A new report claims women are being failed by the criminal justice system because it is too focused on transgender rights which is putting “trans rights ahead of women.”

The report, titled Transgenderism and Policy Capture in the Criminal Justice System, was authored by the Policy Exchange think tank. 

While researching the paper they found the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts are, in their opinion, keen to treat people based on their ‘gender identity’ rather than their biological sex.  They then go on to say that while self-declaration of gender identity has been adopted by key institutions, it does not align with the law and this is creating problems for female suspects and female victims.

The publication also quotes from a paper written by Michael Biggs, a sociology professor at Oxford University.  Mr Biggs wrote:

“If campaigners for gender identity achieve their goal, the number of males in women’s prisons will multiply.  Given the obvious incentive for heterosexual men to transfer… males would soon outnumber females. The consequence for female inmates hardly needs to be spelled out.”

As well as claiming the Justice system is putting “trans rights ahead of women”, the new report calls for the elimination of personal declarations of gender identity.  Instead, it suggests data should be recorded on the basis of biological sex because, in the words of its author Maureen O’Hara, an assistant professor at Coventry University:

“Practices which treat biological males as women are causing harm to victims of crime, staff in the criminal justice institutions, female prisoners, and perhaps to trans-identifying offenders.”

This view is echoed in the paper’s forward in which SNP MP Joanna Cherry QC says:

“When politicians from the left and right such as Annaliese Dodds, Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson refuse to define what a woman is for fear of being branded ‘transphobic’, it is depressingly difficult to have an informed debate on the implications of the wholesale and often unquestioning adoption of gender identity theory by our institutions, both public and private.  Many politicians describe the debate as toxic and use that as an excuse to avoid addressing issues of the sort set out in this article. It is a quite shocking abdication of their responsibility as law makers.”

Ms Cherry added that more and more women and men are being unfairly “hounded from their jobs” in both the public and private sectors “for daring to question the adoption of gender identity theory in their workplaces.”  It is a situation Ms Cherry feels is “positively McCarthyite.” 

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