Can someone explain to to me why this has gone to court? Teenage girl pretending to be a boy.

Because the woman isn't claiming to be trans/a man.

Interesting legal judgement from 2013. The date of birth should read 1994 not 2004
https://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/format.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2013/1051.html&query=Sexual+offence+impersonation

Yes, I remember that court case. The defendant seemed very vulnerable, and devastated by the whole thing. It seemed a remarkably cruel case.

And this is another reason that we shouldn't change 'sex' on official documents. We need to stick to facts re biology and if necessary have a whole new category for trans. Maybe call it trans?
I'm not saying that it would prevent such cases but permitting people to say they are male when biologically not just clouds the issue.

So creepy that people do this.

Allison Bailey described a case that happened a few years ago, in the witness statement for her discrimination case against GCC/Stonewall. The defendant's parents asked Allison Baillie for help after the defendent was given a prison term:

"I was horrified by the outcome of her case. It appeared to me to be a manifestly excessive sentence. Lesbians are treated particularly harshly by the courts in these deception cases."

She passed the case to a colleague at GCC (because she had already made some public comments about the case) and the sentence was reduced on appeal.

I genuinely don’t understand this case, when we are ordered to accept a bearded male as a woman, if he says he is. Or a rapist proudly displaying the shape of his penis in pink tights, but still pretending to be a woman. We are not allowed to call them men.

But somehow a woman pretending to be a man is just a woman pretending.

Genuinely, what is the reasoning for this difference?

Isn’t it bleeding obvious?

Yes. Many victims of sexual aggression by men are also vulnerable. And male sexual assault is usually coercive, intimidatory or violent. But these far more harmful offenders are rarely prosecuted. Women must be punished, while men get away with major crimes.

That's Stonewall Law. In Actual Law, your consent to sexual contact is dependent on the other person disclosing all pertinent facts.

We know that Stonewall knows this, because they're trying to change Actual Law to remove the crime of sex by deception.

There was a case where a man was accused of sex by deception because he pretended to be a female army officer and persuaded the male victim to have sex with him. I can't remember the details, though.

This is where I get confused though with the legalities of trans. Many people within the queer community say that you have no right to know what someone's genitals are until they feel comfortable and safe- that it's one sided about trans safety and the other person needs to accept that....but this seems to say that legally, if you are male or female sex, and purport to be the other sex, that it's assault to not disclose your sex.

I don't think the main difference is because the women aren't identifying as men. I've just come across another case concerning a woman who identifies as a transman.

https://www.gbnews.com/news/trans-male-who-had-sex-with-three-women-using-specially-made-prosthetic-penis-convicted-of-assault/304730

Both Tarjit Singh and Carlos Delacruz identify as 'transmen', but were still convicted. Singh was jailed for 10 years.

This story is more representative of what happens to males who identify as 'transwomen' and trick other men into sex:

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/33995352/former-virginia-tech-football-player-isimemen-etute-found-not-guilty-death-blacksburg-man

I found both of these cases via this article by Mary Harrington who says:

Ismiemen Etute, a Virginia college athlete, beat Jerry Smith to death after discovering he’d posed as “Angie Renee” online to obtain sexual contact with Etute. Etute was acquitted on self-defence grounds, but the sexed difference between this case and that of “Tarjit Singh” is striking. Singh’s victims were first guilted into continuing sexual contact, before eventually calling the police; Ismiemen Etute returned to the scene and beat Jerry Smith to death. Meanwhile when faced with moral pressure for sex by males identifying openly as the opposite sex, lesbians find themselves on the defensive: forced to justify why their same-sex attraction is not bigotry.

Also, just to add to my last post, the same factors apply as for sexual assaults on women - sex tends to happen in private and then it can quickly become one person's word against another, barring physical evidence. On the presumption that a transwoman having sex by deception with another man is doing so by giving oral sex or manual (for obvious reasons), physical evidence is often not going to be available.

I'm sure there must be but it has a few factors against it, not the least of which are that there's a stigma attached - as there is for women but a different one. The men most likely to be bothered by this are the same men who probably least want it known they had sex with a man. And for the reason that if a guy realises during the act (the most likely time if it's actually gotten this far), he's a lot more likely to react with physical violence I would imagine.

But also, carefully filtered and angled instagram photos aside, it's a lot harder to pass a man off as a woman than a woman as a man, for the most part.

Not believing women when they say they've been sexually assaulted or raped is pretty common. "She must have wanted it", "She must have known".

Ultimately, we have a right to fully informed consent when we have sex. Any fact that's withheld which would have led to us withholding our consent negates that consent. There's no nuance - there can't be! If you start trying to add situations where informed consent isn't required then you are legitimising sexual assault.

It was right that this case was brought. CPS will have felt that on the balance of probability there was a good chance of a conviction. Other information may have come out during the trial that cast doubt on that and the jury found the defendant not guilty which is how the whole process is meant to work.

So the only actual conviction so far in the UK for sex by deception is of a woman who did a very similar thing to Georgia Bilham.

Another woman was convicted of a similar offence a few years ago - Carlos Delacruz, who identified as a transman.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6130021/Transgender-sex-attacker-no-penis-tricked-two-women-sex-jailed-three-years.html

The accused, Georgia Bilham, has been found not guilty of 16 sexual offenses. She has been found guilty of one offense of sexual assault by kissing. The jury believed that the complainant knew by the time the relationship became sexual that her partner was female. Georgia Bilham had long blond hair which she hid by wearing her hood up and the complainant had seen Georgia's driving licence with her female name on it.
I am very short sighted too, but short sighted means you can see things close up but things, at arms distance are very blurry. I think saying the complainant was blind because she could not see well without her glasses on is misleading.
This case and the earlier case of Gayle Newland really bother me. I am not convinced that it is right that these women have been found guilty of crimes. I'm not convinced that their partners really didn't know they were women. I'm bothered that it's only women being found guilty of this kind of thing.
I've heard on this forum so many times, that it's actually easy to tell people who are presenting as the opposite sex to their biological sex. I found both of theses cases really unbelievable, it's like the suspending of disbelief that is the basis of all the gender woo stuff.
Does anyone have any more nuanced thoughts about these cases?

I'm not sure those ages are quite right. They are 19 and 21 now, and the incidents happened under 2 years ago in August 2021. So they would have been 17 and 19 respectively.

It certainly looks an odd case, and the evidence given throws much of it into a different light. Almost all charges have been thrown out short of one conviction of assault by kissing. I do wonder how much homophobia played a part in it.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/nov/12/gayle-newland-sentenced-eight-years-prison-duping-friend-having-sex

previous case

There was a similar case a few years ago and the defendant got 8 years in jail. So it’s taken seriously. In the eyes of the law it’s basically rape. The victim did not consent to have sex with a woman.

The TRA likely read more on this case than you have as the accused has said they are not trans and do not identify as a man. The disguise was purely to get access to underage girls.

I saw a TRA on Twitter trying to use this story to show 'cis' women can be dangerous. But surely the TRA should believe that anyone who says they are male really is male? So many contradictions in that ideology.

I think some are forgetting that the victim is a 15yr old underage girl in all this. Why shouldn’t the 19yr old adult that sexually assaulted her be prosecuted?

To just tell a victim meh the CSA was done to you by a woman so we aren’t going to prosecute is shit.

Both men and women should be that's the point. Just because the prosecution rates for male perpetrators or SA are abysmal doesn't mean this women's victims shouldn't recieve justice?
How can you not see that? It's not either/or.