When coming into contact with the police, few women would willingly submit to a strip-search by a male officer. We would assume we have the right to be searched by a female officer, and most reasonable people would agree. Not British Transport Police (BTP), however, which is facing a court challenge to its policy of allowing trans-identified male officers to order women to remove their clothes.

Sex Matters, the campaigning organisation founded by Maya Forstater, is seeking a judicial review of the policy. It means, she says, that “every woman who travels on trains around the UK is at risk of being subjected to undignified and humiliating treatment, which is a breach of her human rights”.

At first sight, it’s hard to believe that this is happening in the 21st century. As early as the 1840s, female “searchers” were employed in police stations to frisk women suspected of concealing stolen goods in their clothes or on their bodies. “Men obviously could not perform this job with propriety,” writes Sarah Lodge in her book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective.

Almost two centuries later, BTP’s Chief Constable, Lucy D’Orsi, disagrees. Her force thinks it’s fine for a male officer to search women as long as he has a gender recognition certificate (GRC), a legal fiction that allows men to change their legal gender. Astonishingly, most police forces operated similar policies until January this year, when an outcry forced the National Police Chiefs’ Council to temporarily withdraw guidance allowing biological males who identify as female to strip-search women.

BTP has chosen to ignore public opinion, however, claiming that acquiring a GRC involves “stringent” safeguards and poses no risk to women. Paying £5, providing gas bills in a new name and producing letters from two sympathetic medical professionals is not exactly “stringent”. But it’s sufficient for BTP, which is happy to allow a male officer with functioning male genitals to inspect a woman’s intimate parts. Its policy also means that female officers may be forced to strip-search male suspects who claim to be women.

The question that arises is who this policy is meant to benefit, since it’s clearly not women. Many who end up in police stations will have experienced domestic or sexual violence, and the prospect of being strip-searched by a biological man will be traumatic — it may well feel like sexual assault.

The awful truth is that it’s yet another exercise in affirming “gender identity”, in which the welfare of women comes a poor second to the demands of entitled men. Adult males rarely “pass” as female and require constant affirmations from people who know perfectly well that they’re men, including work colleagues. Employers give them what they want because they’re afraid of being called out as “transphobic” or sued by an employee with a GRC.

From the police to the NHS, publicly-funded organisations have forgotten the people they are supposed to serve. “We are bringing this case to ensure that no woman in the UK has to suffer this degrading treatment,” says Forstater. In the meantime, no woman can feel safe in the hands of the very force that’s supposed to protect us on the country’s transport system. Even the Victorians didn’t treat women so badly.

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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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