Trans woman wants ‘rent boy’ past erased

A TRANSGENDER woman is seeking to remove two convictions from her time spent working as a “rent boy” because the crimes could only have been committed by a man.

The unnamed woman is considering legal action to force police to wipe the historical criminal convictions because they would reveal she was born male and a records check would “out” her to any new employer.

As a teenager in the late Seventies, the woman was twice found guilty of the offence of “man importuning”.

Under the 1956 Sexual Offences Act, the crimes could only be committed by a man, while a woman would have been convicted of solicitation. The Act was removed from the statute books in 2004 and solicitation is no longer gender specific.

The qualified therapist has a gender recognition certificate that gives her the legal right to keep her birth gender secret. She has complained that “because I do not wish my gender history to be more widely known (and do not wish to disclose my trans status to employers), this has prevented me from applying for many roles and has forced me to stay in organisations that haven’t been in my best professional interest”.

She has engaged a barrister, Claire Mccann, of Cloisters Chambers, to investigate bringing a judicial review to force police to either remove the offence from its national computer or else have it altered so that the conviction for male importuning is altered to solicitation, a nongender specific offence.

Police say its database cannot be amended as it is a “historical record”.

Her case has been taken up by Unlock, a charity that supports people with convictions to overcome “stigma and obstacles”.

It has complained that the current law risks “outing” transgender people.

But Fair Play For Women said that if she succeeded it could allow sex offenders in the future to hide past crimes by changing sex.