The British Transport Police (BTP) is facing legal action over new guidance that allows trans officers to strip-search women. Women’s rights campaigners have written to Chief Constable Lucy D’Orsi calling for the advice to be removed on the basis that it breaches human rights.
They say they are willing to try to bring a judicial review of the guidance.
Revealed by The Telegraph, the guidance allows male staff identifying as female to intimately search women so long as they have a gender recognition certificate (GRC).
A backlash earlier in 2024 saw similar national policing guidance temporarily withdrawn after the Conservative government raised concerns about women’s safety.
The guidance says officers can search people of the same sex as “either their birth certificate or GRC” in BTP jurisdiction.
Maya Forstater, chief executive of human rights charity Sex Matters, which penned the letter, said the guidance was “state-sponsored sex discrimination and sexual abuse”.
She added: “Its guidance breaches the Human Rights Act, the Equality Act and PACE, the law that requires strip-searches to only be carried out by someone of the same sex.
“Abuse of position for sexual purposes is the largest area of corruption that the Independent Office of Police Complaints deals with and too many officers have been found guilty of sexual offences.
“The police say that lessons have been learnt and then adopt a policy of institutionalised sexual harassment and abuse of women.
“Not only are women more likely to feel humiliated and vulnerable when naked, but men are responsible for 98 per cent of sex crimes.
“It is well attested in the medical literature that for many men, cross-dressing is a sexual fetish.
“No woman should be degraded by being made to strip and bend over in front of a man. That is even more important when the man may be manifesting a sexual paraphilia.”…
Cathy Larkman, retired police superintendent and national policing lead for the WRN, said: “The letter before action to British Transport Police by Sex Matters is a significant development in this sorry tale of police forces putting ideology, and the unjustifiable self-interest of very few individuals, before the dignity, privacy and safety of women.
“Men are not women and men cannot become women. That applies to police officers too. A vulnerable woman being strip-searched is presented with a man in front of her, regardless of whatever £5 official piece of paper he holds.
“Strip-searching by its very nature can be degrading and embarrassing, for the woman being searched, and for the policewoman doing the searching.
“When the state allows men to strip women and touch them, then that in my view is state-sanctioned sexual assault. It beggars belief that police leaders view this as a carrot to dangle to get more trans-identified men into the service.”
[A grammatical aside: that singular verb in the first sentence – "The British Transport Police (BTP) is facing legal action" – caught my attention. I'd have written "are facing legal action". I struggle a bit with this. It depends, I suppose, on context. So you'd say "the BBC is an organisation at the heart of British life", but "the BBC are disputing this version of events". Possibly. Depending on whether the emphasis is on the institution itself or on the people within the institution. Maybe. I don't know.]
Mick Hartley 
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