Another Gender Nail in the Coffin of Common Sense

The UK police allow male rapists to self-identify as women

An investigation by The Telegraph reveals that police in the United Kingdom continue to list hundreds of suspected male rapists as women. Why? The police allow accused rapists to self-declare their gender.

This farce was first uncovered in 2019 by Fair Play For Women, a volunteer group of female campaigners concerned that transgender rights were often coming at the expense of biological women. Fair Play For Women had submitted a series of Freedom of Information requests to discover how British police recorded the sex of criminal suspects. The group was motivated in part by a highly publicized trial the previous year in which a convicted pedophile, Stephen Wood, was accused of repeatedly raping a woman. At the time of that sexual assault, Wood identified as Karen White. Police and prosecutors referred to Stephen Wood always as a woman; prosecutors talked in court about “her penis.” 

Fair Play For Women was startled by the response to its Freedom of Information request. It turned out that the police often opted for self-declared gender identity instead of birth sex, even when the crime was rape. In the U.K, only a biological male can commit a rape, although there are rare instances in which biological females have been convicted as an accomplice in a sexual assault. 

“You can’t get much more of a male crime than rape,” said Nicola Williams, director of Fair Play for Women. “It would be highly offensive to a woman who was raped to have it written down that her attacker was a female when clearly that was a male with a penis.”

The policy skews crime stats. Campaigners decry it as an “insult and travesty” to victims of sexual violence. It also renders “totally useless” the data on assessing the risk of sexual assaults. 

Suella Braverman, the British Home Secretary, responded to the initial disclosure in 2019 by admonishing police to use their “common sense.” She later told reporters that “in no instance” was it right for a rapist to be described as a “she.” 

“Not only is that wrong because a woman cannot legally be a rapist,” said Braverman, “but also it’s grossly insensitive and insulting to the victims of rape who are biological women.” 

The new statistics, drawn from a fresh Freedom of Information Act request by The Telegraph, shows police have ignored Braverman’s instructions. Since the original request by Fair Play for Women, another 260 accused male rapists were referred for prosecution as “females.” And 209 male rapists were recorded as “sex unknown” since the suspects told police they identified as “non-binary.” 

A source the Telegraph described as “close to Mrs. Braverman,” said that official police records should reflect that “only men can be rapists — anything else is nonsense.”

Maybe, at long last, the Home Office will make it mandatory for police to list the birth sex of the perpetrator, particularly in cases of sexual assault or violence against biological women. The era in which we live unfortunately requires rules sometimes to enforce some semblance of common sense.