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Police criticised for calling trans woman ‘a person convicted of rape’ Lexi Secker was found guilty on Friday of a rape committed in 2021 when a pre-surgery man, but Wiltshire police used the terms ‘person’ and ‘she’ in a statement new Lara Wildenberg Wednesday June 26 2024, 2.35pm BST, The Times Secker was living as a man at the time of the attack on the woman after a night out on April 23, 2021 in Blunsdon, Wiltshire ALAMY Police have been criticised for describing a transgender woman who attacked a woman after a night out as a “person convicted of rape”. Lexi Secker, 35, of Lowbourne, near Melksham, was found guilty of rape on Friday after a four-day trial at Swindon Crown Court. Secker was living as a man at the time of the attack on the woman after a night out on April 23, 2021 in Blunsdon, Wiltshire. The offence was recorded by police as being committed by a male. Last week, however, the court tried Secker as a woman, while Wiltshire police referred to Secker as both a “person” a...

Material Girls by Kathleen Stock, review — a controversial look at transgender issues This author fights back against the modern orthodoxy of gender theory Christina Patterson Sunday April 25 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times Reality check: Kathleen Stock’s arguments about gender identity certainly pack a punch ALAMY I n 2018 the LGBT charity Stonewall came up with a slogan that was a rallying cry for a revolution. “Trans women are women,” it declared. “Get over it.” It was punchy. It was clear. It was slightly aggressive. It was also a statement of a new orthodoxy, one in which sex gives way to feeling, and feeling trumps facts. This is the central argument of Kathleen Stock’s controversial new book and, boy, does she pack a punch. In 2004, she tells us in the introduction, “it was estimated there were about 2,000–5,000 trans people in the UK”. That was the year the UK government introduced the Gender Recognition Act, which allowed trans people to apply for a gender recognition certific...

Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier review — the risks of transgender activism This controversial book warns about the toxic online diet being fed to teenage girls Christina Patterson Sunday January 03 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times Rights and wrong? Pro-trans messages at Leeds Pride ALAMY “Like a virus.” That’s the phrase one teenage girl in this book used to describe her gender identity in an online post, along with the words “trans, genderfluid, non-binary, demiboy”. At the time she was being ironic, or semi-ironic, but it didn’t take long for the sense of irony to fade. After swapping her “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia) Tumblr sites for “social justice” sites full of “trans testimonials”, she, along with four of her closest friends, decided to change her pronouns and her life. She bound her breasts, swapped her diet pills for testosterone jabs and waited to be happy. Unfortunately she wasn’t, and nor, it seems, was anyone else. “They’re all goddamn miserable,” she told Abigail Shrier. ...

Judith Butler, the intellectual behind the trans movement, bites her feminist critics In Who’s Afraid of Gender? the academic who put gender ideology into the mainstream tries and fails to explain her views Judith Butler, 2015 PACO FREIRE/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET/GETTY IMAGES Sarah Ditum Sunday March 10 2024, 12.02am, The Sunday Times T he last time I had to read Judith Butler it was as an undergraduate, and the experience affected me so profoundly that I left my university (Manchester) and moved to a new one (Sheffield) in the hope of never doing it again. A pointless gesture, because 20-odd years on, while Butler remains a professor at Berkeley, her theories have thoroughly escaped it. Who’s Afraid of Gender?  is an elaboration on her big idea, as laid out in the 1990 book  Gender Trouble , that gender is “performative” — that is, whether you’re a man or a woman is determined by whether you act in a manly or womanly way, not by your physical body. This is the intellectual bal...