Sunday Times 'Justice system 'puts trans rights ahead of women'

[LK1972]

Justice system ‘puts trans rights ahead of women’

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/9ff5aaf6-df87-11ec-8bdd-c253e043f5f0?shareToken=8445ad90ef25f5e4dabba65b9e15a346

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10864613/Transgender-murderer-caught-having-drunken-sex-female-inmate.html

I really wish Dominic Raab would actually DO something about men in women's jails.

To paraphrase the recent words of a comedian, I mean the old-fashioned kind of men: the ones with cocks.

Wow, The Times has certainly woken up to this issue lately. A LOT of coverage of GC concerns.

Yes, it's from The Times, this time by Steven Swinford, Political Editor.
I've not seen anything by him before on this topic. We've had articles by several others, including a regular columnist, the Education Editor and I think Social Affairs Editor or similar title, and even a leading article.

When will the police forces act to correct this? Do they have any intention of reflecting upon the harms their practices are causing women?

Maureen O’Hara, senior law lecturer at Coventry University, wrote that it was having a “detrimental effect” on female victims, witnesses and prisoners. She said that while gender self-declaration had not been incorporated into law in England and Wales, it had been “adopted by all key criminal justice institutions”.

She said: “These institutions now all effectively subscribe to the belief that individuals’ subjective sense of ‘gender identity’ should take precedence over their biological sex. The adoption by criminal justice institutions of this belief appears to have come about largely as the result of policy capture, as it is a widely contested belief and has been adopted without public scrutiny.”

Her report highlighted recent disclosures that many police forces record suspected and convicted offenders by their self-declared gender. A survey of 24 forces found 13 recorded people’s gender by self-identification.

Times columnist Janice Turner has been covering this for years. She was at the very first event in 2017 where we had to find a new venue because TRAs intimidated the organisers of the original place into cancelling. She witnessed Maria Mac being beaten up by TRAs and sat in the substitute venue listening to them yelling ‘Burn it down’ outside.

Lucy Bannerman has also been great on this, as was Andrew Gilligan while he was at the Times.

I think the Telegraph had this first as theirs is time stamped 10pm last night. I can't find an archived version but it's much longer. I assume the report is out sometime today. Some recommendations:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/29/police-calling-transgender-rape-suspects-preferred-pronoun-report/

"The Policy Exchange report noted that offence of rape as defined in Section 1 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 involved penile penetration without consent.

The report called for an end to de facto self-declaration of “gender identity” so that the criminal justice system was aligned with the law.

It also recommended police data should be recorded on the basis of sex, the compelled use of “preferred pronoun” should be scrapped and suspects and defendants should be referred to on the basis of their sex.

It said all searches of police detainees should be carried out by police and prison officers of the same biological sex as the person being searched and all prisons should be made single sex."

This is the most time deaf. Knowing what they've found, and knowing their job is to to know and enforce the law, and that this is about sex, not gender, THIS is what the police come up with:

"A spokesman for the National Police Chiefs’ Council said: “How gender is recorded is a matter for individual forces. However, as a general rule we will accept the details that a person provides to us, whether a victim, witness or suspect. Every effort will be made to establish someone’s gender identity if there is honestly held doubt about the information provided

“If gender is relevant to the case and its prospects for a criminal justice outcome, we have processes to obtain the relevant information, including medical records.”"

Ffs. Convicted killer is provided with incarcerated women as part of his sentence. Gets pissed and has sex in prison.

The prison service are unhinged misogynists.

I really hope that this is the beginning of the end of stonewall law

I too hope this report is acted on and very quickly. It’s insane to be in this position anyway but I expect we have Stonewall to thank for that. (Plus the idiots who listen to them).

I recently had a reply from my (conservative) MP Bob Blackman after I wrote to him about single sex spaces including prisons.

I'm heartened that he appears to be on side but his only reassurance was to say that he was not aware of any assaults on women by transgender women in prisons since 2019. What I want is confirmation that male prisoners will be kept out of female prisons full stop.

1.8% of rape defendants are claiming to be female????
Given the minuscule number of rapes that get to that stage, just how many rapists ARE claiming they are female? Are transwomen over represented in other sex crimes?

Yes, it's from The Times, this time by Steven Swinford, Political Editor.
I've not seen anything by him before on this topic. We've had articles by several others, including a regular columnist, the Education Editor and I think Social Affairs Editor or similar title, and even a leading article.

This seems to reflect a change at the BBC. The person in the role of LGBT & Identity Correspondent is Lauren Moss who comes from a background of reporting on Home Affairs and Politics. That is, an actual journalist rather than an activist-journalist. For a few months now when I've been startled by a report on the BBC about LGBT issues looking like it might have some balance in it, her name has usually been attached.

When exactly is gender relevant? Apart from the times when a TW wants to get inside a female prison?

Question on the stats he gives- are there only max 4 transwomen in womens prisons? Why had I understood it to be many more? (Maybe because it seems fairly standard to transfer them in the us and Canada?) but I thought there have been more than 4 cases called out specifically in the past few years.

Last year there were 146 transgender women in prisons in England and Wales, with up to four in women’s prisons. A total of 87 transgender women had a conviction for a sexual offence.

So around 60% of the trans prisoners are in there for sexual assaults/rape.

Surely promoting self id will just lead to more and more perverted men who are not trans saying they are just to get access. Eventually this will skew the figures so that the majorly of trans women WILL be sexual predators. This is not going to help trans people.

I have now read the MPs letter. In it he looks as though he's not fully grasped the issue, in that he talks about no assaults carried on by an assigned male transitioning. This sort of male, who is genuinely transitioning by taking hormones and may go on to surgery, is a very different proposition to a male who just Self Id's as a TW, but in all other respects is male. This pandering to Stonewall endangers women.

Thanks for the link, and thank God the media are increasingly giving this issue exposure.

The foi request in Scotland said 12+ in women's prisons and only 1 had started to take hormones

Last year there were 146 transgender women in prisons in England and Wales, with up to four in women’s prisons.

I'm surprised it's only four, given the amount of testimony I've seen from female prisoners about what it's like having to share prison space with a male-bodied prisoner. I wonder how they decided those four were entitled to be in women's prisons and the rest not?

I also wonder about the other 142: if they're not in women's prisons, what are they getting out of identifying as trans? Are there particular privileges to be had from identifying as trans (eg private bathrooms)?

many things in 'the trans debate' aren't black and white, but the prison issue is mind bogglingly clear.

with people sentenced to prison, especially for violent crime and double especially for a violent crime which might see them become a target of reprisals in a male prison, bad faith can be almost taken as a given. this phenomenon, in terms of its drivers, no different to something like the long established tradition of bad-faith prison conversions to Islam or other minority religions (see en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_to_Islam_in_prisons) in the hope of getting better food or other perks. only in the trans example there's a very clear victim to this permissiveness, even if it is only plain old women (yes, the boring ones with wombs, those dinosaurs).

got that link wrong

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_to_Islam_in_prisons

with people sentenced to prison, especially for violent crime and double especially for a violent crime which might see them become a target of reprisals in a male prison, bad faith can be almost taken as a given.

OK I know that when Emily Thornbery came on to do a MN interview she wittered on about how TW weren't safe in male prisons, instead of addressing the question of why women don't feel safe in a prison with TW. For me it begs the question, why is male violence to other males a problem for women to sort out? There are enough male prisons in the UK, they should be able to find enough space in them to keep TW relatively safe.

I'm heartened that he appears to be on side but his only reassurance was to say that he was not aware of any assaults on women by transgender women in prisons since 2019

I think this is a standard reply as I had this from my Tory MP within about 10 minutes of writing to him. If they have a standard reply presumably that means they are getting a lot of letters / emails.

But they are still ducking the issue that self-ID is not the law.