“KK”: transgender paedophile prisoner who lost court case vs NHS
‘KK‘, a violent male who identifies as a trans woman, received an indeterminate sentence for public protection (IPP) over a decade ago after being convicted of making indecent photographs of children and following a previous conviction for sexual activity with a young girl. KK cannot be named for legal reasons.
The 60 year old paedophile sued the NHS for refusing reassignment surgery after identifying as transgender for the past eight years while incarcerated in a men’s prison. The judge at the High Court deferred to the expert clinical opinion that the referral should not be made, saying that “the claimant has produced no evidence to the contrary.”
The prisoner claimed the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust has unlawfully adopted a “de facto policy” of refusing to refer serving prisoners with gender dysphoria for gender reassignment surgery (GRS).
In written submissions, Jenni Richards QC, for the trust, argued that the court should not interfere in a decision involving “the application of clinical expertise in a developing area of medical practice” and that the reason KK was not referred was because “the treating clinicians at a world-class clinic for gender dysphoria did not consider it clinically appropriate to refer her for surgery”.
KK’s barrister submitted that the trust refused to make the referral over “concerns that there was a possibility that the claimant may not wish to continue to live as a woman following her release from prison”.
In 2015, The British Association of Gender Identity Specialists submitted evidence to the Transgender Equality Inquiry on “the ever-increasing tide of referrals of patients in prison serving long or indeterminate sentences for serious sexual offences” and identified clear, worrying motivations for some male prisoners to transition; most alarming of which was a desire to make subsequent sexual offending very much easier. The British Psychological Society similarly warned the Inquiry to be “extremely cautious of setting law and policy such that some of the most dangerous people in society have greater latitude to offend” and were “aware of a number of cases where men convicted of sex crimes have falsely claimed to be transgender females.”
This tag collates other transgender prisoners who have received indeterminate sentences for public protection (IPP) as a result of their violent and/or sexually violent offending.
The judgement can be accessed by searching for KK v NHS here https://www.casemine.com/judgement/uk/5e0065bb2c94e06539c0c1f3
Analysis of the court papers is available from Women Are Human revealing the legal lengths KK was prepared to go to and the clinical assessments by the doctors who recognised the fetishism KK displayed regarding young girls and feared the prisoner may de-transition once released https://www.womenarehuman.com/court-papers-shed-light-on-case-of-paedophile-prisoner-refused-gender-re-assignment-surgery/
*Update January 2022*
The Times reports on a study published in the British Journal of Criminology which appears to suggest male prisoners in Scottish prisons are doing exactly as predicted by experts (here and here) and going on to ‘switch gender again’ once freed from women’s units, indicating their transition was less than sincere and potentially a way to access vulnerable female victims at worst, and/or to have an easier time in prison at best. It should be remembered that one of the architects of Scotland’s transgender prison policy, Gordon Pike, was subsequently convicted of possessing 22,000 indecent images of children.
Media reports
The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/paedophile-prisoner-loses-gender-surgery-bid-256st7r0k archive
i newspaper https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/gender-reassignment-prisoner-kk-loses-high-court-case-1347195 archive
Metro https://metro.co.uk/2019/11/29/trans-prisoner-denied-gender-surgery-despite-living-time-inside-woman-11237405/ archive
Daily Telegraph https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/28/transgender-paedophile-sues-nhs-refusing-reassignment-surgery/ archive
One thought on ““KK”: transgender paedophile prisoner who lost court case vs NHS”
Comments are closed.