British Home Secretary Suella Braverman has told women’s campaigners that UK police should not call transgender rapists women because it is “offensive and factually incorrect,” according to a new report in The Telegraph.
The politician and barrister is believed to made the comments during a roundtable meeting with policing partners and women’s rights campaigners on Tuesday, which was set up to “discuss women’s confidence in policing, police impartiality & the role of single-sex spaces.”
Yesterday I chaired a roundtable with key policing partners & women's rights campaigners to discuss women's confidence in policing, police impartiality & the role of single-sex spaces.
It was a valuable meeting with numerous recommendations for consideration. pic.twitter.com/mctA1qP23R
— Suella Braverman MP (@SuellaBraverman) October 24, 2023
That same newspaper revealed earlier this month that 260 “females” have been referred to the Crown Prosecution Service to consider a charge of rape – while a further 209 suspects have been recorded as having an “unknown” sex, understood to include people who identify as being non binary. By British law, however, rape can only be committed by a biological male.
The Telegraph’s investigation from the start of October found that hundreds of suspected rapists had been “wrongly labelled” as women, despite the Home Secretary telling the newspaper that police should not do so.
In an interview published in September, the Home Secretary said: “In recent years, we’ve seen an unacceptable rise in police partisanship and the police straying into politically-contested areas.”
She pointed to police referring to self-identifying rapists as “she” or “her,” along with other examples including officers taking the Knee at Black Lives Matter Demonstrations, saying:
“Some of these examples that I’ve mentioned are having an insidious effect on public confidence.
She said that while police deserve respect and public confidence, “in too many instances that confidence has been eroded and needlessly damaged” because of Public confidence in the police is being “eroded and needlessly damaged” because of officers who are “politicised” and “partisan.”
A Home Office source told the newspaper that: “The Home Secretary is clear that those who stand up for women’s rights must be protected from harassment and abuse. It’s unacceptable and she has urged policing partners to do everything they can.”
One of the attendees at Tuesday’s meeting was Heather Binning, founder of the Women’s Rights Network, who is reported to have raised complaints that police training had been “hijacked” by transgender activists. “They should rip out all of this training. They are misrepresenting the law that if someone says they are a woman, you must treat them as a woman.”
A Home Office source also said: “Only men can be rapists and official police information should be reflecting that wherever appropriate – anything else is a nonsense.”
Ms Braverman’s comments follow a storm of controversy over the Isla Bryson case. Bryson, a biological male, was housed in a women’s prison in Scotland before public outcry prompted Bryson to be moved.
Bryson, previously named as Adam Graham, was found guilt of raping two women in 2016 and 2019 before he started identifying as a female. He appeared in court as a woman despite not fully transitioning.
The row has exposed a growing sense of concern about the potential dangers posed by biological males in women’s jails in Britain, as it was revealed there were a total of 230 trans prisoners in England and Wales in the year to last March.
In February, England and Wales announced that transgender inmates who retain male genitalia, or have been convicted of violence or sexual assault would be banned from female prisons in England and Wales under new rules.
More than 90 per cent of trans prisoners in the UK are transgender women housed in men’s prisons according to the UK government, and most do not request a move to a women’s prison. There is also currently no obligation to move transgender prisoners according to their wishes. Trans women who do not hold a Gender Recognition Certificate are initially sent to a male prison as a matter of course in England and Wales.
Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Ministry Dominic Raab said at the time that the shift was a matter of safety.
“Safety has to come first in our prisons,” he said, “And this new policy sets out a clear, common-sense approach to the housing of transgender prisoners,” Mr Raab said.
“With these sensible new measures in place, transgender offenders who have committed sexual or violent crimes or retain male genitalia will not serve their sentence in a women’s prison, unless explicitly approved at the highest level.”