Building a criminal case requires forensic and impartial scrutiny of the evidence. Shockingly, however, the Crown Prosecution Service continues to mislead about something as fundamental as the sex of men accused of serious crimes. And the latest example, though egregious, is far from a one-off.

A man has just been convicted of murder at Chester Crown Court. Aurin Makepeace stabbed Steven Rothwell with a kitchen knife and left him dead or dying in his flat in Macclesfield. The two men had met several years before in a male prison, HMP Grendon, where Makepeace was serving a sentence for wounding, while Rothwell was a convicted murderer. Makepeace has a long history of violence, including convictions for grievous bodily harm, affray and assaulting a police officer. It’s a grim story of male-on-male violence that has absolutely nothing to do with women.

Not according to the CPS, however. Throughout the press release, Makepeace is consistently referred to using female pronouns, including a claim that “she” made no attempt to get help for the victim. Bizarrely, the CPS crowed that “the jury have seen through Makepeace’s layers of lies” while failing to acknowledge its own. Makepeace claims to have “transitioned”, but he is visibly male in the photo accompanying the press release.

The doublespeak of the CPS goes much further than that. In August last year, a man was convicted of deceiving another man into having sex by pretending he was a woman. The CPS’s argument was that the victim could not give informed consent because the defendant, who calls himself Ciara Watkin, concealed the fact that he was a “transgender woman”. He’s not a woman of any sort: the entire case turned on the fact that Watkin hid his status as a biological male, yet the CPS went along with the deception by using female pronouns for him in a press release. It even referenced a text sent by Watkin in which “she” admitted to having male genitalia.

Both these cases happened after the Supreme Court clarified the legal definition of sex once and for all. The anniversary of that ruling is next month, and there is no way to reconcile the judgment with the CPS’s absurd statements that men convicted of violent or sexual crimes are women. Keir Starmer used to be director of public prosecutions, and presumably takes an interest in the service he once ran. Yet neither he nor any of the ministers responsible for justice in Britain have intervened to prevent the CPS from making itself a laughing stock.

It is not the job of prosecutors to affirm the delusions of men charged with serious offenses. Following the verdict in the Makepeace case, a KC, Simon Myerson, took to social media to say it’s “unutterably stupid for a justice agency — however poor — to misdescribe a crime”. We know that the consequences are far-reaching, skewing crime statistics by appearing to show an increase in violent offenses committed by women.

What’s really happening in this country is an epidemic of domestic and sexual violence against women. We are sick of having these characteristically male crimes blamed on us, and the CPS owes us an apology.

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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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