Today is a horrendous day for women.

[Catsanfan]

I haven't the energy to explain, just skim Aja's twitter this morning. So much there, I am losing heart. Especially the police thing.

‘once a transgender colleague has transitioned, they will search persons of the same gender as their own lived gender.’

So if I am required to be searched, and I don't have a gender identity, do I need to wait for a person with no gender identity to search me? What if I am demi-boy?

I do hope they very carefully ask what the gender of the people being strip searched is. It would be very, very transphobic to assume based on observable sex.

(Goes away to find out the rarest and most unpronounceable gender identity that no police officer will conceivably ever have or know about before their enounter with me.... seems like quite a handy way to get out of being strip searched. Oh wait, does is only apply to the XYs? So sex is more important still?)

You could ask for a transman

I suggested upthread that saying your gender is 'cis female' might work. Does anybody know if it would?

Are transmen officers allowed to search males, & if so what do gay men think of that?

If a man feels that not being allowed to get his hands on women to search them is a barrier to their employment, don't bloody employ them. How many red flags do you need that this person should never, ever be in a position of power and trust?

Indeed.

Personally, if I were considering employment in the police or similar, I would put conducting strip searches in the 'against' column. Anyone considering it a plus should be banned from doing them.

Also links us to Pink News!

It's pretty clear that this thread topic's ... bat signal ... Gish Gallop ... word salad ... special mantra for The Righteous is "only 4 in The Met."

I asked my husband if he’d rather be strip searched by a man or woman and he just said he’d rather not be strip searched at all but if he was strip searched it wouldn’t make a difference to him if it was a man or woman doing the search. it. I think it’s different for men. They’ve not generally suffered from sexual harassment and assault at the hands of women.

That's the thing, if a female were strip searching a male, she would likely be the one to feel more vulnerable/uncomfortable (I'm sure there are plenty of men who would also feel uncomfortable being strip searched by women, but there are no doubt plenty of men who would enjoy it 🤢).

My #metoo moments include one GP and one optician, both men I'd trusted to keep me safe.

We know the police has many sterling officers - and some absolute bastards. Some of them actual women.

But in the event I'm ever strip searched (and I wouldn't rule it out) I will quote the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) chapter and verse, no matter who is to conduct it:

'The officer must be of the same sex as the detainee.

I will consent to the search and cooperate when it is conducted by a member of the female sex, as set out in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.'

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pace-code-c-2019/pace-code-c-2019-accessible#bookmark60

In terms of an intellectual argument (which clearly the police force is not capable of) then it's a good question. If it IS gender identity then a cis woman is different to a transwoman so cannot be strip searched by a transwoman.

However, as this is all really about doing away with women's rights and using unconsenting women to validate men who like to travel to Malaga airport, I don't suppose any of the craven idiots implementing these policies will be able to engage with this sensible, logical point.

At best they're virtue signalling and are too thick to understand the very obvious illegal assault on women's human rights their policies pose. At worst, they want to harm women. It's one or the other.

Some of them, particularly the women, have decided that harming other women is worth it to keep being promoted upwards and getting ever higher salaries. They know, they just don't care.

I know it's not very generous but one thing life has taught me is that no matter how well connected you are and no matter how much you think wealth and connections make you protected from the harms they are visiting on vulnerable women with policies like these, sometimes you can lose it all. I can't help but hope that these women throwing away women's rights come to experience what they've promoted so unquestioningly.

I think action needs taking. We should be protesting this sort of thing

Ha yes. There was a side step ‘I need to check’ to the 12 at West Midlands cited in the press release

And how do women say anything anyway? If they do it’s a crime. That stops any complaint dead

If it is zero as @Flickersy and others assert let’s put it in policy that it never happens, why not?

The clever thing is that just asking for a "cis" person will get you accused of transphobia. See how it works? Don't use their language.

Quite. Do not engage in the game.

I’m a heterosexual man, and I don’t think the sex of the person would make a lot of difference to me. My experiences of an intimate examination by a female GP and a male GP were much the same, equally embarrassing but with no significant fear of assault or inappropriateness by the GP. In a strip search, the power relationship would be different though, so maybe I would be more uncomfortable if searched by a man, but I think that would depend on their demeanour. I fully accept that a woman should not be subjected to a strip search by a male person.

A male friend teetered on the edge of 'getting it' after he booked for a massage abroad on a work trip and the person who came to do the massage was male. He didn't enjoy it and he didn't know why. I explained that he did not like the new experience to him of feeling sexually vulnerable.

Thank you to those who replied to my post. What IS it with Malaga airport, which has appeared in odd places twice now!

I totally agree that we should not have use gender as a defence; however, the report says:

'The paper proposed for the first time that officers be permitted to strip and even intimately search suspects of the opposite sex if the officer self-identified as the same “gender” as the person being searched.'

So as far as I can see, they've (unwittingly?) created a loophole in that no MTF officer can possibly be a cis female, because they're trans. And it's the other side who insist that everybody has a gender identity & ours is 'cis'. By their own rules, the new propsals leave the whole situation unchanged i.e. suspects with matching birth sex only, for cis & trans officers alike. No possible question of transphobia, because it's written into their own proposals. As to what happens with non-binaries & other genders, well the proposals seem to mean they can only be searched by an officer with exactly the same gender, unless they're the same birth sex.

My question about gay men came about from having seen the extreme reluctance of some gay men to engage with FTMs who say they're gay (seen on twitter/X, where some are quite vehement about it). I wonder what they would think about being searched by a FTM?

Edited for spelling error

What IS it with Malaga airport, which has appeared in odd places twice now!

You know there's a 3 letter code for each airport - Heathrow is LHR, Gatwick is LGW etc. Look up the code for Malaga airport and all will be revealed.

"flying to malaga" is my new favourite euphemism

I quite like 'and they can fuck off all the way back to Malaga airport'

Ah!

Has anybody posted this? In the next tweet, WRN don't agree with the minister that holding a GRC should let male POs search females. It's a video:

https://twitter.com/WomensRightsNet/status/1745054721822376249

If she had chosen to do searches and the person in custody refused and wanted a woman to do it, what would happen in that situation?

Sorry, I've read the similar questions asked that you answered very well.