The Thought Police are here: Criticise the trans lobby and you can expect the cops to come round to ‘check your thinking’.

Orwell tropes are overused. I’m guilty of it myself. And yet there are times when only a Nineteen Eighty-Four reference will do. The police questioning of Scottish charity worker Nicola Murray is one of those times. After Ms Murray issued a statement saying that her domestic-violence charity would no longer refer women to the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, because of ‘deeply concerning comments’ made by the trans woman who runs the centre, the police came knocking. ‘We need to speak to you to ascertain what your thinking was behind making your statement’, they told Murray. Police officers visiting a woman’s home and grilling her over her ‘thinking’? Yep, we need Orwell for this.

Ms Murray’s crimethink was to feel uncomfortable with comments made by Mridul Wadhwa, the trans woman who is CEO of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC). Last year, Wadhwa said some women who experience sexual abuse and rape are ‘bigoted people’ and they should expect to be ‘challenged’ on their bigotries if they turn up at the crisis centre looking for help. Sexual violence is ‘not [a] discerning crime’, said Wadhwa. It ‘happens to bigoted people as well’. And ‘if you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature [to the crisis centre], we will begin to work with you on your journey of recovery from trauma… but please also expect to be challenged on your prejudices’. In short – if you’re a woman who doesn’t believe that someone born male can become a woman, and who doesn’t want to see blokes of any sort in a rape-crisis centre, then you’re a ‘bigot’ and your trauma therapy will come with a side order of woke lecturing.

Not surprisingly, many campaigners against sexual violence were horrifed by Wadhwa’s comments. In my view, the very idea of a rape-crisis centre being run by a biological male is pretty disturbing. But the fact that that biological male is also happy to brand some rape victims as ‘bigots’ who essentially need re-education is just despicable. Women turn up at rape-crisis centres for urgent assistance following a terrible exprience, not to be interrogated on how au fait they are with the latest beliefs and decrees of the cranky cult of genderfluidity.

Ms Murray runs Brodie’s Trust, a charity that provides help to women who have experienced the loss of a pregnancy through domestic violence or a forced termination. In September, in the wake of Wadhwa’s comments, she said Brodie’s Trust ‘cannot in all conscience send vulnerable women to [the ERCC]’. She made the perfectly reasonable point that it is not for sexual-violence charities to police vulnerable women’s thoughts. ‘We have no interest in our clients’ religion, sexuality [or] political views’, she said. And so she said she would no longer ‘signpost’ vulnerable women to a centre whose CEO was openly threatening to police and correct vulnerable women’s beliefs.

The police didn’t see it as reasonable, though. In November, detectives from Edinburgh knocked on Ms Murray’s door. They had in their possession screenshots of her tweets and a printout of the statement made by Brodie’s Trust. Get your head around that – actual police officers printed out a statement made by a charity and went around to the charity founder’s home to talk to her about it. This is banana republic stuff. The officers confirmed to Ms Murray that she hadn’t said anything ‘hateful’ – ‘there isn’t a crime here’. So why were they in her home waving around printouts of her comments, she asked? ‘Because we need to speak to you to ascertain what your thinking was behind your statement’, they said.