There may be situations
If truth doesn’t matter in the courtroom then…?
Judges have been told that they should refer to criminal defendants by the gender they have chosen for themselves.
Just “gender”? What if criminal defendants have chosen to be called Duke? Doctor? Father? Sister? Lord? Admiral? Your honor? Why is “gender” the one category defendants get to force everyone to lie about?
New guidance instructs judges to consider whether alleged victims of sexual offences should be required to describe transgender defendants by the pronouns they self-identify with.
It will give rise to concerns that witnesses and alleged victims of rape, sexual offences and domestic abuse could be forced to refer to defendants as women, even if they view them as male.
The victims (who will be women) don’t “view them” as male, they know fucking well they’re male. It’s not a matter of “viewing as,” it’s a matter of blunt in-your-face fact.
Revisions to the “equal treatment benchbook”, a 540-page guide from the Judicial College, have told judges: “There may be situations where the rights of a witness to refer to a trans person by pronouns matching their gender assigned at birth, or to otherwise reveal a person’s trans status, clash with the trans person’s right to privacy.”
What does a right to privacy have to do with ordering people to call you by the wrong sex? That’s not privacy, it’s public narcissistic coercion.
It’s not privacy, because everyone in the courtroom can tell that the person is presenting themselves as someone of the opposite sex. In the UK, at least, an assailant can only be charged with rape if he’s male; so everyone there already knows that the defendant is a man. The only reason to insist that his victim refer to him by female pronouns is to make rape ultimately unprosecutable. All rapists will have to do is claim to be women immediately after arrest, and their victims will no longer be willing to be witnesses. The treatment of victims is already so horrendous that horrifyingly few cases ever come to court, and such a tiny proportion of those cases end in conviction, that women will just give up complaining to avoid further horror.
Excellent point, tigger.
This is the sort of thing that leads to the UK’s reputation as ‘terf island’: objections are strongest there, because the TRA campaign has had its greatest successes there. See above, where a personal fiction now has weight of law even in a proceeding whose purpose is to arrive at factual conclusions.
Never been raped, so I cannot even imagine the true horror that this must inflict on the victim, male or female. And from everything I have read, especially when the victim is female, the court process can be even more harmful than the original offence. So hey, why not pile more pain onto rape victims, most of whom are only women.
As this is a guidance, not law, women should be free to ignore it, and I would hope that the CPS would put their full support behind the woman.
Of course, it is easy for me to say, not being the victim, but I see no need for pronouns in a court case – keep referring to the accused by name, preferably the last name, as they seem to keep that.
And what about the neglected Otherkin? Should we refer to the guy who thinks he’s a dragon in a human body as “his lizardship?”