December 29, 2024 - 8:00am
When coming into contact with the police, few women would willingly submit to a strip-search by a male officer. We would assume we have the right to be searched by a female officer, and most reasonable people would agree. Not British Transport Police (BTP), however, which is facing a court challenge to its policy of allowing trans-identified male officers to order women to remove their clothes.
Sex Matters, the campaigning organisation founded by Maya Forstater, is seeking a judicial review of the policy. It means, she says, that “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”.
At first sight, it’s hard to believe that this is happening in the 21st century. As early as the 1840s, female “searchers” were employed in police stations to frisk women suspected of concealing stolen goods in their clothes or on their bodies. “Men obviously could not perform this job with propriety,” writes Sarah Lodge in her book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective.
Almost two centuries later, BTP’s Chief Constable, Lucy D’Orsi, disagrees. Her force thinks it’s fine for a male officer to search women as long as he has a gender recognition certificate (GRC), a legal fiction that allows men to change their legal gender. Astonishingly, most police forces operated similar policies until January this year, when an outcry forced the National Police Chiefs’ Council to temporarily withdraw guidance allowing biological males who identify as female to strip-search women.
BTP has chosen to ignore public opinion, however, claiming that acquiring a GRC involves “stringent” safeguards and poses no risk to women. Paying £5, providing gas bills in a new name and producing letters from two sympathetic medical professionals is not exactly “stringent”. But it’s sufficient for BTP, which is happy to allow a male officer with functioning male genitals to inspect a woman’s intimate parts. Its policy also means that female officers may be forced to strip-search male suspects who claim to be women.
The question that arises is who this policy is meant to benefit, since it’s clearly not women. Many who end up in police stations will have experienced domestic or sexual violence, and the prospect of being strip-searched by a biological man will be traumatic — it may well feel like sexual assault.
The awful truth is that it’s yet another exercise in affirming “gender identity”, in which the welfare of women comes a poor second to the demands of entitled men. Adult males rarely “pass” as female and require constant affirmations from people who know perfectly well that they’re men, including work colleagues. Employers give them what they want because they’re afraid of being called out as “transphobic” or sued by an employee with a GRC.
From the police to the NHS, publicly-funded organisations have forgotten the people they are supposed to serve. “We are bringing this case to ensure that no woman in the UK has to suffer this degrading treatment,” says Forstater. In the meantime, no woman can feel safe in the hands of the very force that’s supposed to protect us on the country’s transport system. Even the Victorians didn’t treat women so badly.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.
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SubscribeI agree with this piece, but I’m unclear why sexual orientation wouldn’t also be relevant in this case.
Should homosexuals (male or female) be allowed to search members of the sex to which they feel sexual attraction?
Presumably the objection is not to men as such, but to the possibility they might take a prurient interest in the people they are searching, and might even abuse the position of power this gives them.
For the same reason we keep dogs as house pets but not lions.
Dogs clearly present some risk because they sometimes bite and, tragically, occasionally kill. But for the vast majority of dogs in the vast majority of circumstances, the risks can be sufficiently mitigated.
Lions are much bigger and more dangerous than dogs. To all practical purposes it is impossible to mitigate the risks sufficiently to keep one in the house.
I had this very question……
However, possibly asking the airport security guard if he was “Gay”, while he patted me down, was not the cleverest, or most sensitively timed, of questions. It did have a very simple logic behind it though. If passengers were divided into two queues, male and female, for body searches, wasn’t that ‘undone’ by having (what I considered) an obviously gay man doing the checks on the men ?
It does seem, in my experience, that men come a very poor second when it comes to being ‘considered’, and while organisations will bend over backwards for some preferred groups they will ignore others, or to put it another way the ‘considerations are ‘performative’ rather than carefully considered thinking about the needs of the other person (politeness). A further example, if needed, queueing up to get into a BBC Question Time audience, several years ago, female ‘security’ was moved from the ‘empty’ female queue to help with patting down the male attendees. Was it a problem ? No, not really, but it did demonstrate a set of double standards by which men were treated differently.
Men are different from women.
Vive la différence!
In the 60’s and 70’s being a man buying a made to measure suit often involved a thinly disguised groping by a homosexual.
‘What side do you dress sir?’
A man vs. a man (and most gay men are not that up for fighting?) is certainly more of an even match than a man against a woman.
Let’s try to be a little bit real.
I think we are discussing body searches, not boxing matches.
Good point. You would have to ask a feminist to explain that.
Good luck with that.
Absolutely. We have given too much leeway to the homosexual agenda.
No, sexual orientation has nothing to do with it. If I, as a woman, am searched by another woman I won’t like it much but I am unlikely to be afraid of the searcher. I do not want to be searched by a male.
Which is fair enough for you. Would you also support other people’s preferences in this regard. Objections might be to being searched by an obvious homosexual or masculine presenting lesbian. Other people might even have objections based on race, while others might have religious objections to such searches by anyone at all.
As regards your “fear”, I assume such searches take place under controlled circumstances, and under a strict code of conduct. So your fear may be real, as may other people’s feelings of disgust or violation – but why would your feelings be taken more seriously than those of others.
The inescapable logic of redefining the category “women” to include men who claim to be women is that women-only services will eventually no longer exist. With calamitous consequences for women’s safety, dignity and fairness.
Anyone who denies this is either completely addled by trans ideology, lying for personal gain, or having to willfully ignore the fact in order to cope with galactic levels of cognitive dissonance.
In any event, my policy is not to believe anything else such people say.
This is all about exercising the power of office. Like Winston Smith in 1984 this female head of the Transport police wants to show who is in charge and who must submit and requiring the victim to accept that five fingers are really four or that a man is really a woman for strip search purposes is the ultimate exercise of power.
I suspect, however, that in practice the transport police will not be using female identifying male officers to search veiled Muslim women because they know they will get a far more vigorous response than the cowed Christian and atheist women who have been befuddled by woke propaganda.
A strip search is an imposition and should be made as unobjectionable as possible. I have never had a problem as a man in having intimate examination by a female doctor but I would certainly object to a similar examination by a male identifying woman simply because if she is sufficiently mentally unbalanced as to wish to lie about her sex what other lie might she be happy to resort to if she took a dislike to me – such as claiming I had some illegal substance about me. Many of these searches come about in any case not because the police officer suspects the woman concerned but for the purposes of the fiction that all ethnicities and ages are equally likely to be carrying concealed weapons or explosives and they are carrying out a random search.
If a person holds the delusional belief that men can become women, they should be given no respect and trusted on no issue.
The idea that a piece of paper with writing on can change a man into a woman and vice versa is just so laughable, I don’t understand how it ever came to be acceptable at any level.
If a person holds the delusional belief that men can become women, he/she should never be appointed to any position of responsibility!
GID is a misogynist’s charter. Biggest assault on women’s rights since I really can’t think when. The contrast with the Victorians is well chosen.
‘…BTP’s Chief Constable, Lucy D’Orsi, disagrees. Her force thinks it’s fine for a male officer to search women as long as he has a gender recognition certificate (GRC), a legal fiction that allows men to change their legal gender.’
This puts D’Orsi before Descartes.
Maaate.
Bravo, sir (tips hat)
If a man or woman identifies as a train will she be OK with them running along the tracks at will?
All that articles like this one do is blow smoke in your eyes. They perpetuate all the nonsense of ‘trans identified male” “affirming gender identity” “entitled men”…. by repeating it endlessly.
Only a trannie would protest so much. Trannie bullies are always trying to get normal non-perverts to allow them to violate the safe spaces of women.
I don’t understand what you are saying.
You do prove my point though.
I wouldn’t worry. I doubt Paul understands what he’s saying either.
Why not get a man to write about Gender? That would be truly Unherd!
How I became a target in the gender-critical civil war – UnHerd
Once again… a simple search would’ve sufficed, but your laziness in not doing so is only matched by your intellectual laziness.
To write about Gender… meaning…. explain what it is why it is, what it sets out to achieve, and most importantly how it could be boxed up and put away, so we would never have to talk about it again.
Perhaps women write about it more as they are the ones most disadvantaged.
Initially the role the concept of gender played was to further the feminist cause. Basically the argument was that only the entirely superficial aspects of sex were innate. The rest was “gender” and this was entirely a social construct. This meant there were no natural limits on female behaviour and roles. To claim there were innate differences was patriarchal oppression.
This was really pushed by second wave feminists who didn’t, of course, see how this would feed into trans ideology. A deeper concern – hard to prove, but it does otherwise seem a remarkable coincidence – is that feminist attempts to deconstruct gender in school actually produced the gender confusion we now see.
Unherd is so fake. It’s all built on a lie. Different points of view!?
All we get is Feminism and other Left wing apologism and propaganda.
What a ludicrous take on the situation. What if your wife or daughter was in this position of a male searching her? Possibly a vaginal probe?
Clearly we would rely upon the army, but patently not the police force, were we to summon up a republican force to establish a British people’s republic.
I continue to root for England to come to its senses in any number of areas, gender chaos being a major one, but it’s looking less and less likely that any such thing will happen.
Me too. But it’s the media including (the stupidly named) Unherd that perpetuates the chaos.
Most of the UK is caught up in the net of Far Left Theory.
This article repeats all of its language.
And there is not is single voice allowed to take the first step to freedom, which is to acknowledge the cage you find yourself in.
The one thing I’ve noticed is that we never hear similar demands from or on behalf of “Trans Men” who appear to just quietly get on with their lives.
I think that’s because, reading between the lines, this is all more anti men than anti trans
How is an article about men who say they’re women being allowed to strip search women anti-men? It seems as though you think that this is acceptable. Please clarify.
First, my reply is to a comment, not the article itself.
Second, what I am claiming is that a lot of older feminist opposition to trans is simply an anti male animus being continued. That’s why “trans men” are little spoken of.
In the context of the article trans is seen as bad because it lets the enemy (men) through the lines. I think that unless you are aware of the history of antipathy towards, and even active hatred of, men that characterises second wave feminism then you are lacking the context for their opposition to trans.
Women who believe they are men are not generally regarded as a danger to actual men.
Another example of the excellent work that Sex Matters undertakes. They and the Free Speech Union certainly get my thanks and support.
“… it may well feel like sexual assault.” If she doesn’t consent, it is sexual assault.
Nothing but absolute contempt for these morons at the BTP (they’re not alone)……. this trans garbage is one of the many false religions that must be vanquished by our very own Beowulf to unite our kingdom ;
MacPhersonry – NCHI hit list
BLaMic – DEI, sick lame and lazy welcomed
Multicountry – sharia for all
Translie – denial of sex
BBC – antisemitism
Asylumgee – whatever floats your boat
Drax – trees across the seas
WindEVil – candle power
Men have penises and can’t give birth.
Wome have vaginas and only they can give birth.
Let use that as the single source of truth.
“We would assume we have the right to be searched by a female officer, and most reasonable people would agree.”
Only under the most Orwellian of criteria could the trans activists I’ve seen interviewed qualify as ‘reasonable people.’ Presumably, there must be a few lurking about, somewhere, who have a sense of perspective; but if so, they’re keeping a very low public profile.
Unbelievable! Surely, before anyone becomes a senior police officer, he, or she, should be expected to have common sense.
Unbelievable! Must we next ask that chief constables have common-sense certificates?
I know we’re all busy arguing back and forth on principle, but just exactly how many members of the British transport police are actually trans women? And how many of these are actually involved in body searches?
They deserve to appear in court in the nude. See how liberal and understanding they will be.