As part of their ongoing Mermaids smear campaign, the Daily Telegraph have produced yet another misleading headline and article as they attempt to pressure the Prime Minister and police into opening an investigation.
In their Friday edition, the Daily Telegraph had an article by their special trans correspondent, Hayley Dixon, with the headline “Trans charity trained police set to investigate it” which is misleading on a number of fronts.
Even the opening paragraph betrays the misinformation in the headline, saying “The police force facing calls to investigate Mermaids has received training from the trans charity.”
“Facing calls to investigate” is certainly not the same as “set to investigate.”
Hayley Dixon has written 9 articles about Mermaids for the Daily Telegraph in just over two weeks
Unless Dixon and the Telegraph have been informed privately by the police that a police investigation into Mermaids is forthcoming, there is no investigation.
That’s the main problem with their headline.
What happened was Miriam Cates, a Tory MP with known GC views stood up in the House of Commons, possibly abusing her role as an elected official, to implore the Prime Minister (at that time), Liz Truss, to call on the police to investigate Mermaids.
It would be more than a little disturbing, to say the least, if the police have informed a publication and journalist who are well known to be hostile to trans issues of an impending investigation into a trans organisation.
Next up, we have the statement that Mermaids trained the police.
I can’t believe that I have to say this but, just to ensure there is no doubt, Mermaids do not train the police.
In 2019, “Mermaids confirmed it had provided training sessions for Merseyside and West Yorkshire police as well as representatives from other forces,” according to this report.
Those ‘sessions’ involved simple ‘trans awareness training’.
No doubt the Telegraph and it’s eager supporters would prefer that the police were as ignorant about trans matters as they are.
Dixon did not have any articles in the Daily Telegraph on Saturday but the paper’s attack on Mermaids continued.
This is not Sanderson’s first foray into anti-trans journalism.
He has also recently written for the Telegraph pieces with headlines such as “Feminist group tells church: ‘You’ve let women down’ where he puts forward the case of ‘Sole Sisters’, “a small grassroots organisation which believes sex is immutable”.
The Telegraph also had another small piece by an unnamed ‘Daily Telegraph reporter’ and there has been some suggestion that these pieces are being penned by certain GC ringleaders and published whenever they arrive in the Telegraph’s inbox:
In this case, it is the wizard author inserting herself into a narrative, once again, then crying about things that weren’t actually said.
It’s worth noting that the Telegraph have only just been found guilty by IPSO of breaching accuracy guidelines after they published a headline stating that Allison Bailey had won her case against Stonewall.
She did not.
As IPSO write in their ruling, “The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images, including headlines not supported by the text.”
You can make a complaint about the headline at the start of this article here.