Trans ally Georgia Tennant contacts police after receiving death threats online

Actress Georgia Tennant, who is the wife of Doctor Who star David Tennant, has contacted the police after being targeted by trolls, who sent a string of abusive messages.

The 40-year-old actress is best known for her roles in Merlin, The Bill and Doctor Who, but has also become known in recent years among the LGBTQ+ community for her staunch allyship.

Tennant has become a particularly vocal ally for the transgender community, speaking out when the community has been targeted by politicians and policy-makers in recent years, including after the UK’s Supreme Court decision in April to exclude trans women from the legal definition of a woman.

While Tennant and her equally pro-trans husband have been celebrated by the community for their allyship, they have also been targeted by trolls for their stance.

Over the weekend, Georgia Tennant posted a series of screenshots on her Instagram Stories, detailing some of the horrendous messages she has received on the platform.

In one post, shared by Metro, a troll dubbed Tennant “sick” and told her to “die” and to “go back to the street”. They also shared a false claim about her marriage to Good Omens actor David Tennant, branding her the “ex-wife” of the actor.

Other messages called her “disgusting” and a “dirty w****” who deserved to “die for good”, per the Daily Mail. 

Tennant didn’t provide any additional comment on the grim messages, but did tag the official Metropolitan Police Instagram account in her post. She also tagged the handle for Instagram itself, which is owned by Meta.

In a follow-up post on Sunday (9 November), Tennant called out the social media platform for removing her screenshots as they supposedly went “against community standards” while failing to remove the “hundreds” of abusive messages she receives which use “the same language”.

In September, Tennant reported that she had received a chilling threat from a troll via Facebook who offered a “reward” to “whoever kills Georgia Tennant immediately”.

After reporting the post to Meta, Tennant shared a screenshot of an automated response from Meta’s moderation system, which detailed that the original post did not go against the platform’s community standards.

At the time, PinkNews contacted Meta for comment and was told that those posts had been removed.

In January, Meta updated its Hateful Conduct policy, with the company allowing its users to allege that someone’s sexuality or gender identity is a result of “mental illness or abnormality”.

“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words such as ‘weird’,” the policy reads.

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