The CPS is affirming the delusions of violent men

Where can violent men meet like-minded lonely hearts? For Aurin Makepeace, it wasn’t through a dating app or the local pub – he met his ex-boyfriend, Steven Rothwell, in prison. Rothwell was serving time for murder; Makepeace for stabbing a stranger and leaving him with life-threatening injuries. When they were released, the convict couple stayed together.

But the lag love story didn’t last. The pair split in 2023, though they stayed in contact. Then, on 19 August 2025, Makepeace stabbed Rothwell in the chest and left him to die. He had assaulted Rothwell’s girlfriend earlier on the same day. He then tried to spin an implausible story to cover his tracks.

None of this is especially remarkable. Violent men commit violent acts. What is remarkable is that it was reported as a killing by a woman. After leaving prison in 2011, Makepeace began identifying as transgender, and so apparently otherwise sane professionals obligingly described him as female.

Official and media reports were illustrated with a photograph of the convict sporting straggly blonde hair and a five o’clock shadow, set on a jawline hewn out of granite and testosterone. Yet Cheshire Live and North Wales Live inaccurately reported that Makepeace is a ‘woman’, without even referencing his trans identity. Readers could be forgiven for wondering whether the picture editor was having an episode. The BBC didn’t cover the trial, though it did publish a report following Makepeace’s arrest, which simply referred to a ‘woman’ who had been charged. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail and the Sun both referred in their headlines to Makepeace as a ‘transwoman’ and used female pronouns.

The journalists were doubtless taking their lead from prosecutors. In a tone-deaf statement peppered with ‘she’ and ‘her’, Rachel Worthington of CPS Mersey-Cheshire proudly said that: ‘The jury [has] seen through Makepeace’s layers of lies.’ Worthington has some cast-iron gall complaining about lying in a statement that refers to a male murderer as if he were female.

Telling the truth about the sex of offenders matters because patterns of violence are not evenly distributed between the sexes. Pretending otherwise does not make anyone safer. According to Ministry of Justice figures, around 24,000 men are in prison for violence against the person, roughly 27 per cent of the male estate. For women, the figure is closer to 3,500. The gap widens further with sexual crime: 18 to 20 per cent of male pisoners are sex offenders, compared with just two to three per cent of female inmates. Among the 245 male prisoners who identify as transwomen or nonbinary, 151 are convicted sex offenders, which is around 62 per cent.

We are now nearly a year on from the UK Supreme Court confirming that sex in law refers to biological reality. Many hoped this would mark a return to plain speaking. And there have been innumerable employment tribunals in which claimants have won the right not to be discriminated against for knowing what every dog knows – that there are only two sexes. There has, in effect, been a grassroots uprising against trans tyranny. YouGov polls show a drop in support for legal sex change. Today 55 per cent of Britons say they believe that allowing men to use spaces reserved for women, such as women’s toilets or changing rooms, ‘presents a genuine risk of harm to women’.

Yet the mainstream press and taxpayer-funded institutions still contort themselves to avoid stating the obvious. At a time when trust in legacy media and statutory bodies is dropping, they are at risk of seeming dangerously out of touch and losing public confidence. Why should anyone pay their BBC licence fee or buy a newspaper when journalists and editors are misleading them? Why should anyone respect police officers and court officials who coddle the feelings of dangerous criminals?

To describe a violent man as a woman is not a harmless courtesy, it is an abdication of responsibility. It distorts crime statistics, misleads the public and erodes trust. Crucially, it demands that everyone else participate in a lie. To indulge this pretence is to adopt the worldview of dangerous thugs like Makepeace. It prioritises his feelings over reality, professionalism and public safety.

A society that cannot name what it is looking at cannot hope to confront it. And one that will not speak plainly about male violence will find itself increasingly unable to stop it.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.