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

[placemats]

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/08/teenage-girl-georgia-bilham-pretended-to-be-boy-duped-second-girl-sex-court-hears

I'm following this and cannot understand why this is being prosecuted.

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.

So creepy that people do this.

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.

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

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

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

Thanks for those links @OldCrone I stand corrected.

I wonder if Delacruz and Singh would have been convicted if they'd had a phalloplasty and passed it off as a penis.

I don't understand why this has gone to court either as surely Georgia was claiming to be a boy at the relevant time and, as we all know, anyone claiming to be of one sex or the other (regardless of biological facts) has to be believed, respected, and treated as their claimed sex. We have seen this working for males telling us they are female so why doesn't it work from the female to male side of things, such as this case? Georgia is Georgia now but she was once George, therefore anything George did or said as George was fine and dandy?

It’s not about Georgia. It’s about the victim, who was not offered the information in order to decide whether to consent. The victim consented to sex with a male. Not consent with a female.

I do wonder if the justice system just wants women in jail to keep up their funding cos there's not enough of them

This is why.

• Bilham replied: "I don't even dress like a lad, it just took over my life." Bilham admitted pretending to be George saying she got trapped in a "web of lies".*

She admitted she was pretending. It's not a trans thing. No idea how this would've gone if she did say she was trans.

She admitted she was pretending. It's not a trans thing. No idea how this would've gone if she did say she was trans.

It's likely that it would have made no difference. Kyran Lee, Tarjit Singh and Carlos Delacruz all identify as transmen and all were convicted of sexual offences against women who believed they were men.

But she was. That’s the whole point. She was claiming to be a man, therefore she was a transman. Whether she used that word or not, that is what she was doing.

Sex by deception invalidates consent whoever is responsible and should be prosecuted. The disproportionate number of women prosecuted is a different issue - perhaps down to the difficulty of men passing?

i literally don’t understand how this case fits in with the current TRA ideological capture across the country. Say a trans identified biological male who has had excellent feminisation surgery but kept their penis kisses somebody and that somebody believes they are genuinely female - based on this case that is now sexual assault.

Sure there should be hundreds of these cases going through the courts.

Yet somehow it’s in the public interest to prosecute in this one particular case where the perpetrator happens to be female.

It would have been vanishingly unlikely for her to have been prosecuted for kissing alone. She was cleared of the more serious charges because the court didn't believe the victim.

As has been mentioned below, there have been cases of men using sex by deception by transwomen as a defence for violence.

These are complex crimes with layers of cultural norms and prejudice to unpick - on both sides.

"She was cleared of the more serious charges because the court didn't believe the victim."

From what I've read, that doesn't seem to be exactly the case:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/14/georgia-bilham-woman-accused-of-posing-as-male-found-guilty-of-sexual-assault-by-kissing
"... after a crash in Bilham’s car, the victim saw her driving licence when it was shown to police and it had clearly said “Georgia”.
The complainant texted her that evening, asking: “Answer this with yes or no: are you a girl? And if you are a girl, why the fuck have you lied all this time?”
Bilham said she assumed from that point the game was up, but continued to pretend to be George after the crash....
...the pair continued to see each other and the relationship turned sexual, the court heard."

Of course it's the case. The victim says that she didn't know the accused was female when she was penetrated with a dildo and therefore wasn't giving informed consent.

The court decided that the evidence presented by the prosecution suggested she was lying (presumably assuming internal homophobia/homophobic pressure from relatives/regret).

This is the way it goes in every sexual assault/rape case. Evidence is presented to show the victim to be a liar and in this case it was successful on the most serious charges.

I thought the whole point of the prosecution was that she did claim to be a man?

Yes, she obviously claimed to the other girl that she was a man. She may not have been claiming that by the time this went to court, but at the time of the offences, she claimed to be a man and we are repeatedly told that people are who they say they are. So at the time of the offences she was a transman because that is what she claimed to be.

Saying that anyone who says they are trans is trans and then trying to shift the goalposts when someone claiming to be trans commits an offence is all a bit Nicola Sturgeon and her 'rapist gender'.

Within the terms of self-id, she was "living as a man". Her 'impersonation' included the use of chest binders, trousers and an artificial penis. It's notable that the press reports use male and neutral pronouns when referring to her role as 'Brummy George'. This seems to reflect the language used in court, including by the victim. Part of her defence was that it was consensual role play (she does not appear to have used a 'genderfluid' defence).

There have been multiple cases of young lesbians 'impersonating' boys or men for sexual purposes. A judge in a similar case some years ago referred to the defendant as an "imaginative and persuasive liar" and sentenced her to 8 years in prison. This sentencing was in sharp contrast to another case in 2014 where the offender said she identified as a man, was not called a "liar", and received a short suspended sentence. The LGBT Foundation's male campaigns manager indicated that the victim's assumption that a man would have a biological penis rather than a vagina, was "transphobic".

This is problematic territory for those who want social gender (ie personal assertion of gender) to trump biological sex - even in cases where the crime itself is of a sexual nature.

...the LGBT Foundation, which decrees that "the assumption that all men have penises and all women have vaginas" is "transphobic" (thereby radically altering the English language), indirectly receives funding from the UK Government (Equalities Office, via Consortium).

The Tory peer who announced one of these pots of money for purposes including "training", described the beneficiaries as "fantastic organisations".

The dead-headed institutional support for this ideology is a bigger problem than any masked men or blue-hairs shouting abuse at women.

I think to get back to the core of the case, it is about deception. Not even whether someone claims they are trans or not.

But was someone decieved into being sexually intimate with someone becasue they genuinely believe that were the sex they said they were.

I thought the legal issue rested on this, as in other cases such as a woman who sued because she only had sex with a man because she thought they were going to be married. (He was lying) And a Palestinian man sued by a Jewish woman for deceiving her.

Isn't this why some trans groups have been so against having a law of sex by deception, as they dont think it is deception to say you are the sex you identify as, and for someone to argue that it is, is saying in legal terms that it is a deceit, ie you cant change sex.

And there have been cases in the US where men who feel they have been deceived by having sex with a trans woman who they accepted as biologically female, have argued that their violent response (ie attacking the trans woman) is a "natural" response, ie mitigating circumstances. (Some have suggested that this violent response by men maybe one of the reasons that trans women working as prostitutes have a right rate of being attacked, and in some instances murdered.)

So it isn't about whether someone genuinely thinks they are male or female, it is about how the person they are interacting with perceives what has happened.

Agreed. Trans status is completely irrelevant in this situation as the law currently stands, but the law is under pressure from lobby groups, and we know that the police are also being influenced to interpret the law as certain groups would like it to be - not as it is written.

I don't think sex deception should be a defence for violence under any circumstances. I do think people who deceive others into sexual contact should be prosecuted.

the law is under pressure from lobby groups, and we know that the police are also being influenced to interpret the law as certain groups would like it to be - not as it is written.

And as the courts are being asked to interpret the Equality Act not as written but as now preceived by some trans activists

I don't think sex deception should be a defence for violence under any circumstances. I do think people who deceive others into sexual contact should be prosecuted.

Agreed re both points. And it maybe that male violence is one of the reasons trans women dont report, because of the threat of violence.