Let’s start with a horror story.
In a suburb of New York, police discovered various dismembered body parts. An adult female torso had been left in a shopping trolley. A few blocks north, they found a leg. Once the police had identified their suspect, an 83-year-old woman, they uncovered a human head and saw-blades in her apartment. Not only that, it turns our that this octogenarian had been jailed for murdering a woman sixty years before, and was convicted of manslaughter for stabbing another.
Perhaps you think this lurid story is too unbelievable to be true. Very few women are serial killers, and fewer still target other women. Unfortunately, this actually happened, and was reported as outlined above on the BBC News website in March 2022. It was only towards the end of the article that a key piece of information was added. The perpetrator, one Harvey Marcelin, had “recently identified as a woman”.
We should have seen that twist coming. There was a good reason this didn’t sound like a female crime. So why did the BBC only mention the biological sex of the murderer as a casual aside towards the very end of its account, as though it were a relatively inconsequential detail?
Many of us have noticed with weary regularity the way in which journalists pretend that male criminals are women if they so identify. Last week, the Guardian ran an article with the headline: “Cat-killing woman guilty of murdering man as he walked home in Oxford”. This was the horrific story of a trans-identified male who had killed, dissected and blended the corpse of a cat before going on to strangle and drown a stranger. Yet throughout the story the journalist insisted that this psychopath was female.
Many were outraged at this misrepresentation. One of the Guardian’s own writers, Louise Tickle, wrote a letter to the editor Katharine Viner to say that she could not continue working for the publication until it was “able to demonstrate that its reporters, editors and management understand what constitutes a fact, and stops deceiving its readers.”
But the Guardian is not alone. In December last year, a shocking story appeared on the BBC News website about a predatory woman who had directed a man to abuse a four-year-old child.
What the article doesn’t tell you is that this individual is a man. He is referred to with “she/her” pronouns throughout, and you have to rely on the evidence of your own eyes to get to the truth.
One of the key misunderstandings about this widespread media deception is that it has been mandated by either the law or press regulators. Yet there is absolutely no legal or professional obligation for journalists to misstate the sex of a criminal.
Even so, the examples are endless. According to the mainstream media, this is a “woman” who was jailed for paedophilic abuse:
This is a “woman” who exposed “her penis” and used a wheelie bin as a sex toy in public:
This is a “woman” who was imprisoned for sexual assault:
This is a “woman” who was arrested for making bomb threats:
This is a “woman” who was jailed for stabbing and false imprisonment:
And this is a “woman” who was incarcerated for cocaine-fuelled sex with a dog.
If you believed the mainstream media, you’d think there had been an exponential rise in the numbers of women committing acts of violence and sexual assault. The truth is that men are far more likely to be criminals. There are currently 84,000 men in prison as compared with just 3,500 women. And according to the most recent census data, men are one-hundred times more likely than women to be convicted sex offenders.
So why all the misinformation? A generous interpretation might be that reporters are merely following the language used by the police. For instance, in one recent case, the DI of the Greater Manchester Police’s Online Child Abuse Investigation Team described a male accomplice to sex-offences as a “predatory female”.
And yet there is no obligation for the police to use such language either. The guidance is muddled at best, and practice is inconsistent across the country. A Freedom of Information request by the group Keep Prisons Single Sex found that of the twenty-four police forces who replied, fifteen said they record suspects by “gender identity” and just two on the basis of biological sex. When a suspect identifies as non-binary, many police forces record the sex as “indetermine” or “non-specified” even though “non-binary” does not exist as a category in English law. In other words, the police appear to be making it up as they go along.
As a result of all this, crime statistics in the United Kingdom are being skewed. The most obvious and straightforward solution is to record suspects and criminals by biological sex, but if a particular criminal claims to have a “gender identity” that could be provided as an additional detail. (Although why the metaphysical beliefs of criminals need to be recorded is beyond me.)
It should go without saying that crime statistics ought to be accurate. Under the present system of improvisation and inconsistency, we have no way of knowing how many of these “female rapists” are actually men. Moreover, we need to prevent male criminals exploiting the religion of gender identity as a loophole to be moved to women’s prisons. The double rapist Adam Graham famously sought to be housed in the female estate by wearing an unconvincing wig and calling himself “Isla Bryson”. He was temporarily accommodated in a female prison while the Scottish government conducted a risk assessment.
What kind of “risk assessment” does a double rapist require? Is not the conviction sufficient for the government to know that he is a threat to women? So absurd was this situation that, when it came to light, it arguably contributed to the fall of first minister Nicola Sturgeon.
The ideological capture of the police in the United Kingdom is well known, largely a result of the influence of the College of Policing. And while the government seems unable or unwilling to tackle the problem, we might at least turn to our media to begin accurately describing these criminals as men. I appreciate that if reporters are quoting from a court case, and a criminal has been referred to with different pronouns, they are obliged to quote accurately. But most of the articles cited above are about convicted criminals, so there’s no justification whatsoever for the pretence.
So is all this happening because of style guides? When the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) published its “Guidance on researching and reporting stories involving transgender individuals” in October 2016, it had only consulted with trans activist groups. Unsurprisingly, the advice was contorted accordingly. Rather than compel “preferred pronouns”, IPSO asked a question of reporters:
“If known, have you used the pronouns the individual uses to describe themselves in your story?”
At the same time, it asked:
“Have you taken care not to publish inaccurate or misleading information?”
The implications behind these two questions appear to be contradictory. Yet in framing the advice in this way, IPSO has avoided taking a dogmatic stance on the issue. In other words, reporting a criminal’s “gender identity” but not his sex is by no means compulsory, but is rather a conscious choice that media outlets are making. The same is true of televised journalism; Ofcom does not mandate using “preferred pronouns” for criminals. That reporters continue to do so is confusing, unethical and frankly embarrassing.
There is absolutely no requirement for the media to engage in some ridiculous charade to spare the feelings of rapists, paedophiles and murderers. Nobody is required to pretend that male sex offenders are women just because they say they are. Please stop misleading the public.
Journalists and editors who would like further guidance on how to accurately report the sex of criminals should read the media handbook on sex and gender by campaign group Sex Matters. It is available to download here.
Thank you Andrew.
I'd just submitted my complaint to the BBC re the reporting on Scarlet Blake when your mail arrived. I encourage everybody to make formal complaints rather than just rage on X etc.
It was actually misreporting that alerted me to the whole trans issue; I was trying to find out why women suddenly seemed to be committing child sex abuse and violent crimes in unprecedented numbers. Of course they weren't! These were male crimes.
You may have noticed reporting (not on the BBC obviously) in the last few days that over 70% of trans convictions are for sexual crimes - no one is surprised - yet these are the men women are supposed to #beKind to and welcome into our spaces and services.
For anyone not aware of how widespread this problem is take a look at transcrimeuk.com
Thank you so much for highlighting what's happening.
While I wasn't really paying attention, I am ashamed to admit that I did not realise until two days ago that Scarlet Blake was a bloke. I am usually fairly alert to these things, but this one slipped past me. I was talking to a friend last night who said, "Blake is a man? Really?". He hadn't realised either. That is how easily people are now being fooled by the normalisation of this by journalists. It's scary.