The Dispatch: More from CWR...

UK activist says she was wrongfully denied entrance to the US

Caroline Farrow discusses why she believes she’s being targeted for her views on LGBT issues.

Caroline Farrow appears on the March 25, 2019 airing of "Good Morning Britain" to discuss controversy over "misgendering row". (YouTube)

The Emperor has no clothes. The famous Hans Christian Anderson story has kept coming to mind in recent months as the battle over trans ideology in Britain and abroad has intensified.

More than one nation is in need of a sanity check just now, as battles rage on both sides of the Atlantic on the subject of whether men who identify as women should be permitted to use the same bathrooms as girls, as young female athletes lose out to males competing as females, and a female professional can have her unfair dismissal case thrown out because her view (that a biological male is a man not a woman) is “not worthy of respect in a democratic society.” Some years ago, I was cornered by a group of incredibly smug students at the University of Stirling who seemed to think it the job of the Gender Equality Society to attack a female speaker fighting to expose the horrors of gendercide.

When I last spoke to Caroline Farrow, an outspoken commentator on ethical issues, including transgenderism, she was fighting claims of “misgendering” following a debate on the BBC with the head of the UK trans advocacy group Mermaids. Late last year, I heard on social media that Caroline had been prevented from entering the United States for a business trip in which she was to present a petition on behalf of the organization CitizenGo and speak at a conference. Besides some gloating words from an LGBTQIA activist, I found little information about what had happened, and contacted Caroline for an update.

The subsequent interview raised more questions than it answered. According to Caroline, what happened to her at the airport as she attempted to check-in for her flight to the US is almost unprecedented. “I had this trip to Orlando booked which I was very excited about,” said Farrow, “it was mostly to talk at a conference, but as part of the trip, I was going to hand in a CitizenGo petition to Disney asking them not to hold Pride parades. It’s our most successful petition so far, we had over half a million signatures. My tickets were booked, everything was ready.”

It is no easy business arranging to be away for a week when you have five school-age children, and the trip took a great deal of planning. At the airport check-in desk, it rapidly became clear that something was very wrong. “The woman at the desk tried to scan my passport, then she was on the phone trying to sort something out. Next thing, she’s blocking off the conveyor belt and going to find her supervisor. A few minutes later, she’s telling me I can’t fly because my ESTA’s been revoked.”

Caroline had applied for and been granted an ESTA, the standard visa-waiver document used by Brits traveling to the US for 90 days or less. It is not a difficult document to obtain – I have traveled to the US on a number of occasions using an ESTA – and Caroline was told when she went to the airline help desk that the revocation of ESTAs “doesn’t happen.” The staff at the desk could not understand what had happened and gave her a list of US embassy numbers. She was on the phone for over an hour without being given any information as to why she was being stopped from traveling. Eventually, she was told that she would have to go to the US embassy to get a visa and could not travel that day.

“It really was a warning to be careful about giving away information on social media,” admitted Farrow, “I knew someone must have done something and all I could think of was that I had mentioned on Facebook that I was going to Orlando. I thought of it as a fairly closed, secure group, but I should never have mentioned my travel plans.” According to Farrow, activists quickly started posting photographs of themselves online with the US embassy in shot, speaking of their “important business” at the embassy. One activist in particular (name withheld) posted gloating references to the embassy and claimed that Farrow had been denied entry to the US because she was a criminal. “I have no criminal convictions whatsoever. I have ongoing civil proceedings against me but I have a completely clean record. There were simply no grounds to bar me from the US,” Farrow told me.

Frustratingly, the US embassy will not give out information about why an ESTA has been denied or revoked, meaning that Farrow cannot defend herself against whatever allegations have been made about her to the embassy. Nor did the US embassy do her the courtesy of informing her that her ESTA had been revoked, causing her the considerable distress and inconvenience of discovering the truth at the airport, just hours before her flight was due to leave.

Farrow’s own investigations have led her to the belief that activists may have used a technicality to get her ESTA revoked, such as claiming that she lied about the purpose of her visit (which Farrow denies). “Activists go on and on about tolerance, but where is the tolerance here?” she said. “They’re the ones trying to force the rest of us to endorse and validate their lifestyles.”

Does Farrow believe there a case for banning certain individuals from entering a country? “I never felt I had a right to enter America,” she says, “but I feel devastated that the US embassy was misled about my application, that they were led to believe that I had lied to them.”

Farrow could not reclaim the considerable cost of her trip, was given no chance to defend herself, and may never have an explanation as to precisely what happened. What makes the situation feel more like a vendetta is that other members of Caroline’s organization were not prevented from flying, even though they presumably share the same views.

My biggest fear as a writer is that we have sleep-walked into a form of totalitarianism in which our most cherished freedoms are quietly being undermined and destroyed, not by war or revolution, but in the name of a progressive agenda. A number of UK universities now have Free Speech societies to try to protect the rights of students to express unpopular opinions; I have had normally confident and outspoken friends contact me tentatively, almost fearfully, to ask my opinion on trans issues. One friend jokingly suggested that “TERFs” like her ought to wear a badge so that like-minded individuals would know they could safely talk to her.

In the meantime, activists like Farrow are on the receiving end of constant harassment and rape threats. In her words, she “lives in constant fear of a knock at the door.” She has been accused of harassing others through anonymous accounts (which she fervently denies) and of faking her own harassment. Farrow says the police, who are supposed to protect citizens going about their lawful business, have told her to “stay off social media,” which feels like a cyber form of “if you don’t want to be raped, dear, don’t go out after dark.”

In the meantime, Caroline Farrow is still seeking answers, not just from the US embassy, but from those responsible. “I was handing over a petition and I was attending a conference. What else did they think I was going to do? What sort of threat am I supposed to pose?” she asks.

The answer may be as simple as the question. Activists like Caroline Farrow are a threat because they are prepared to say what no one else wants to say or hear. The Emperor has no clothes.


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About Fiorella Nash 38 Articles
Fiorella Nash is a researcher and writer for the London-based Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and has many years' experience researching life issues from a feminist perspective. She makes regular appearances at both national and international conferences and has appeared on radio and in print discussing issues such as abortion, gendercide, maternal health and commercial surrogacy. She is the author of The Abolition of Woman: How Radical Feminism Is Betraying Women (Ignatius Press, 2018), and is also an award-winning novelist, having published numerous books and short stories under the nom-de-plume Fiorella De Maria.

8 Comments

  1. My biggest fear as a writer is that we have sleep-walked into a form of totalitarianism in which our most cherished freedoms are quietly being undermined and destroyed by progressives (Farrow). Caroline Farrow deftly addresses our somnolence on a key liberty issue. Conservatives tend to uphold traditional ethical mores that include human rights the right to hold contrary views, freedoms contained in the Common Law. Whereas ‘progressives’ who hold to an extreme concept of liberty have jettisoned any and all moral permanence, that is permanent social, ethical mores. Therefore views that are contrary to their vision of absolute liberty are deemed reactionary, hateful, threats to their ill conceived freedoms. Anomaly because liberty is expected to accommodate. But when liberty is unprincipled it translates into oppression. This is the pall hovering over Christians especially traditional Catholics and others who hold to truths that have permanence. Such as Ms Farrow who seeks to protect girls, women from intrusion into their privacy by deviates extremist rebels who repudiate the Natural Order and why she is threatened with sexual assault. It’s the common threat of a homosexual tyranny destroying culture if not an entire Nation many not quite aware as Ms Farrow.

  2. Self-labelled people of the political left are all in for tyranny, and self-labelled political moderates are all in favor of sleep-walking. Political liberty and sexual morality have to be fought for, or else we are doomed to living merely as subhuman plow-horses and rutting animals.

  3. There’s a level of vindictiveness out there that’s amazing.
    But it’s a good object lesson to not reveal your future travel plans on social media.

  4. Given that we are all adults here, I’ll mention that all this LGBT Tyranny is the spiritual, moral and physical equivalent of a hard grab and twist at the core of our sexual identity. Ouch!! Sexual perversions are at the core of all tyranny, because only in tyranny can BLINDING sexual perversions flourish and grow unimpeded, as “entertainment” to distract you away from the fact that you are absolutely nothing to the “social justice” tyrants in charge (“social justice” is how all tyrants in history have climbed to power, they just act as “saviors” of the people).

    It’s all about progressively “colonizing” all the USA with these “colonies” called “safe zones”, liberal colleges, etc. and which are smaller, clone versions of Russia-China-Iran and therefore the “idealistic”, “delicate”, so-called “snowflakes” (which include some of our dear, deluded family members) are indeed the new-and-improved, Russian KGB, Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Chinese Secret Police, but in a “softer”, more sinister way. No truth is allowed in these poisonous “colonies”, like today’s Muslim colonies where entering is so dangerous and they can get armed to the teeth with no publicity (meanwhile our right to bear arms is taken away). To cover this invasion, they call you Sino[Chinese]-phobic, Islamo-Phobic, Homo-Phobic, etc. if you expose these GOVERNMENTS and RADICALS for the instruments of Satan they are. As always, they hide behind the more peaceful, agreeable, friendly ones in their races/groups.

    Why not more of a widespread Russo-phobic accusation? That’s because Russia is the leader of this “colonization” and that particular accusation is otherwise so centered on Trump while the true traitors in collusion with Russia act as his vicious, rabid, “people saving”, “Constitution saving” accusers. It’s time for so many Catholics to stop supporting them on false grounds of “compassion for all people, the poor, minorities and women”, the same, old, recycled HISTORICAL LIE that enables tyrants, again and again and again.

    The support of some Catholics, Clergy and Laity, is why these colonization clones think of themselves as easy, cheap “Automatic Saints” which must save the world at all costs, with all forms of violence included. To learn more about how this “colonization” works, I recommend you read the book: “The Tyranny of Virtue” by Robert Boyers, who is a liberal through and through, not a Catholic/Christian, but who has enough honesty to expose all this. If a man like this can see the Truth then we all, especially Catholics, should stop supporting Satan’s colonizers (including our own family), inside and outside the Church, especially at high levels!! Freedom comes as being part of God’s family and not Satan’s family! “A man’s enemies will be the members of his household. Anyone who loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:36-37).

  5. Yes, these activists are totalitarian and use empathetic notions to enable coercive measures designed to bully and destroy opposition, (as totalitarian regimes always do). They must be fought. In doing so, the weapons must be truth and light – they operate in darkness and obscurity. They use euphemisms to disguise their objectives and these must always be exposed. The methods were set out by Saul Alinsky in his book ‘Handbook for Radicals’ and they do not operate within parameters whereby the truth is spoken by them or they respect the other person. They see those who oppose their goals as bad people, the existence of whom leads to the destruction of their vision of utopia, so any methods, any lie is justified. To operate against these people and to expect natural justice, respect for human dignity or such ideas as spoken by them as ‘tolerance’ or ‘inclusiveness ‘ is naive, and to decry it’s non-performance is not effective. They must be exposed by cutting through their lies – for example, the videos exposing the fraudulent allegations against the Covington Catholic School kids and similar exposures.
    The advice to refrain from detailing travel plans on social media is good but Ms Farrow may have been just as effective by voicing her opinions anonymously. I am certainly reluctant to lose my anonymity to a cyber world populated by people I don’t know (or people who may be nothing like their representations).
    My advice is, when these things occur, recourse should be had to the law. Ms Farrow should seek legal advice, as it appears to me that natural justice has been denied to her and she has suffered as the result of the malice of those who have influenced the decision maker to refuse her permit. These people have done so in bad faith. She should seek crowd-funding or ‘ no-win, no fee’ legal representation and should take them on. I say this, not from her personal perspective of individual inconvenience, but as a woman involved in a war. The only way these people will be made to account will be to force them. The only way the authorities will be made to apply those principles they speak about so freely is to make them face up to it. This should be the modus operandi of all those people who are currently being oppressed by these bullies in the name of niceness – those young girls who are unable to use a toilet at school because of the presence of boys who claim to be ‘women’ should be suing. The Nazis rose to power because the intellectual elite supported them, their ideology was enforced by the authorities and people were cowed and rendered too fearful to speak up. We can be thankful that today we have alternatives to the main stream media such as this site and various others by which the oppression of people is publicised and where the true grotesque developments within our culture is made known – things such as denial of employment, refusal of visa (such as here), application for denial of practising certificate for a doctor by reason of her opposition to same sex marriage. Other developments such as bathroom access by men to women’s restrooms, drag queen story hour, the pushing through of full term abortion legislation etc. None of these issues get any press in the main stream media, but we are made aware because of our access to various alternative sources. Unless we oppose these ideological forces, unless we make those in power accountable in a real sense, the totalitarian nature of this ideological tyranny will only become worse.

  6. I think that this just shows how ugly and hate-filled they are.

    And I think this hate that is boiling in their heart is coming from the fact that in choosing to go against nature, they have in fact made a pact with the devil. There is no other way to explain this delight in doing evil.

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