Facts aren’t transphobic, so why the secrecy?

I’M A scientist, so facts matter to me. The group I help run, Fair Play for Women, uses hard data and proven facts to defend women and their rights.

I became interested in the topic of transgender prisoners after reading about a few extreme cases. It seemed clear that allowing male sex offenders to change their birth certificate to female and become eligible to live in a female prison could expose women to real danger.

Female prisoners are vulnerable. Many have suffered male violence or sexual abuse as children. Many have attempted suicide and selfharm. Yes, they have committed crimes – mostly non-violent – but that doesn’t mean it’s OK to expose them to sexual violence.

But if, as the Prime Minister has suggested, the law is changed so that any man who chooses to say ‘I am a woman now’ gains the right to be transferred to a women’s prison, female inmates would have no choice but to be imprisoned with potentially predatory, sexually violent males.

This is an important issue. Yet when we asked the Ministry of Justice for the facts the public needs, such as the type of offences committed by transgender inmates, we drew a blank. Even my MP was stonewalled when he raised a parliamentary question.

If the authorities wouldn’t produce the data, we would have to find it ourselves. That meant reading public records for every UK prison. Our volunteers combed through hundreds of documents. Finally, late last year, we had some answers: the first snapshot of transgender offenders. We discovered that a high proportion of transgender prisoners are housed in sex offender institutions or highsecurity prisons. In other words, many have already proven themselves to be violent, abusive and potentially dangerous.

Yet they could become eligible for transfer to women’s prisons under the regime of sex self-identification Theresa May has suggested.

Some trans activists claimed our figures were false. So we fought on, using the Freedom of Information Act. Six months later the Ministry of Justice has vindicated our figures – a process that should have taken 28 working days. Yet, yesterday the Ministry was still hinting to reporters that our survey was somehow unreliable.

We carried on because women in jail have a right to demand that the proposed policy of ‘selfidentified sex’ considers the impact on them, too. We believe this issue needs to be discussed rationally. Data isn’t ‘transphobic’, facts aren’t ‘bigoted’.

But it’s incontrovertible that men convicted of abusing women have already broken the rules. Why would anyone want to make it easier for them to do it again?