Gender critical musician arrested by West Yorkshire Police for trans comments

Underground punk singer Louise Distras was arrested by West Yorkshire Police, held in custody for five hours, and then interviewed under caution over comments she made about the importance of biological sex during an appearance on GB News (Mail).

Since early 2022, the singer-songwriter has been increasingly vocal about being ostracised by the music industry for daring to question gender ideology.

The industry’s reaction to her ‘gender critical’ beliefs has been as depressing as it is predictable. Radio stations have stopped playing her tracks. Venues have cancelled gigs. Online sites like Big Cartel and Band Camp have demonetised her. Even her own agency has criticised her defence of women’s sex-based rights.

And yet, as Julie Bindel puts it for Unherd, this working-class woman remains unafraid to speak her mind, and will not be cowed by the mob.

According to Metro, her recent arrest was due to “vile remarks” she made during a recent appearance on Andrew Doyle’s GB News show, Free Speech Nation. That will probably come as a surprise to anyone who watched the interview. It certainly surprised Andrew Doyle, who took to Twitter to point out that the paper’s use of this adjective was “beyond ridiculous”, something more akin to “propaganda than journalism”.?

In the clip the paper shares with its readers, presumably by way of evidencing Louise’s moral depravity, she can be heard telling Andrew: “Everything in my life starts with me being a woman, and being a woman is being an adult human female, right. So I stated this radical biological fact in an interview in May this year and since then the music industry has just shut its doors on me.”

Lock her up and throw away the key, officers.

The former darling of the anti-establishment Left first revealed news of her arrest on X and subsequently confirmed that officers had told her no action would be taken against her, “coz I haven’t committed any crimes, obvz”.

Ms Distras, who lives in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, said she was washing her hair in the shower when police came unannounced to arrest her. She was then forced to endure the indignity of getting dressed in front of a police officer with a bodycam, presumably just in case she tried to flush some of her illicit ideas down the toilet.

Once in custody she was photographed and fingerprinted before officers then used swabs to record the immutable biological reality of her DNA. (Sadly, the College of Policing has yet to provide guidance on how police forces are to capture admissible evidence of a person’s ‘gendered soul’).

West Yorkshire Police has been making a nasty habit of this sort of thing recently.

Back in March, officers caved to pressure from local Muslim ‘community leaders’ and recorded a ‘hate incident’ against a 14-year-old autistic boy who had accidentally dropped and caused slight damage to a copy of the Quran at Kettlethorpe High School in Wakefield.

The force was at the centre of another free speech story in August, when officers arrested an autistic 16-year-old girl for suggesting a female officer looked like her “lesbian nana” — a ‘crime’ for which she was summarily dragged screaming from her home in the early hours of the morning, and taken into custody on suspicion of a “homophobic public order offence”.

If only the force’s constables and PCSOs showed such vim and vigour when it came to the policing of, you know… actual crime.

An FoI request recently revealed that 40% of crimes reported to West Yorkshire Police went unsolved in 2021-22, with cases involving serious offences getting shut down without a suspect ever having been identified. When it comes to burglaries, the ‘unsolved’ percentage rises to 80% – that’s 11,418 burglary cases being closed without a suspect being identified, let alone interviewed.