From The Spectator last year
'The criminal justice system merits quite a bit of thinking about. On the one hand, many of us can remember patients who were charged with crimes, convicted and who ended up on the sex offenders register when we thought that the same thing wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t a trans person.
The converse is the ever-increasing tide of referrals of patients in prison serving long or indeterminate sentences for serious sexual offences. These vastly outnumber the number of prisoners incarcerated for more ordinary, non-sexual, offences.
*It has been rather naïvely suggested that nobody would seek to pretend transsexual status in prison if this were not actually the case. There are, to those of us who actually interview the prisoners, in fact very many reasons why people might pretend this.
These vary from the opportunity to have trips out of prison through to a desire for a transfer to the female estate (to the same prison as a co-defendant) through to the idea that a parole board will perceive somebody who is female as being less dangerous through to a [false] belief that hormone treatment will actually render one less dangerous through to wanting a special or protected status within the prison system and even (in one very well evidenced case that a highly concerned Prison Governor brought particularly to my attention) a plethora of prison intelligence information suggesting that the driving force was a desire to make subsequent sexual offending very much easier, females being generally perceived as low risk in this regard.
In summary, a representative body for psychologists and the leading expert in the field, speaking for other experts, submitted clear and quite extensive evidence to Parliament suggesting that some male sex-offending criminals have attempted to exploit existing gender-change rules for harmful and illegitimate purposes and that others are likely to attempt to do so in future.*
Let me put that another way. In 2015, the experts we collectively trust and pay to study the issues arising from allowing people to change gender told our elected representatives that there are non-trivial risks that some male criminals exploit gender-change rules to gain access to, and commit acts of sexual violence against, women. Three years later, a person born male, has been charged with four acts of sexual aggression against women in the prison system.