‘No. Rape is rape if it involves penetration by a penis, regardless of someone's (real or faux) 'identity' , and regardless of the sex of the victim. It's a specifically male crime in the U.K., but the victims are men as well as women (I can't remember the proportion but I think it's a not insignificant minority of cases)’
Thanks for your reply @ErrolTheDragon (sorry, it wouldn’t let me quote the whole post).
I’d expressed myself badly, wondering about a hypothetical situation in court with a rapist who was a man identifying as a woman, and whether I (hypothetical victim) would be able to identify as a man in return. Whether this would change the charge because the sex of both the rapist and victim have been flipped. But I can see from your reply that no it doesn’t.
But surely at some point in court it has to be made clear, given that rape can only be perpetrated by a man, then the accused is a man. I mean you can’t have a prosecution based on a crime only perpetrated by one sex without acknowledging that… can you?
Otherwise you’ve got a ‘woman’ in there for a crime they can’t commit, in which case surely there’s an argument the whole charge can get thrown out?
Sorry if I’m being dim. I just don’t understand how the police recording the crime as by a woman can actually get carried all the way through the courts without it being established that the sex of the accused is male.
(Would there be any psychological advantage for the female victim to insist on being referred to as a man I wonder? Perhaps distancing oneself from the trauma, and/ or taking back some control by forcing everyone to also refer to you as the opposite sex, not just the rapist.
Anyone listening to a barrister questioning about ‘his’ sexual history and/ or ‘his’ foolish decision to dare go into a bar/ agree to go on a date/ etc might be struck by how it jars when the questions involve a male pronoun not a female one…)