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September 25, 2024 - 7:00pm
In a sane universe, a declaration that police officers will identify rapists by their biological sex wouldn’t count as news. The ability to recognise a suspect’s sex could even be seen as a minimum service requirement — but we are talking about Police Scotland here. Instead of celebrating a new U-turn by the force, which will now take the extraordinary step of recording men accused of rape as male, we should see it as a long-overdue return to normal practice.
It is a grudging admission from the force that its previous policy, which went far beyond the demands of the law by allowing sex offenders to self-ID as women, has made it a laughing stock. The policy has been in place for years but only came to public knowledge earlier this month, after persistent questioning by the Murray Blackburn Mackenzie policy collective. In a written explanation to a committee of the Scottish Parliament, Police Scotland blethered about observing “values of respect, integrity, fairness and human rights while promoting a strong sense of belonging”.
Members of the public, who pay for policing through their taxes, might wonder when “promoting a sense of belonging” replaced “catching and convicting criminals” as a priority. It’s especially galling in relation to serious sex offences, where very few rapes reported to the police result in a prosecution. When they do, only 24% of defendants are found guilty in Scotland, compared to 84% for other crimes. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise us when police, prosecutors and judges fall over themselves to be kind to suspects, addressing men as “Ms” and expecting victims to use female pronouns for rapists.
Women who pluck up the courage to go to the police north of the border should never have needed this assurance from Police Scotland that any “man who commits rape or serious sexual assaults will be recorded as male”. Trust in the police is already low, and it’s hard to see how victims could ever have had confidence in officers who pretend to believe that a man in a wig and leggings is female. The country will be forever haunted by the case of “Isla Bryson”, a male double rapist actually called Adam Graham who appeared in court thus attired in January last year and brought the entire gender racket crashing down. He spent a single night in a women’s prison before being whisked off to the male estate.
When did the police become a gender validation service? Why did they risk skewing crime statistics by recording male offenders as female? It’s a question that applies beyond Scotland, as evidenced by a press release from Sussex police about a murder in Brighton in May. They announced that a 70-year-old woman, Joanna Rowland-Stuart, had been arrested in connection with the murder of “her” husband, without acknowledging that the suspect is a trans-identified male. Even more extraordinarily, Rowland-Stuart appeared at a court hearing in July via video link from a women’s prison, Downview in Surrey, having been transferred there from Lewes Prison in the male estate.
This mess, which has had disastrous consequences for women’s safety and police authority, requires more than a climbdown by a single police force. One by one, the UK’s institutions have fallen under the spell of a misogynist ideology, and we’ve just begun the process of rooting it out.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.
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SubscribeIt doesn’t fill one with confidence, that’s for sure!
On the contrary! Good news! Great comedy too!
Expecting female victims to refer to the rapist as ‘Ms’ in court ? Okkkaaaaayyyy.
It’s the second most wicked crime and it is exclusively committed by men.
I cannot understand how any society can pretend otherwise.
Forgive me, Ms Smith, for a quibble. The conviction rate for rape is low because it’s a crime that is especially difficult to prove. Undoubtedly, some men get away with their crimes, for this I am sorry but the presumption of innocence matters too. It is not difficult to make a false accusation. He said, she said, who knows?
Once again, what is going on in Scotland? How did they go so wrong?
They elected crooks and Muslims.
I don’t think Muslims are more prone to transideology than the general public.
It is not just Scotland. The entire UK, most of the US, Europe etc.
All part of the attempts to destroy our society so we will acquiesce to the new global totalitarian Govt that is planned for all of us, not just us right so far bigots.
Good news! Great comedy too!
The baleful truth is that British policing has become a combination of thick-witted political correctness + thick-witted bureaucracy. It would be hard to get a worse combination.
How about adding led by moronic politicians!
The police lead themselves. They are independent from politicians who provide the laws and interpret those laws however they see fit.
Transgender people (.003% of the whole) are mentally ill. The news media have been instrumental in promoting the fraud that this is otherwise..
They are not all “mentally ill” – any bloke in a frock that can get themselves into a women’s prison is in for a far easier sentence and possibly also some fresh meat to abuse. Sick – yes, definitely. And adolescents caught up in the Great Lie are just kids (girls mostly) who are justifiably terrified of the treatment they will get from too many males and are seeking anonymity. They need proper therapy (not drugs or surgery) – the blokes in frocks need locking up for as long as possible.
I always saw the Scots as charming people, unable to spell whiskey and given to the occasional performance resembling that of beginners Irish dancing. This article puts them in an entirely new and entertaining light.
The so-called “TERF” association of trans-women (biological males who lives as women) with sex offenders infantilises women (“safe spaces”) and demonises all men (and non-sex-offending trans-women) as being dangerous (men and women are all potentially dangerous but in a stable society few become actually injurious to other persons).
Likewise the transactivist view that a biological male who believes himself female is indistinct from a biological female flies in the face of science and, worse, the quasi-legal imposition of this view on the general population tramples on the rights of free expression, free association (by sex if individuals choose to do so) and the freedom to publish empirical scientific research.
Given that both camps have so much wrong, I suggest a partial solution to this particular aspect of the argument:
– for those arrested on suspicion of sex offenses, let both sex and gender be recorded and, if these diverge, **the earliest date on which the individual noted gender dysphoria to an official organisation**. Was it at school? To a GP? Or was the individual’s first claim to gender dysphoria 5 minutes after being arrrested for rape? Then publish this information.
Because the information that is never presented to the public – that is, literally unheard (no doubt as it suits neither the “TERF” camp nor the transactivist camp to be truthful about this) – is how many non-trans (ie. not suffering gender dysphoria) sex offenders falsely claim to be trans to get special treatment.
Because, of course, people never take the p***.
Women are not saying all transwomen and all men are sex offenders.
They are saying that it is impossible to tell until an assault happens and by then it is, of course, too late.
Asto a few, the police recently released that had documented 4 million men who were a danger to women, that being those that were known to them.
Women have been pointing out men have been falsely claiming to identify as women when they have been arrested for years but were just accused of transphobia.
Lastly, terf is a term of abuse which you seem to be in to be in agreement with.
I once read a story of Scottish Highlander infantry being battered by French cannons, then attacked by waves of French cavalry. Closing ranks on their dead, they repulsed the enemy, undefeated. Could Scotland muster such a group of men today?
In Britain, rape is forced penetration of a pen*s. Therefore, it is impossible for a “woman “ to commit the crime.
One small step for women (dare I say it …).