Trans detainees can request officers of a different sex for searches (Scotland)

[Igneococcus]

This might be the most bonkers thing to come out of Scotland yet.
"Transgender detainees undergoing police searches will be allowed to ask for officers of different sexes to frisk their top and bottom halves, under new guidelines."

https://www.thetimes.com/article/ac912fac-0038-4d68-80a9-b3dce4807ca6?shareToken=8d1563cd136a6688bad250e571282b97

Well at a guess female lice will be queuing up to do this lol.

This is utterly crazy. There is no such thing as 'full surgical transition' for a start - and I don't believe for a minute that female officers won't be put under pressure to carry out intimate searches of trans identifying males. What happens if no complying female officer is on shift in that police station? Do they abandon the search or (much more likely) coerce a female colleague? Why is the top half of a trans person a different sex to their bottom half? The police unions should be speaking out against this, it's abusive to officers and could put them at risk of legal action.

I agree it's mad and I feel for the female police officers.
Also, I thought it was us who are "obsessed with genitals" allegedly.

I wonder (if they’ve considered) how this would go in court….

Officers who refuse to carry out such searches will face no career detriment, the guidance adds.

I hope every female officer if asked to check a transwomans top half (or bottom half if they've inverted the penis) tells their superior to stick their request where the sun doesn't shine.

I'm picturing that flipbook game I played as a kid where head, torso and legs are all wearing different outfits...👫

Link to Police statement, with link to full guidance therein:

https://www.scotland.police.uk/what-s-happening/news/2025/june/police-scotland-publishes-interim-transgender-search-guidance/

And excerpt.

I'm struggling to make any kind of sense out of this. Is the suggestion people can be a different sex from the waist down?!

We’ve come across this in the NHS audit too, wrt intimate searches in mental health wards. Although in the one I’m remembering it specifically stated that staff would not be able to object to doing these searches, on any grounds.

But - but it's utterly absurd!!

Yes. Because they may be “mid transition” so they’ve only had half of their surgeries. The policies seem to not have caught up with the fact that for many TiMs the boobs-plus-intact-penis is in fact the end goal.

It’s for the comfort of the transitioning person, apparently.

It adds a whole new dimension to it doesn't it? 🤷‍♀️

Scunnered. I'm scunnered.

This means a man could request a female search certain body parts.

Doesn't at all sound like a twisted fantasy.

It is a bit crazy, but provided we have moved away from the idea that male police officers can search women on the basis of the officer's say-so about his gender, and provided that police officers can refuse to search someone not of their sex, then it seems harmless enough.

The only enraging thing is that there are stories of extraordinarily brutally inappropriate police searches, like that of the schoolgirl whose treatment was probably influenced by racist stereotyping. Those stories make these very gentle and sensitive guidelines for one particular set of people seem incongruous. But perhaps the solution to that is to make sure that ALL people are treated with as much concern as is being set out here.

I mean, I think in the NHS one the gender (sex) of the searcher was meant to match the genitals/secondary sex characteristics, but now you mention it I’m not sure it specified.

But it does throw a spanner in the works of the “I am woman and this is my woman penis,” doesn’t it?

I am curious whether these policies are some sort of interesting fudge thrown up because of trying to shoe horn TRA demands into something as (previously) tightly controlled as intimate searching. Do we know what the prison policies are?

What is interesting is the ability to ask for a police officer of a particular “biological sex”. A binary male/female.

What if the Police Officer is trans/non binary/ gender fluid etc. I could see a law suit here!

The Police and nurses’ trade unions should be up in arms about this. They won’t be of course because special men’s feelz but no senior officer should ever ask anyone to do this.

Please can we return to the simple position we used to have? X needs to be strip searched. X is male. A male staff member will do the job. Y needs to be strip searched. Y is female. A female staff member will do the job.

I have asked this a few times on various threads. We seem to be in an age where we are expected-rightly so - be be tolerant of how people present. I am absolutely fine you presenting however it suits as long as you are equally respectful and kind and tolerant to me. Do the job you are paid to do without expecting special privileges.

It seems to me - and I am happy to be corrected-the trans men identifying as women group shout much louder than the trans women identifying as men.

Am I missing something and just not aware of them and their voices?

There is also the misconception that policy always = correct in law.

Most people don’t know, or need to know, the minutiae of the law, but I suspect they would assume that their employer would at least have consulted someone (legal, not activist) when writing policies.

As we are discovering, not even the government is capable of this - thus all the NHS trans policies that “go beyond (ie break) the law” which were imposed on trusts from on high.

That is the Irish Prison Officers solution to the male who trotted up to Court with his GRC and was placed in the Womens Prison.

The female officers carry out the strip search of his male top half and male officers carry a search of his male bottom half.

So a minimum of 4 POs would needed to carry out any search with a swap out of staff mid way.

He made a number of complaints to the Prison Visitor group but oddly fails to use his free legal aid to take his case to the High Court as a breach of his Rights and and a breach of the law on prison searches.

The pro-Self ID Ministers in charge continue to whistle quietly to themselves and pretending not to notice.

This isn't about this particular guidance but here is Alex Massie's comment in the Times today about why nothing (or nothing tangible) has happened yet to implement the HC ruling in Scotland.
https://www.thetimes.com/article/94110501-684f-47bd-8fe0-2bebcc193add?shareToken=8ce5489a142c875c536eef789fb280d3

I don't think so, because the guidelines explicitly say that officers must not suffer any 'career detriment' for refusing to carry out an opposite-sex search.

Also, the guidelines do say that a transgender person's request to be searched by an opposite sex person will only be fulfilled where it is 'operationally viable' and the officers are only mandated to 'make efforts' to fulfill it.

On the top and bottom separate search thing, it does seem to fly in the face of how trans people are said to conceive of themselves. That's what makes it absurd. Hopefully it will tend towards revealing how daft some employer-and-service-provider contortions have become in response to the sheer irrationality of public discourse in this area.