Maya Forstater runs the charity Sex Matters
Credit: PA
A leading feminist campaigner has said police have been investigating her for almost a year over a social media post she wrote about a transgender doctor.
Maya Forstater,51,said the Metropolitan Police is examining a post on X,formerly Twitter from June last year in which she said Dr Kamilla Kamaruddin “enjoys intimately examining female patients without their consent”.
It came after the former GP,who transitioned from male to female,wrote in a blog post about being permitted by patients to perform “more intimate examinations that they did not let me to do when I was a male GP”.
The alleged offence is punishable by up to two years in prison.
The post linked to a previous blog article in which Ms Forstater questioned whether Kamaruddin’s female patients could truly consent to being examined by her.
Ms Forstater,who runs the charity Sex Matters,came to prominence for winning an employment tribunal after successfully arguing that she had been discriminated against on the basis of her beliefs after losing her job as a tax expert over publishing gender critical messages.
In an interview with The Times,Ms Forstater said that she received an email from the Metropolitan Police in August last year informing her that she was being investigated for “malicious communication” but was not told why.
The following month,she was interviewed under caution at Charing Cross police station,where she claims an officer asked her if she understood her tweet might be viewed as “transphobic”.
She said: “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.”
Ten months after first being contacted by the police,Forstater is allegedly still under investigation. She told The Times: “Despite my solicitor following up with written representations giving chapter and verse on the law,arguing that the investigation is unjustified and pressing for resolution,I remain under investigation.
“I still don’t know if I will be charged and prosecuted. It was plain when I was interviewed that the police had given no consideration to the contents of my blogpost about Dr Kamaruddin.”
A Metropolitan Police spokesman told The Times: “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.”
