Transwomen Are Harmless...

Now, before you darned TERFs start ripping apart that headline, let me tell you a story.

In the early hours of 8th June 1975, a detective constable was patrolling Cambridge during the hunt for the man known as the Cambridge Rapist. A young woman on a bicycle was approaching him in the dark, without lights. When the officer tried to stop her, the cyclist swerved past. He grabbed at her hair, and a wig came away in his hand. Underneath the coat and pleated skirt was a short, stocky man. 

The officer had arrested Peter Samuel Cook, the Cambridge Rapist. A search of his bags revealed disguises, a leather mask and ether, which he had used to drug victims. At the time he was described as a transvestite. Today, he would be understood by the genderborg as a transwoman.

By the time he was caught, police linked Cook to a series of attacks on ten women. His crimes  spread terror amongst women throughout the city. 

In October 1975, he was sentenced to two life terms at Norwich Crown Court after admitting six rapes. He had also wounded two women and committed an act of gross indecency against a ninth. Mr Justice Melford Stevenson recommended that Cook spend the rest of his life in prison. He died of natural causes at Winchester Prison in January 2004, aged 75.

A common argument made by trans rights activists is that transwomen are harmless, and that allowing them into women’s single-sex spaces presents no problem. But a Ministry of Justice snapshot of prisoners in England and Wales found that, at the end of March 2024, 151 of the 245 male transgender prisoners had a conviction for a sexual offence. That is 62 per cent, compared with 17 per cent of the male prison population overall: nearly four times the rate. 

It’s comforting to imagine that dangerous and predatory men are easy to spot, but they don’t wear signs around their necks. Ted Bundy was a handsome, debonair young man. On occasions he would pretend to be disabled and walk around a college campus with a crutch or with his arm in a sling and holding some books in the other hand. On seeing a potential victim, he would pretend to drop the books. She would help him to take the books to his van. On more than one occasion, that was the end of her life. Bundy killed at least 30 young women.

It appears that as soon as a man identifies or presents himself as a woman he is said to be harmless. We need to get to grips with this. 

Not all men who pretend to be women are predators, but a significant proportion of them are. A man’s claim to be trans should not lower our guard; the prison figures suggest if anything it should raise concern. In any event, the vast majority of sex offenders and violent offenders are men.

The case for keeping men, however they identify, out of women’s single-sex spaces is clear. Why we still have to keep making it is beyond me.