Police Scotland allows male rapists to be recorded as women

Police Scotland has been slammed for saying that rapes will be recorded as being committed by a woman if the rapist claims to be female.

Assistant Chief Constable Gary Ritchie said there were several scenarios in which this could occur, including where the offender does not have a Gender Recognition Certificate.

Under Scots law, it is impossible for rape to be committed by a woman.

Harm

In response, former SNP Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said: “As a lawyer for twenty years and justice secretary for almost eight, I’ve seen some legal absurdities but this tops it all and is dangerous.

“It’s physically impossible and is about dogma overriding common sense. Women prisoners are being harmed by this and vital crime statistics rendered useless.”

Leading author J K Rowling compared the policy to “doublethink” in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where citizens are indoctrinated with contradictions to prevent them from thinking rationally. She tweeted: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.”

Justice Secretary Keith Brown acknowledged that Police Scotland are “aware of the complexities and the dangers of this situation”.

Truth

Writing in The Times, columnist Alex Massie said that the “feelings of rapists are considered more significant than the truth and much more important than the feelings of their victims. If a man wishes to consider himself a woman that desire must be honoured, even if doing so compounds the pain and indignity endured by his victim.

“This seems a curious ranking of priorities, not least since it requires maintaining that what is fiction is in fact real.”

It is one thing for private individuals to believe in make-believe, quite another for the police

He added: “It is one thing for private individuals to believe in make-believe, quite another for the police — and by extension — the state to do so too. Yet this is where we are and we have reached this extraordinary situation without much in the way of public debate”.

Opposition

Last month, a poll revealed that the majority of the Scottish public oppose the Scottish Government’s proposals to allow people to change legal sex by self-identification.

Proposals are expected to sweep away current safeguards – removing the need for any medical evidence, reducing the two-year waiting period to three months and even extending sex swaps to 16-year-olds.

The poll, conducted by Panelbase, asked 1,001 over-16s who they thought “should be eligible to legally change the sex or gender recorded on their birth certificate”.

Nearly 60 per cent of respondents chose options which excluded self-identification. Only 20 per cent agreed that it should apply to “anyone who makes a solemn declaration that they are living in their new gender”.