The compassionate origins of Tory transgender self-identification proposals
by Archbishop Cranmer:
“Maria Miller gathers up her handbag and makes to leave: ‘I don’t think I’m happy about this. I think I’ve finished… I didn’t realise this was such a stitch-up’”, the Times recounts as they probed Tory proposals to make gender-switching a simple matter of self-identification. You’d think, as Chairwoman of the Women and Equalities Committee, Maria Miller would be eager to explain the rationale and virtues of transgender self-identification – that is, the state’s recognition of a person’s preferred sex/gender irrespective of biology or medical authentication – especially as the consequences will be quite far reaching, and the policy didn’t feature in the Conservative Party’s (very) recent General Election manifesto. The announcement of a public consultation on the matter appears to have come somewhat out of the blue.
The question which particularly perturbed Mrs Miller (or is it ‘Ms’?) was the emotive one of rape. The interviewer remarked that “90 per cent of violent crime and 98 per cent of sexual crime is committed by men. Trans women, such as Davina Ayrton, who raped a 15-year-old girl, have been convicted of offences seldom committed by natal females”, which elicited the question: “Would self-identification mean these crimes would be registered as committed by women, skewing the figures?”
“It should be registered in the gender of the person when they committed the crime,” Maria Miller responded, apparently without thought or hesitation.
And so the Times concludes: “This would mean that if Katie Brannen, charged with twice raping a man in South Shields, is convicted that crime would be recorded on female statistics even though legally women cannot commit rape.”
So the Chairwoman of the Women and Equalities Committee has confirmed the emergence of a new gender inequality in law: presently, natal women cannot commit rape but transgender women patently can. Transsexuals obviously can’t: the penis is all. This means that transgender women will be treated differently in law to natal women, and that’s… well, it’s called gender discrimination, and it’s Maria Miller’s task to stamp all that out because it isn’t fair.
When this question was thrown out to Twitter (as one does to crowd-source wisdom, which sometimes works), Michael Stokes QC confirmed that the law would need to change:
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