Suspected and convicted rapists are allowed to self-identify as female, Police Scotland revealed following a freedom of information request from a feminist think tank.
The police force for Scotland said that if a rape or suspected rape was committed by a “male who self-identifies as a woman… the male who self-identifies as a woman would be expected to be recorded as a female on relevant police systems.”
Detective Superintendent Fil Capaldi said per The Sunday Times: “The sex/gender identification of individuals who come into contact with the police will be based on how they present or how they self-declare, which is consistent with the values of the organisation.
“Police Scotland requires no evidence or certification as proof of biological sex or gender identity other than a person’s self-declaration, unless it is pertinent to any investigation with which they are linked as a victim, witness or accused and it is evidentially critical that we legally require this proof, or there is reason for further enquiry based on risk.”
The revelation seemingly flies in the face of statements made by Scotland’s left-separatist Justice Secretary, Humza Yousaf, who has said that legal proof of a gender transition should be required of criminals seeking to be classified as female.
Yousaf, the chief architect of the controversial Scottish Hate Crime bill which seeks to impose harsher restrictions on freedom of speech in the country, has said that police should record an offender’s sex rather than their so-called gender identity in instances in which their sex directly relates to the crime committed.
In a letter to Scottish politician Johan Lamont seen by The Times, Yousaf said that male rapists should obtain a gender recognition certificate in order to be considered “legally female” to be statistically categorised as such in instances of sexual assault.
Dr Kath Murray of the Murray Blackburn Mackenzie feminist think tank said that recording the actual sex of rapists is important in terms of being able to keep accurate statistics, as it impacts the policies of the government.
“Recording and presenting violent and sexual offences committed by male as ‘female’ distorts our understanding of the nature of offending by women and men,” Dr Murray said.
“It obscures whether changes shown in statistics are due to real changes or only to changes in recording. In extremis, it may lead to the development of policies and projects based on false information,” she added.
The problems of allowing male sexual offenders to identify as female has been demonstrated elsewhere in the United Kingdom, where some inmates have even been moved into women’s prisons where they continued to sexually assault other inmates.
In a notable case, Karen White, previously known as Stephen Wood, who was jailed for raping two women, was convicted of sexually assaulting several female inmates after being transferred to a women’s prison following claims of being transgender.
In another case, double rapist Martin Ponting, who later identified as Jessica Winfield, was forced into isolation after reportedly sexually harassing the female inmates of the Bronzefield women’s prison in Surrey. The double rapist was also provided a £10,000 sex-change treatment at taxpayer expense.
Dr James Barrett, the then-President of the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists, warned the British Parliament in 2015 that there is a “plethora of prison intelligence suggesting” that a “driving force” behind male sexual offenders identifying as female was in order to “make subsequent sexual offending very much easier”.
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