London mayoral candidate and former government minister responsible for prisons Rory Stewart has revealed that trans inmates raped female staff during his time in office.
Stewart, a noted anti-Brexiteer with a colourful life history — the British Hong Kong-born politician has served as a diplomat, as a member of the provisional government in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and is thought by many to be a former MI6 asset — made the remarks in an interview with GQ magazine.
Asked for his thoughts on whether biological males who identify as women should have free access to women-only spaces such as lavatories, the liberal-leaning conservative revealed that he was “instinctively worried about that, partly because when I was prisons minister, we had situations of male prisoners self-identifying as females then raping staff in prison.”
“I think if someone is biologically male, particularly in an environment like a prison, we shouldn’t allow that to happen,” Stewart added, adopting a stance which may come as a surprise to many left-wing supporters of the former Tory — expelled from the party after voting with anti-Brexit opposition MPs against Boris Johnson’s then-minority administration in 2019.
“We have to be pretty cautious about how we think that happens in other spaces,” Stewart continued.
“The important thing is: I think the rights of women to feel safe trump the rights of somebody who’s biologically male to enter that space.”
While the British government has refused Freedom of Information requests asking how many trans prisoners are former sex offenders, analysis by the Fair Play for Women charity indicates that somewhere between a third and one half are predators — their own estimate is 41 per cent.
Many observers regard sex offenders’ seemingly disproportionate share of inmates transitioning from male-to-female is suspicious, especially considering how few biological women in the general population commit such offences.
The British Psychological Society has previously conceded that some men in prison have “falsely claimed” to be trans in hopes of “demonstrating reduced risk and so gaining parole” or even in order to gain “better access to females and young children through presenting in an apparently female way”.