October 1 2026 - 10:00am
This week, it was reported that new guidance from the Crown Prosecution Service will allow prosecutors to call biologically male transgender rape suspects men. Following a legal challenge from the charity Sex Matters, rapists may be referred to by their birth sex “where it is appropriate”. Given the nature of the crime, it is difficult to imagine a situation in which it wouldn’t be.
Until this change, only an alleged victim would be permitted to describe a sexual assault in terms which reflected her perceptions, as opposed to the perpetrator’s. A woman accusing a trans man of rape would have to hear her own barrister call her rapist a woman, if that was what the accused wanted. The change is a step in the right direction, but it is far from enough.
As feminists have long argued, rape is not just about sex but power. The vast majority of sexual assaults are committed by men, and the majority of victims are women. When a man’s rape of a woman is recast as a gender-neutral act, it is not just unspeakably cruel to the victim, but also denies the act its social and political significance. It suggests that male violence against women is defined not by who does what to whom, but by how the perpetrator decides to feel about himself. Revising how the event is described changes how it is understood, in ways which can favor the worst of men.
Trans activists will claim that denying a rapist recognition of his declared gender identity constitutes an additional punishment. In a sense, they would be right, at least if one were to believe such recognition is essential to basic human dignity. This is the bind into which the trans rights movement, and progressives in general, find themselves. Male rapists are never women because male people are never women.
But trans activism sought to impose a definition of gender that was both vague and unfalsifiable. It was, the narrative went, a deep feeling about yourself and no one else could question it, no matter who you were or what you’d done. The feminist definition of gender as relational — a mechanism by which men and women are positioned in a social hierarchy — is very different in nature. Feminists do not reject gender stereotypes by saying sex has no social or political meaning. Gender, from a feminist perspective, is the means by which sex-based oppression is facilitated and perpetuated.
Calling a male rapist a man is not a form of punishment, but instead a way of recognizing where he stands in relation to his victim. Rape is not just “a bad thing”. It must be regarded in relational, not individual terms. I would go further than that, though. I agree with trans activists that a two-tier approach to sex-based language cannot hold. Where I would differ is in arguing that the sex-realist version should always be prioritized. If a man catcalls me or pushes me, I do not need to check his pronouns to know how to categorize what has occurred. Sex matters whenever we talk about gender and power, and whenever we experience it. We need to be able to say this whenever and wherever we want.
