Mail Online, 2 March 2024
‘The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it. But in the end, there it is,' said Winston Churchill in the House of Commons almost a century ago. What would the great man have made this week of the case of Scarlet Blake? A heinous criminal, who indiscriminately murdered Jorge Martin Carreno by drowning him in a river, and was found to have skinned a cat and put it in a blender before the murder.
The case attracts attention because of its truly sickening character. But for those of us who believe in the truth, it is the reporting of the case that has added an extra layer of horror. For Blake is a transgender woman, also known as a man. Identifying as a woman, but still very much a man. You wouldn't have understood this fact from the reporting which, in some cases including a shocking BBC News channel piece, never even mentioned this mere detail.
The truth can be uncomfortable. But if our journalists fail to report the truth, on basic matters like biology and on issues affecting public safety and criminal justice, then we are on a slippery slope to a dystopian world of doublespeak, misinformation and dangerous deception.
The problem is that the erasure of biological truth is becoming a professional practice by our media. This perverted reality has produced false headlines such as: 'Norwich woman jailed for cocaine-fuelled sex with dog,' 'Woman who bragged about being a paedophile approached boys' and 'Female convicted of rape'. In the case of rape, it is legally incoherent to describe the perpetrator as female because commission of this offence requires a penis. A biological woman cannot commit rape, except as an accessory. As Home Secretary, I repeatedly made this view clear, but the practice continued.
How is such distortion possible? Regulatory guidelines make newspapers 'responsible for accurately reporting what is heard in court; they are not responsible for the accuracy of what is heard in court.' And the BBC's Style Guide advises that the pronoun 'she' should be used for describing a transgender woman. When our national broadcaster upholds complaints against its journalists for describing transwomen as male, we know that the problem runs deep.
That leaves us with how transgender criminals are being described within the criminal justice system. Herein lies the root of the problem. The Equal Treatment Bench Book, written by judges for judges, makes it clear that the preference is to enable self-identification so that biological males can be referred to as women and in the female form at their request, regardless of whether they have a Gender Recognition Certificate, the relevance to the offence or the wishes of the victim.
While of course transgender people deserve respect and support, it cannot be right that their rights prevail over the truth. The public interest in honesty is clear: distorted crime statistics mean ministers will be forced to respond to 'evidence' of increased violence by women. Male criminals will argue that, as self-identifying women, they are entitled to go to a women's prison. If we are to restore public confidence in the criminal justice system, then surely a good place to start would be with getting the basic facts right?
So we need to change the guidance, rules and the law. Firstly, the judiciary need to amend the Equal Treatment Bench Book to instruct judges to describe offenders by their biological sex, not preferred pronouns. Secondly, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which regulates how the police deal with these situations, needs to change so that they must record birth sex in the custody record of suspects. Currently it does not. Lastly, we need to fix regulatory guidelines so that a biological man is described as male; and a biological woman is described as female.
Much of the reporting this week was bizarre. But more worryingly, it was grossly insulting to women, a distortion of crime recording and a dereliction of a journalist's duty to report the incontrovertible truth.
