The answer to this question was in the tweet itself, which linked to a blog post I wrote in 2020. The police did not appear to have read it. There, I set out the clear evidence from numerous media articles in which Dr Kamaruddin boasts of intimately examining female patients while not being clear and honest about his being male. He expresses happiness at now being able to perform “more intimate examinations that they did not let me do when I was a male GP”, and in the post I asked why the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the regulator that inspects GP clinics, said nothing about Dr Kamaruddin’s behaviour or the clinic’s policy of telling patients he was female.

Nothing I said came anywhere near the threshold required for “malicious communication”; more importantly, it was all true. But the Metropolitan Police is currently unequipped to treat women like me fairly. As with many police forces and the Crown Prosecution Service, it has been trained by Stonewall as part of the Diversity Champions Scheme, and so has been exposed to the doctrinal falsehood that anyone who refuses to pretend that men who identify as women are really female as bigots and transphobes.

Understanding that it is morally and legally wrong for a male doctor to examine female patients without their informed consent should not be hard, if one remembers that women and girls are human beings and not props for men’s ideas about themselves. It helps to use clear language, but the Met maintains a policy of allowing some male officers who identify as female to search women and girls. Fixing these policies in the police, not to mention the prison service and the NHS, requires leadership at the highest level. Unfortunately, it is a hot potato that has been passed on to the next government.

Instead of issuing a firm No for the sake of women and girls, politicians squirm and call the debate “toxic”, “polarised”, and a “culture war”. Officials and judges fear being labelled as transphobes and so avoid challenging the whims of the trans lobby. They trust and hope that someone else will draw the line on a case-by-case basis, so that inappropriate and abusive things do not happen.

This line should be drawn long before a woman is told to take her clothes off in front of a man and required to call him “she” as he puts his fingers inside her body. But as far as I know, no one in the East One Health Centre, local NHS Commissioning Group, CQC or Royal College of GPs said no to Dr Kamaruddin. No one in the media noticed his behaviour, even when he spelled it out for them repeatedly. The police did not ask him to present himself to a police station to answer questions.

When a male doctor publicly boasted of intimately examining female patients without their informed consent, the only person whom the Metropolitan Police saw fit to investigate was a woman who pointed it out. The whole state apparatus meant to safeguard women from such abuses has now been turned against those of us who stand up against them.

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Maya Forstater is CEO of Sex Matters.

MForstater

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