Trans ideology is now pandering to paedophiles

To Greater Manchester Police (GMP), the feelings of paedophiles are seemingly more important than telling the truth. Last week, the force reported on the sentencing of two inmates – Naomi O’Brien and Jonathan Walker – for crimes against a child. GMP posted on X: ‘A man and a woman have been sentenced to a combined 16 years and nine months in prison for their roles in the sexual abuse of a child.’ Only this wasn’t quite true. The text was accompanied by a mugshot of the very obviously male O’Brien.

O’Brien, who identifies as trans, was handed a sentence of four years and three months for his part in the co-ordinated rape of a toddler – an outrageously short sentence for such a horrendous crime. He exchanged over 1,800 messages with Jonathan Walker, sharing their depraved, paedophilic interests. Walker abused the boy under O’Brien’s direction and the pair shared images of the assault with other paedophiles online. The crimes were horrific and the suffering of the victim was heartbreaking. The public clearly deserves to know who was really behind this awful crime.

Yet GMP have effectively deceived the public not only on social media, but also in the quotes offered to the press. Detective inspector Zoe Marsden, of GMP’s Online Child Abuse Investigation Team, inaccurately described O’Brien as a ‘predatory female’. This blatant lie was shared in reports by numerous outlets from the BBC to local newspapers, where no mention was made of the fact that O’Brien is a biological male.

When I spoke with Dr Kate Coleman, director of pressure group Keep Prisons Single Sex (KPSS), she found this deception unsurprising. Coleman says that GMP are not alone in ‘recording and reporting crimes committed by men as having been committed by women’. Each year, KPSS asks constabularies across the country how the sex of suspects is entered into their databases. This year, of the 32 forces that answered KPSS’s freedom-of-Information requests, ‘no force records sex registered at birth as standard in all circumstances’. This remains the case even when a suspect has been accused of rape, a crime that under British law can only be committed by a man using his penis.

The implications of such misrecording are serious and wide-ranging. As Coleman explains: ‘Some offence categories are only very rarely committed by females. This means that the allocation of even one or two cases of male offending to the female subgroup can have a significant impact on that data, compromising both reliability and its utility and relevance to service development.’

Acknowledging sex differences might now be frowned upon in trans-pandering circles, but it remains a stubborn fact that male defendants outnumber females in every category of offending. Data from the Ministry of Justice make clear that men are much more likely to find themselves in court for all crimes. Men represent 98 per cent of those prosecuted for sexual offences and 82 per cent of those facing a sentence for violence against the person.

More uncomfortably still, it seems that sex offenders in particular are disproportionately represented among trans-identified inmates. Government figures show that, as of 2020, 76 of the 129 male prisoners identifying as transgender (not counting those with gender-recognition certificates) have at least one conviction for a sexual offence. This includes 36 convictions for rape and 10 for attempted rape. No doubt many of them only discovered their ‘trans identity’ after being arrested, perhaps hoping for a place in a women’s prison.

The prison system as a whole has been so overwhelmed by male offenders claiming to be women that an entire wing has been set up to facilitate prisoners with gender-recognition certificates at HMP Downview.

Despite most of these trans inmates clearly being men in wigs, we are still expected to treat them as no different to biological women. Institutions from the Crown Prosecution Service and the police to the BBC insist on calling them women and describing them with feminine pronouns. They cling to the fiction that the self-declared gender of these offenders matters more than their biological sex. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that many police forces – including GMP – have close relationships with trans lobby groups, including Stonewall and the LGBT Foundation.

Those investigating and reporting on crimes should remember that their duty is to the truth, not to sparing the feelings of depraved paedophiles. People have a right to know who really committed these horrific crimes.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.