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you’ll only find men and women based on their skeletons’. For thus ‘engaging in hate speech and publicly belittling comments based on sexual orientation under the Swiss Criminal Code’, he was convicted and fined 500 Swiss francs (£470).
Uncompromisingly, he has refused to pay the fine, and will now be going to jail for expressing his opinion, a view supported by scientists and many ordinary people. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/switzerland-goes-war-against-free-speech-man-jailed-claiming-skeletons-reflect-gender
It seems that on this occasion, the court adopted an exceptionally broad definition of the protected transgender class, which although initially intended to prevent racial and religious hate speech, was broadened in 2022 to cover sexual identities. Critics have argued this shows the extent to which Swiss law is being weaponised to silence dissent on gender ideology while ignoring biological fact.
In basic scientific terms, the evidence is clear, and the literature abounds with studies showing that forensic anthropologists are able to identify the sexual characteristics of skeletal remains using sexual dimorphism, as defined, for example, in Chapter 9 of Colorado University’s Introduction to Forensic Anthropology: ‘The growth of visible morphological differences between males and females in a species or population’. The skull and the pelvis are most commonly used for analysis, since both demonstrate significantly varying degrees of robusticity, thickness and dimension.
Particularly relevant to the Brünisholz case in this publication is the proviso that ‘biological sex is a different concept than gender. The gender identity of any individual depends on factors related to self-identification, situation or context, and cultural factors’. In other words, sex is a matter of the physical body, in this case the skeleton; whereas gender is ‘all in the mind’, which skeletons no longer possess. As far as archaeologists and forensic anthropologists, not forgetting Swiss lawmakers, are concerned, ‘there’s no escaping one’s assigned sex’.
Mr Brünisholz seems to have been judged somewhat unfairly. But perhaps his real ‘crime’ was not his scientific opinion, but his reliance on hurty words to express it. His posted comment stated: ‘Everything else is a mental illness promoted through the curriculum’. For the Swiss Criminal Code, this was pure hate speech.
Elsewhere, the confusion between the words sex and gender is causing no end of time- and money-wasting legal shenanigans, for example the NHS Fife controversy and even BBC journalists.
Thankfully public and official opinion is starting to shift back to more commonsense policies. The UK Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex means that the words man, woman and sex in the Equality Act are tied to biology and not Gender Recognition Certificates.
Most recently in Australia, the Queensland Minister for Women Fiona Simpson restored the state’s official definition of a woman as ‘an adult female human being’, as opposed to that of a transgender person whose ‘gender identity is opposite to the sex the person was born with, either male or female’.
Bret Weinstein, former professor of evolutionary biology at Evergreen State College, Washington State, has issued a stark warning that 21st century civilisation is ‘living through a co-ordinated sabotage of our truth-seeking institutions’.
He says that we have been severed from the tools of the Enlightenment and left in a precarious state where anecdote replaces evidence and ideology replaces inquiry. This predicament, he believes, is not just dangerous, it is existential.
In this regard, making law on the basis of feelings, personal preferences and biology-denying notions is always going to be a minefield, and in practice a hiding to nothing. So it is all the more astonishing that the generally down-to-earth Swiss are prepared to go along with such challenging concepts.
Just how seriously Mr Brünisholz’s offence is being viewed, however, is made abundantly clear by the draconian nature of his custodial sentence: all of ten days, no doubt open to a 50 per cent remission for good behaviour and a promise to desist from using hurty words.
Maybe this is how the canny Swiss are able to circumvent unwelcome interventions and criticism from more progressively committed judiciaries elsewhere in Europe. But surely the law and its purveyors throughout Western civilisation have vastly more important issues to be getting on with?
