Mermaids advise the CPS on 'sex by deception'

[ArabellaScott]

https://mermaidsuk.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Mermaids-Consultation-Response_-Deception-as-to-Gender_-proposed-revision-to-CPS-legal-guidance-on-Rape-and-Serious-Sexual-Offences-1.pdf

Mermaids Response to Consultation on the Deception as to Gender section in the Rape and Serious Sexual Offences (RASSO) legal guidance

'as a charity that support young trans and gender diverse people, we are concerned that many of the recent prosecutions for sex crimes on the basis of deception as to gender affect young people'
...
'Even if a trans person lies about their gender history or assigned sex at birth, they remain an authentic man'

[verbatim copy and pastes - Arabella]

The consultation:

https://www.cps.gov.uk/consultation/consultation-deception-gender-section-rape-and-serious-sexual-offences-rasso-legal

Look, some trans people pass. Of course they do. Every thread on FWR has posts saying 'nobody passes' next to others saying 'I have a transwoman friend I didn't know was trans'. If no trans people ever passed there wouldn't be an issue with this particular law, would there?

Equally, yes more transmen pass as men (at least to other very young people) than transwomen pass as women, particularly for sex. Obviously.

Don't be dayphobic, today identifies as Thursday.

@Boiledbeetle did you have to? I'm going to have nightmares now.

Authentic man.

can we all just make up whatever shit we like and speak to the CPS in a meeting they arrange for us?

Fair enough, I hadn't been aware of that.

Bingo.

Sorry. Here's some puppies

Authentic Man sounds like a 1970s aftershave

Trans men are only trotted out like this when Stonewalled organisations want to make something appear less threatening.

So definitely authentic men then. Yep. 100%.

Except...where are all the other children's charities..?

It's the concern for convicted sex offenders that I find surprising. Most children's charities are concerned with victims of abuse rather than perpetrators.

The crux is that they claim a person lying about their sex can be absolved if they have an inner essence of trans.

The whole thing was drawn around concern for sex offenders. Did that concern start in-house? Or from the outside in, and then the CPS ran with it? They must respond to this consultation before the election IMO. We need to know what direction they plan to go in.

Probably because they are in the businsess of encouraging young lesbians to believe they are male.

Deception experts consulted in sex by deception laws...erm...almost like...how to DO rather than prevent it.

'How to get away with lying'.

I also recall the whole thing being a prelude to removing the words "penis" and "male" from the definition of rape. And it was based on a misreading of McNally.

The CPS absolutely must tell us what their conclusions of this work were.

The concept of passing is the problem. To ‘pass’ is to successfully deceive people about your sex.

Just because you’re justifying that deception on the basis that you really strongly identify as the oppositive sex, it is inherently about deception.

There are situations where someone’s
sex just doesn’t matter at all - and the idea of deception just doesn’t matter. Whether my bus driver is male or female is of absolutely no consequence to me as a passenger. Whether the new hire in the accounts department is male or female
matters not one jot to whether they can do their job.

In those kind of cases, their desire to ‘pass’ doesn’t matter because the people
around them don’t need to know what sex they are.

But there are situations where it does matter and it’s not ok to deceive anyone. If the company wants you to travel and expects room sharing, then the sex if your colleague is likely to matter. Same when it comes to sharing single-sex spaces.

It absolutely and fundamentally matters if you want to pursue a romantic and/or sexual relationship with that person. The idea that one partner should be allowed to deceive the other about their sex so that they will have sex with them is abhorrent. And indefensible.

Overall, the whole concept (and goal) of passing is a problem.

And it's again based on the whole 'some people are more equal (and human) than others' belief, where the TQ+ identity unlocks higher levels of privilege and treatment compared to the norm.

If someone is upset about sex by deception committed by a person who intentionally used them in this abusive way while privately holding a TQ+ identity, the lobby's concern is that the perpetrator's feelings and self expression is the only valued thing.

And that perpetrators with TQ+ identities are excused their crime and their victims dismissed and the harm to them erased and scolded into silence, where perpetrators without TQ+ identities would face the law and their victims have access to justice.

I mean, who at this point cannot spot the obvious whacking great issue here?

And who thinks this is going to end in sunshine and rainbows rather than increasing resentment and anger towards the weaponised special identity choice that enables abuse of others without responsibility?

And are we arguing that holding a TQ+ identity means that choosing to use and abuse a non consenting other person in this awful way is a 'normal' part of being TQ+ and should be accepted unquestioningly as such, as opposed to the actions of someone with any identity who has a major issue with capacity for respect and boundaries of other people? Because that also raises a LOT of issues and questions.

You can see the questions that were asked (I assume CPS posed these) in Mermaids' submission.

Charitably one could say this was looking at the law and whether 'sex by deception' is a law that is fair/being fairly prosecuted?

Mermaids' response is that if someone tells you they are a certain sex then they are, and if they admit they were lying about their sex, then they're not.

It's a refreshingly simple approach to crime.

'Ask them if they dunnit and if they say 'no', believe them'.

No thought appears to have been given to the victims of sex by deception. Those familiar with Mermaids may be surprised they missed the glaringly obvious point, which is that if a victim accuses a trans person of being their birth sex rather than the sex they identify as they are surely guilty of transphobia.

If the accused was pretending to be trans they are a sex offender and the other party a victim of sexual assault.

If the accused is really truly trans they are brave and stunning and the other party is a bigot.

Apologies for Columbo posting.

The CPS and their waggish appointments that may underpin some of this fear and the consultations. iirc, this appointment (Sophie Cook) is known to have defended sex by deception (see Glinner link).

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/4561116-cps-appoints-trans-activist-who-was-critical-of-women

Cook, however, does not believe that knowledge of a person’s sex is a necessity when consenting to sexual activity with them.
“Transgender people are entitled to a private life and the personal choice as to how much of their history they disclose”, [Cook] said, claiming that ‘forcing transgender people to disclose their history to prospective partners’ is ‘infringing their ‘human rights’.
[Cook] doesn’t show the same concern for the ‘human rights’ of women who may prefer to know the sex of the person with whom they are physically intimate.

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/sophie-cook-the-cps-and-speaking

PS: Cook had a role in the CPS' extension of domestic abuse to include displaying pre-transition photos, 'withholding' money for transition costs etc.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4843625-domestic-abuse-according-to-the-cps-includes

@VinegarTrio

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