Mick Hartley

Julie Bindel at UnHerd talks to Ceri Lee Galvin – 'I will never call my rapist father a woman’:

“I have no respect for those criminal sex offenders who want to make life easier for themselves,” says Ceri-Lee Galvin. “My father wasn’t dysphoric about his male genitals when he was abusing me.”

Ceri-Lee is a bright and confident 24-year-old who juggles taking care of her young child with training to be a paramedic. In contrast to the loving family and happy life she now has, her childhood was pure hell. For nine bleak years, she was sexually abused and raped by her father, an ordeal that began when she was just eight years old.

But Clive Bundy, the man that subjected Ceri-Lee to unimaginable hurt and terror, has recently discarded his old life and now identifies as a woman. Ceri-Lee has felt compelled to speak out, in condemnation of a justice system that helps dangerous sexual predators to evade detection and to potentially target other child victims in female-only facilities.

In 2016, Bundy was arrested by police that had been monitoring his activities online. When they searched his laptop, they found numerous child abuse images, including a record of his abuse of Ceri-Lee. Bundy was jailed for 15 years but served half of that sentence, before being released a few weeks ago on licence.

Prior to his release, Bundy announced his decision to leave prison as a woman, stating that he has changed his name to Claire Fox.

Why would a sex-offender like Clive Bundy decide to transition? You'd have to be very naive to think he was suddenly desperate to explore his inner woman. Clearly – like so many others before him – he's seen a way of gaming the system: disappearing from the records, getting easy access to women-only spaces. The fact that he's changed his name to that of a well-known campaigner against trans activism shows very clearly that, really, he's having a laugh – sticking two fingers up at the system.

Feminists have long pointed out that men who wish to sexually abuse women and children will seek out and exploit loopholes and opportunities in order to find new victims. Former convicts have been known to change their name by deed poll, for instance, and while they are required to inform the authorities immediately on doing so, many do not, and simply build new identities.

With gender reassignment more commonplace — and easy — than ever, it offers a new opportunity for dangerous sexual predators to change both their name and their sex, and then to hide in plain sight….

Before this child rapist declared his intention to live as a woman, Ceri-Lee was “fairly liberal” about gender reassignment, taking a “live and let live” approach. More recently, however, she has discovered for herself the implications and unintended consequences of self-ID, the law that permits adults to change their gender without a medical diagnosis. In a world in which men can now legally enter single-sex spaces once earmarked for women and girls, Ceri-Lee’s opinions have shifted.

When she told her family members about Bundy’s transition, “at first, all we could do was laugh”, she says. “It’s so ridiculous… There’s just no way a man like him feels like he is a woman. He is so macho. He was always very proud of how manly he was.”

At the time of his arrest, Bundy denied every offence he was charged with. “The police said they’d never been faced with anyone as manipulative and coercive,” says Ceri-Lee. “Why can’t they see this is just him, again, trying to trick the system?”…

Appalled that Bundy’s new persona has, with the stroke of a pronoun, all but erased from the public record what he did to her, Ceri-Lee is now determined to ensure that any medical transition will not give him access to vulnerable female victims. “He will do it to other girls,” she says, “I just know he will. I have to get the message out. But if I can stop one girl from having to go through this then it’ll be worth it.”