A police force is breaking the law by placing men who claim to be transgender in custody cells intended for women. Staffordshire Police is openly defying last year’s Supreme Court judgment, in other words, and is quite proud of the fact. Detainees are allowed “to self-identify their gender” and “may be placed in accommodation consistent with their gender identity”.

This is not a failure to understand the legal situation following the ruling: the force’s custody policy has since been updated, and Staffordshire Police has chosen to ignore the judgment. It’s evidence of how deeply embedded gender ideology is within police forces, along with a culture in which some officers behave as a law unto themselves.

What it means in practical terms is that even male detainees accused of violent crimes, such as sexual and domestic violence, are allowed to be treated as women. Flourishing the shields of “gender identity” and “lived experience” — another gem from Staffordshire’s policy — they can demand to be dealt with by female officers. They could even demand sanitary protection, like actual women, if they claim to have periods. The documents, released in response to Freedom of Information requests, confirm that the force has an “explicit policy commitment to self-identification”, even though self-ID has no legal standing in the UK.

We’ve already seen where such policies end up. Women officers have been expected to carry out intimate searches of prisoners with male genitalia, a policy that’s currently being challenged in a court case brought by Sex Matters. Staffordshire Police is defying the law here as well, claiming that strip searches should be done by someone of the same biological sex unless a male prisoner has a GRC and their sex “becomes that of a woman”. It doesn’t: that was the whole point of the For Women Scotland case, and the outcome couldn’t have been clearer.

Nothing, though, seems to be enough to rid the criminal justice system of its commitment to the non-existent notion of “gender identity”. Staffordshire Police is an egregious example, even having a policy to deal with “non-binary” detainees. Individuals claiming to be neither men nor women “will be accommodated in the most appropriate location to ensure robust safeguarding”, it declares. Safeguarding against what? Having their delusions challenged, it seems.

Officers in Staffordshire are also expected to “uphold inclusive language” and will receive training on “respectful” pronoun use. It might be worth mentioning at this point that the county, which includes the towns of Stoke-on-Trent and Newcastle-under-Lyme, has a higher than average crime rate. In the 12 months up to April this year, the police recorded 42,473 reports of violent and sexual offenses, 1.1 times the national average. But at least victims can be confident that their alleged attackers will have their pronouns respected.

Ministers could put a stop to all this by insisting that senior officers work in accordance with the Supreme Court judgment and EHRC guidance, which comes into force in just over a week. But we currently have the most trans-friendly Cabinet ever seen in this country, egged on by backbench Labour MPs who prioritize the demands of activists. It shouldn’t be controversial to suggest that the police should operate within the law. But the fact that some forces willfully ignore it is down to a failure of political will.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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