Her experience led her to contact Pearson after reading about her case. Pearson was told on Remembrance Sunday by Essex Police that she was being investigated for allegedly inciting racial hatred in a tweet a year ago.

“When I read the article describing her experience as Kafkaesque, that’s exactly what my experience was,” Ms Forstater said. “From the beginning the officer said there was a victim and I was told I had committed a crime but I wasn’t told what the tweet was.

“The whole process was Kafkaesque. It was very stressful and intimidating. It felt like I was being interrogated by a political body, not the police who are supposed to treat people without fear or favour. So it was terrifying.”

My first thought was relief, but the possibility of a criminal charge was stressful

By Maya Forstater

“In this country, we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi,” Mr Justice Julian Knowles wrote in 2020 in his finding in Harry Miller v Humberside Police.

The High Court found that the freedom of speech of Mr Miller, a former police officer, was disproportionately interfered with when an officer visited his workplace to talk about some frankly worded tweets on transgender issues.

The judgment is peppered with quotes from Orwell and warnings against police overreach. But the Metropolitan Police officer who contacted me last year seemed to regard Nineteen Eighty-Four as operational guidance.

I was threatened with arrest for the offense of malicious communication over a tweet. Like Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson, I was told the police could not divulge the reason for the investigation because the “victim” would be “susceptible to further comment”.

Finally, when I turned up at Charing Cross police station, the investigating officer handed my solicitor a single sheet of paper on which was half the text of a single post.

It was about Kamilla Kamaruddin, a male GP with a practice in London’s East End, who decided to live ‘like a woman’ at the age of 53 and wrote articles about being allowed to ‘lovely’ his patients to perform “more intimate examinations”. that they didn’t let me do when I was a male general practitioner”.

I wrote a blog post expressing my concern about this. In it, I pointed out that Kamaruddin described the possibility that patients would still recognize him as a man as “prejudiced and ignorant”.

My tweet said that Kamaruddin “likes to examine women intimately without their consent”. For these words, I was investigated for over a year on suspicion of committing an offense defined as sending an “indecent or grossly offensive” message intended “to cause distress or anxiety to the recipient.”

It is punishable by up to two years in prison. And then, instead of dropping the whole prank, the police referred the case to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for a decision.

This week, 15 months after I first heard from them, the Metropolitan Police finally called to tell me that the CPS had decided to take no further action.

He apparently made this decision in early September. Met hadn’t bothered to inform me.

My first thought was relief. I never thought there was any chance that a court would find that my tweet was “grossly offensive”. But having the possibility of a criminal charge hanging over me was stressful.

The court in the Harry Miller case said: “The effect of the police appearing in his workplace because of his political views is not to be underestimated.” It was terrifying for the police to threaten me with arrest, question me, do an “investigation” for over a year and then refer the case to the CPS.

I am far from the only one who has suffered this type of harassment. Kellie-Jay Keen, the critical gender activist has been interviewed by the police three times. Caroline Farrow, the journalist, was questioned in 2019 after she posted that Susie Green, then chief executive of trans activist charity Mermaids, had her son “castrated and neutered while he was still a baby”, which is correct. I know of other cases, some not in the public domain.

When you forget the distortions of trans activists and look instead at the material facts of my story and Keen’s and Farrow’s, you can see that it’s not our words that are offensive: it’s the acts we describe in hopes of bringing them to an end.

It is deeply offensive that gender-disordered children, who might otherwise grow up gay or just plain weird if supported sensitively and sensitively, should instead be told that they would benefit from having their breasts and genitals removed .

It is deeply offensive that the NHS and the Care Quality Commission look the other way while patients are tricked, coerced or pressured into accepting intimate exams from a man posing as a woman.

It is deeply offensive that police forces allow male officers who identify as women to search female inmates. These scandals can only be defended by twisting words, outlawing the truth, and bullying and harassing those who refuse to accept it.

After the initial relief, my feelings are one of anger and determination. I am now considering what further steps to take to reduce the likelihood of anyone else being treated in this atrocious manner.