Letting grammar do what an accusation would have to prove

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July 19, 2026

An excellent point from Graham Linehan in the Glinner Report:

Section 8 of State of Hate 2026 is headed ANTI-LGBTQ+, and it runs alongside sections on Patriotic Alternative and the fascist Homeland Party. Inside it you’ll find the Scottish Family Party, the Family Education Trust, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, and Fair Cop.

Fair Cop is Harry Miller’s organisation. It was “established to protect police officers who face disciplinary issues for expressing anti-trans, misogynistic and other anti-LGBTQ+ views”, they write, and Miller started it in 2019 “after he was investigated for posting anti-trans content on social media”. That’s a striking way to describe a group founded by a man who in February 2020 won a High Court ruling that Humberside Police had acted unlawfully in recording a non-crime hate incident against him for tweeting about the Gender Recognition Act, and who won again at the Court of Appeal against the College of Policing in December 2021.

He is not mentioned in the document as having won. In an earlier version, published three months after his Court of Appeal victory, they called him “a police officer critiqued for transphobic tweets” and left it there. They’ve since corrected the ‘former’. They have not found room for the judgments.

But we do get a little glimpse of how the sausage is made. Fair Cop, they write, has “strong links to the far right and the broader ‘gender critical’ milieu”.

It’s one sentence with two halves, far right on one side, gender critical on the other. Holding them together is the phrase “and the broader”, which does no logical work at all and all of the dirty work. It never asserts that gender-critical women are far right, it just puts them in the same clause and lets grammar do what an accusation would have to prove.

That last paragraph is a masterpiece.

Comments

5 responses to “Letting grammar do what an accusation would have to prove”

Athel Cornish-Bowden

Jul 19, 2026 1:03 PM

That last paragraph is a masterpiece.

I’m reminded of the Amnesty “report”. Without actually saying that being antiabortion is exactly the same as believing that men are not women they try hard to give that impression.
Artymorty

Jul 19, 2026 1:16 PM

It would be a lot harder for journalists to commit their sleight-of-hand smearing of the gender-critical movement if its “strong links to the far right” weren’t there in the first place. Too often in gender-critical circles, they are. And yes, it’s absolutely true, I completely concede: having links to the far right doesn’t make one far right. That’s a valid and important point. But it gives a lot of observers serious pause when they see the mounting connections.

Because many liberals — myself among them — see the far right as not just a different political voice within democratic pluralism, but as a threat to the system itself. The far right doesn’t play by the rules of liberal democracy because its intent is to destroy it. By that measure, it shouldn’t be welcome on the playing field at all.

So I think it’s naïve at best when GC campaigners join hands with far right extremists. And they sometimes do!

Links between prominent gender-critical campaigners — individuals and grassroots organizations — and far-right individuals and organizations are real and growing, and they are too often glossed over, because they’re an inconvenient complication to the already-difficult gender-critical narrative/political sales pitch, and because they’re frankly too difficult to actually justify when they’re scrutinized.

I’m obviously a liberal and a gender-critical campaigner, so I agree that it’s awful when lazy journalists smear the gender-critical movement as a whole as far-right or far-right-adjacent. Because the principles at the gender-critical movement’s core are not remotely far-right in their philosophy or their logic. At all. But above that principled core, in the cloudy matrix of networking and power-broking among the activists, there is much cultural exchange between the far right and the GC sphere, and the influence between them is, unfortunately, running both ways.

So yes, let’s push back against journalists who lazily try to link the far right and the GC movement. But also: I think GC liberals need to speak up louder and criticize the far right more firmly, even when it’s with us on the “lone tiny island of common ground” over the trans issue (as I once called it here at B&W).
Ophelia Benson

Jul 19, 2026 1:19 PM

Eeek, Arty, you were writing this while I was gp-ing your previous. I think that defies the laws of physics or something.
Artymorty

Jul 19, 2026 1:27 PM

ooh! I just saw that! And with added pic!

*blushing* I’m chuffed!
Axxyaan

Jul 20, 2026 12:06 AM

I disagree that it is wrong to join hands with the far right side. It can be the only way to avoid having a particular view become the monopoly of the far right.

Here in Belgium we have tried a very long time to isolate the far right with a “cordon sanitair”. This meant that any problem the far right mentioned became contaminated and made the problem unmentionable and a solution as good as impossible. It made the far right big, because the far right only had to point out how the rest refused to tackle a number of problems.