Get a piece of paper and you can strip-search women all you like.

Transgender police officers can strip-search women under new guidance issued by the British Transport Police (BTP).

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

Men get to do what they want. Women, not so much. Men get to frighten and humiliate women; women get to be frightened and humiliated.

The guidance says officers can search people of the same sex as “either their birth certificate or GRC” in BTP jurisdiction. 

Authorised in September by the assistant chief constable for network policing, it reads: “British Transport Police recognises the status of transgender and non-binary detainees/staff from the moment they permanently identify in that gender with or without a GRC.”

The cops recognize the status of transgender and non-binary detainees/staff, but they don’t recognize the status of women. If you’re fake, you’re good to go; if you’re just another goddam woman, you deserve whatever the good gendery people do to you.

Cathy Larkman, retired police superintendent and national policing lead for the Women’s Rights Network, labelled the new guidance “state-sanctioned sexual assault”.

She said: “British Transport Police think that the possession of a GRC conveys some sort of right for a male officer to strip-search a woman, or for a female officer to be pressurised into searching a male detainee.

“Their eagerness to bring this in despite the clear warnings made indicates that they have forgotten about women’s rights, or at best that these can be dispensed with. But women have human rights too.”

They haven’t forgotten about women’s rights. This isn’t being done by accident or unconsciously. This is a deliberate calculated campaign to demolish women’s rights. All of them.

“It is appalling that police chiefs are so intent on disregarding the law and shocking that it is left to women to hold them to account and to remind them that not so long ago, they promised to rebuild women’s trust. Those were hollow words.

“This is state-sanctioned sexual assault and police chiefs have lost their mind bringing this in. They have failed women, it is absolutely unforgivable. It cannot go on.”

And yet it will.