Chamber and committees

Mary Gordon submission of 28 July 2021

PE1876/E - Accurately record the sex of people charged or convicted of rape or attempted rape

In the Times of April 17th 2021, Police Scotland said that if a rape or attempted rape was perpetrated 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.”

I am strongly against this. We know that there a marked differential between criminality between the sex classes. Last year 100% of rapes were committed by men. If men who identify as women, commit a sexual crime and the crime is identified in statistics as by a woman it gives a misleading impression of criminality by women.

As Professor Alice Sullivan says on the importance of sex disaggregated data "Accurate data on sex is fundamental to any analysis of the differences and inequalities between women and men, girls and boys. The drive to undermine sex-based data collection is fundamentally a form of silencing, designed to make certain facts unknowable and unspeakable."