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[dragonlady7]

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uranianrights https://www.tumblr.com/uranianrights/712061076752171008/operation-spannerthe-spanner-case-really-makes-me :

Operation Spanner/The Spanner Case really makes me feel insane because it was so relatively recent and, as far as I understand, the law has not changed nor has anyone received apologies or pardons

Summary taken from here https://href.li/?https://www.hertsmemories.org.uk/content/herts-history/people/lesbian-gay-bisexual-and-transgender/lgbtq-history-month-2022/protest-and-progress/operation-spanner :

In the 1980s, it was discovered that there was an underground culture of sadomasochism amongst gay men in the UK which was seen as unacceptable, and so the Obscene Publications Squad of the Metropolitan Police were assigned to investigate and make arrests. This became known as Operation Spanner, and it ran across 3 years during which 100 men were questioned by police. Out of these men, 43 were named in an official report, and 16 were taken to court on charges of assault and unlawful wounding. […] In September 1989, 16 men were charged with over 100 offences. During the trial, it was revealed that these occasions of assault related to consensual, private sadomasochistic sex sessions held across 10 years. One of the defendants was a 42-year-old man from Welwyn Garden City, who faced 6 charges of conspiracy to assault and grievous bodily harm and assault occasioning actual bodily harm on himself and others. The House of Lords ruled that consent was not a legal defence for causing actual bodily harm in Britain, but the cases led to a national debate about how consent was defined and how far the government should intervene in sexual encounters between consenting adults.“

Because of the judgement that consent was not a defence, the men pleaded guilty and they were convicted in November 1990. The prosecutor described the defendants’ behaviour as “brute homosexual activity in sinister circumstances, about as far removed as can be imagined from the concept of human love” and these comments were picked up by the British Press, who described the men as torture gangs and perverted. The men were sentenced to between 12 months and 4 ½ years in prison, but 5 of them appealed the sentences in 1992. Whilst the Lord Chief Justice upheld the convictions, he conceded that the men were not aware that their acts were criminal and so reduced their prison sentences to 6 months or less.

The men since appealed once more in Britain and once to the European Human Rights Court, receiving rejections both times. From what I understand, the law under which these men were convicted has not been changed since 1989, either.

There’s a reason there are leathermen at Pride and there’s a reason queer people recoiling from the inclusion of kink are shooting themselves in the foot. There’s no way to disentangle the legal history of homosexuality or transness (laws against "crossdressing” in particular) from the legal history of kink.

A full history of the case and related documents can be found here https://href.li/?http://www.spannertrust.org/indexpage.asp?cat=4. (Your picture was not posted)

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[minoanmiss]

This is so blazingly true.