@DumplingsAndStew
So what happens now if a woman reports an attack by a man, who later reveals he is actually a transwoman, but preference is to be called a woman?
As well as possibly hindering a police investigation and a prosecution, can the victim be accused of a hate crime?
Maria MacLachlan (60) was told in court that she had to refer to her attacker (25) as 'she' as she gave evidence about the assault.
In an interview she gave after the trial, she said this about the experience of being forced to give evidence she felt wasn't accurate, and how it felt to be made to say "she" in court while reliving her ordeal.
My experience of court was much worse than the assault. I was the one on trial that day and if it hadn’t been for the clear video evidence that I’d been assaulted, my assailant wouldn’t have been convicted, even though there were over a dozen witnesses who could have said what happened.
I was asked “as a matter of courtesy” to refer to my assailant as either “she” or as “the defendant.”
I have never been able to think of any of my assailants as women because, at the time of the assault, they all looked and behaved very much like men and I had no idea that any of them identified as women.
After he was arrested, the defendant posted vile misogynistic comments on his Facebook page that no woman would ever make. He was also filmed aggressively intimidating a woman on a picket line, shouting obscenities at her. In what sense is this person a woman?
I tried to refer to him as “the defendant,” but using a noun instead of a pronoun is an unnatural way to speak.
It was while I was having to relive the assault and answer questions about it while watching it on video that I slipped back to using “he” and earned a rebuke from the judge. I responded that I thought of the defendant “who is male, as a male.”
The judge never explained why I was expected to be courteous to the person who had assaulted me or why I wasn’t allowed to narrate what happened from my own perspective, given that I was under oath.
His rebuke and the defence counsel’s haranguing of me for the same reason just made me more nervous and I so continued to inadvertently refer to my male assailant as “he.”
In his summing up, the judge said I had shown “bad grace” and used this as an excuse not to award compensation.
One writer said, “It was as if the state had colluded with the defendant to take one last stab at the victim,” and that’s exactly how it felt.
That wasn’t the worst part, however. The worst part was when four friends of the defendant gave evidence claiming that, prior to the attack on me, I had been going around abusing the protestors and filming although I’d been repeatedly asked not to. There was no video evidence of this because it simply didn’t happen, but the judge still chose to believe it.
In fact there is video evidence that, prior to the assault, I was nowhere near the protesters and was simply chatting to new acquaintances, but that footage wasn’t admitted in evidence nor were the witnesses invited to testify.