Police Scotland are letting rapists identify as women

Apparently, the people of Scotland can now sleep easy, safe in the knowledge that transgender sex offenders will not be ‘misgendered’ by the authorities. Yesterday, the Herald reported that Police Scotland are allowing any male rapists they apprehend to self-identify as women.

The news emerged thanks to an ongoing Scottish parliament probe into the accuracy of gender in crime recording. In 2021, policy analysts MurrayBlackburnMackenzie (MBM) submitted a petition with the Scottish Parliament Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee to ‘urge the Scottish government to require Police Scotland, the Crown Office and the Scottish Court Service to record accurately the sex of people charged with or convicted of rape or attempted rape’. In March this year, Police Scotland responded to the Committee, but MBM was only recently made aware of the reply.

Now we have official confirmation that Police Scotland record the sex of anyone who comes ‘into contact’ with them according to ‘how they present or how they self-declare’. No evidence of biological sex or a gender-recognition certificate is required. In effect, this means that a man arrested for rape is able to simply claim he is a woman and expect to be treated as one. His alleged crime would be recorded as being committed by a female, and the police and courts would refer to him using female pronouns. There is even a slim chance, if convicted, he could be sent to a women’s prison.

In an attempt to justify this clearly bonkers policy, Police Scotland say that it is ‘consistent with the values of the organisation’, which include ‘respect, integrity, fairness and human rights while promoting a strong sense of belonging’. Clearly, the force does not ‘respect’ the dignity of female victims enough to have the crimes committed against them recorded truthfully.

We have already seen what happens when you allow self-ID to creep into the criminal-justice system. Last year in Scotland, rapist Isla Bryson (previously known as Adam Graham) was convicted for attacking two women and was sentenced to eight years in prison. Incredibly, the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) thought it reasonable to remand Bryson in an all-female prison. Thankfully, following outcry from women’s rights groups, he was moved to a men’s prison before any harm could come to his fellow prisoners. Some female inmates have been less fortunate, as cases of assaults by trans prisoners have shown.

In theory, new SPS guidance introduced at the end of last year makes it ‘highly unlikely’ that trans prisoners with a history of violence against women will be housed in female prisons. But ‘highly unlikely’ isn’t good enough. This should never have been a possibility in the first place.

Even if Scottish men aren’t being sent to women’s prisons in large numbers, Police Scotland’s policy still threatens to distort the way that sexual crimes are recorded. Under UK law, rape is defined as involving penetration by a penis without consent. If rapists are recorded as female, this could easily skew the official crime statistics. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that 100 per cent of rapes are committed by men, not least because they alone have the necessary hardware. If we continue to treat a person’s ‘sense of belonging’ to a gender above their biology, official figures could absurdly end up suggesting that there has been a huge spike in Scottish women convicted of rape in recent years.

As with all aspects of trans ideology, we are being asked to believe something that we all know to be untrue. Journalists nowadays are expected to use ‘she / her’ pronouns alongside images of burly, bearded criminals. A victim of sexual abuse is expected to call her male attacker by a new name and to pretend that he is as much a woman as she is. Female prison inmates are expected to pretend that living with a transwoman presents no more danger to them than an actual woman.

If Police Scotland can’t be trusted to know the difference between men and women, how can they possibly be trusted with keeping the public safe? The Scottish justice system has been completely deranged by trans ideology.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.