Mick Hartley

From the Telegraph:

Women’s rights campaigners are suing the British Transport Police (BTP) over guidance that allows transgender officers to strip-search women.

The policy, revealed by The Telegraph, allows male staff identifying as female to intimately search women so long as they have a gender recognition certificate (GRC).

Ah yes – the little piece of paper that magically changes your sex. A bargain at £5.

A backlash earlier in 2024 saw similar national policing guidance temporarily withdrawn after the Conservative government raised concerns about women’s safety.

Campaigners wrote to Chief Constable Lucy D’Orsi last month calling for the advice to be removed on the basis that it breaches human rights.

But the force refused and now faces a lengthy legal battle with activists who say the guidance means women risk being subjected to “undignified and humiliating treatment”.

Maya Forstater, the chief executive of human rights charity Sex Matters, which is suing the force, said: “Sex Matters is seeking urgent permission for a judicial review to halt British Transport Police’s heinous practice of allowing male officers with a Gender Recognition Certificate to strip-search female detainees.

“This policy means every woman who travels on trains around the UK is at risk of being subjected to undignified and humiliating treatment, which is a breach of her human rights.”

The law on searching is supposed to protect people from being searched by members of the opposite sex. But British Transport Police is taking the Kafkaesque approach of saying that if a male person with a government-issued piece of paper searches a woman, that search is “being done by a female”.

“We are bringing this case to ensure that no woman in the UK has to suffer this degrading treatment, and to protect female officers from being forced to search male suspects who decide to declare themselves ‘women’.”