Gary/Carrie Cooper

Gary/Carrie Cooper (aka Carys), a male who identifies as a trans woman, was convicted in 2012 of sexual activity with a child, meeting a child following sexual grooming and five counts of taking indecent photographs and making an indecent video. Relating to a second victim Cooper admitted meeting a child following sexual grooming and raping a child under 13 and had posed as a teenage girl on social media platform tagged.com in order to meet the victims.

Cooper, then aged 47, was jailed for 14 years and four months at Winchester Crown Court.

The girls’ ordeals were described as wreaking ‘incalculable psychological damage’.

While serving the sentence in a male prison (HMP Isle of Wight) another child came forward to report sexual offending against her by Cooper at an address in Hertford between 2007 and 2012, starting when she was just 7 years old. Cooper was convicted of eight charges of sexual assault of a child under 13 and one charge of assault by penetration of a child under the age of 13, following a trial at St Albans Crown Court.

Cooper, 53, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for sexual offences against the child in October 2018.

The fact that Cooper is being held at men’s sex offender prisons prisons HMP Littlehey (and previously, HMP Isle Of Wight) indicates the defendant does not have a gender recognition certificate (GRC) and has therefore most likely self-identified as a transgender woman.

Frances Crook, CEO of the Howard League for Penal Reform, raised the potential for nonsensical crimes statistics if Cooper ‘s convictions (and many other crimes committed by male violent/sexual offenders) are recorded in female crime statistics.

But this person will be recorded as a female offender, inflating the statistics of the extremely small number of women who are convicted of sex offences. It will look like women are becoming more dangerous- and we are not. https://t.co/DibWLC3q3A

— Frances Crook (@francescrook) October 25, 2018

After publishing a (since deleted, archived here) press release entitled “Woman sentenced for historical sexual offences against a child”, Hertfordshire Constabulary received hundreds of replies from other Twitter users asking them to name Cooper as a male sex offender, rather than a woman. Herts Police subsequently deleted the tweet (archived here) linking to the press release.

The Daily Mail subsequently obtained a quote from Herts Police: ‘As per national guidelines, a trans person’s Police National Computer file will have them recorded as the gender they were at birth unless they are in possession of a gender reassignment certificate. These guidelines would also be followed when recording crime.’

This highlights starkly how self declaration of gender (and therefore gender recognition certificates potentially issued to the 1% of the population – 650,000 people – who are said to identify as transgender) could entirely disrupt the recording of male and female crime statistics in the UK since men commit the vast majority of sexual and violent crime.

The Crown Prosecution Service said: ‘In court a person is addressed according to their chosen identity at the time of the prosecution. However, this does not affect any charges, which are determined by the person’s identity when the offence was committed.’

See also the UK Paedophile Database: https://uk-database.org/2018/10/24/gary-cooper-carrie-cooper-hertford/

Photo: Hampshire Police