Melanice' Statement - Point number 26 - in 2015 evidence to a Parliamentary
enquiry, Dr James Barrett, President of the British Association of Gender Identity
Specialists referred to “a plethora of prison intelligence information suggesting that the driving force [to transition amongst sex offenders] was a desire to make
subsequent sexual offending very much easier, females being generally perceived as low risk in this regard.”
a - If this is the case, and it has been presented to Parliament no less, then why have the police and prisons completely ignored it?
b - there's a British Association of Gender Identity Specialists? Of course there is...
https://bagis.co.uk/bagis-council/
They even have a 'community scrutineer' post.
I searched for 'prison' on their pages and lo and behold, cannot find any references to this plethora of research.
I did find the statement to the Parliamentary Inquiry though - https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/57375/html/
The criminal justice system merits quite a bit of thinking about. On the one hand, many of us can remember patients who were charged with crimes, convicted and who ended up on the sex offenders register when we thought that the same thing wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t a trans person. A good example would be the transwoman charged with sexual assault after some brief fellatio with two males who were two and three years younger than her own age at the time (she was eighteen). They were visitors to the area and boasted to their cousin of their recent sexual encounter. The cousin, enlightening them as to the nature of the person they had had a sexual encounter with, caused them to feel embarrassed. One thing led to another and the patient was charged with sexual assault. Given that she was in a kneeling position at the time and that it would have been perfectly possible for either one of the males concerned to run away this seemed a bit implausible. In the end, she was convicted of being reckless as regard to age. This does place her on the sex offenders register, though. One suspects that she would never have been charged at all if she had been a born female.
The converse is the ever-increasing tide of referrals of patients in prison serving long or indeterminate sentences for serious sexual offences. These vastly outnumber the number of prisoners incarcerated for more ordinary, non-sexual, offences. It has been rather naïvely suggested that nobody would seek to pretend transsexual status in prison if this were not actually the case. There are, to those of us who actually interview the prisoners, in fact very many reasons why people might pretend this. These vary from the opportunity to have trips out of prison through to a desire for a transfer to the female estate (to the same prison as a co-defendant) through to the idea that a parole board will perceive somebody who is female as being less dangerous through to a [false] belief that hormone treatment will actually render one less dangerous through to wanting a special or protected status within the prison system and even (in one very well evidenced case that a highly concerned Prison Governor brought particularly to my attention) a plethora of prison intelligence information suggesting that the driving force was a desire to make subsequent sexual offending very much easier, females being generally perceived as low risk in this regard. I am sure that the Governor concerned would be happy to talk about this.