John/Joanna Rowland-Stuart

John/Joanna Rowland-Stuart, a violent male who identifies as a transgender woman, was charged with the murder of Andrew Rowland-Stuart. The victim was the accused’s civil partner, a former lorry driver originally from New Zealand and previously known as Angie or Angela Rowland, Angie or Angela Rowland-Stuart and Andy or Andrew Rowland. Media reports say the murder weapon was a samurai sword and that the victim died from multiple stab wounds.

The accused Rowland-Stuart, aged 70, is a trans activist based in Brighton who, as director of the LGBT Community Safety Forum, has apparently previously run ‘safe spaces’ for the LGBT community at Pride and advised the police on domestic violence policy. Rowland-Stuart is currently listed as the transgender rep of the Public Health and Commercial Services Union (archive here in case of deletion) and Equality and Diversity Manager for the Learning and Skills Council.

Despite the BBC recently admitting that omission of murderer Scarlet Blake‘s trans identity from trial coverage was a breach of accuracy rules, an article on Rowland-Stuart’s court appearance used she/her pronouns and a headline that stated that a ’70-year-old woman has been charged with the murder of her husband’ – this earned a Community Note on Twitter/X, intended to correct misinformation. This may well be because similar obfuscation was used by Sussex Police in its media statement. Previously, the Home Secretary had to intervene when Sussex Police referred to trans-identified male sex offender John/Sally Dixon as a woman and labelled women’s objections as ‘hateful’ and irrelevant, despite the overwhelming majority (98%) of those convicted sex offences offences against children being of the male sex. Sussex Police wa ranked 4 9 t h in Stonewall’s ‘Top 100 Employers in 2021.

Rowland-Stuart appeared before magistrates in Crawley on 31 May 2024 and was remanded in custody ahead of a hearing at Lewes Crown Court on 3 June. BBC coverage of that court appearance via the Press Association (PA) continued to refer to Rowland-Stuart as a ‘woman’ and the judge requested medical evidence of the defendant’s mobility issues to be presented at the pre-trial preparation hearing on 19 July. The court heard that the defendant was able to walk, but if Rowland-Stuart’s mobility is a real issue, the case would have to be transferred to another court as neither Lewes, Brighton or Hove is disability compliant. Rowland-Stuart’s cochlear implant’s batteries had also apparently failed, making it difficult for the defendant to follow the hearing via the court-assigned BSL interpreter as Rowland-Stuart has limited sign language ability.

The trial was provisionally set for 25 November, 2024.

*Update July 2024*

Rowland-Stuart appeared at Lewes Crown Court via video-link from HMP Downview – a women’s prison in Surrey that has a transgender unit to house male prisoners with a gender recognition (i.e sex falsification) certificate, or GRC. However, new Government policy introduced in February 2024 prevents trans-identified male offenders being housed in women’s prisons if they have male genitalia or have committed sex crimes. The policy applies regardless of whether transgender prisoners have a GRC and is also described as “extending the rules to cover transgender women who have been convicted of violent offences” and also that exemptions will only be considered for those who are assessed as low-risk. While it beggars belief that a male charged with murder could be assessed as low-risk to female prisoners (after all, such prisoners are imprisoned before trial because they are a risk to the public) it may be the fact that Rowland-Stuart is currently remanded before trial (i.e not currently convicted of any violent offences, as stated in the policy) that has allowed the accused to be held at Downview. Attempts by MPs to ask questions as to why Rowland-Stuart was being held at HMP Downview were stonewalled by the Justice Department.

*Update July 2025*

Following a psychiatric assessment, Rowland-Stuart was deemed unfit to plea. A jury trial of the facts at Lewes Crown Court found Joanna Rowland-Start guilty of killing Andrew Rowland-Stuart.

Rowland-Stuart was given an indefinite Hospital Order Under Section 41 of the Mental Health Act 1983.

Despite apparently “stabbing and slicing” Andrew Rowland-Stuart more than 50 times with a samurai sword, the defendant claimed to police that it was an act of self defence. This excessive violence is termed overkill (i.e. use of excessive or gratuitous violence, beyond that necessary to kill) and is commonly seen when men kill their domestic partners – i.e. it is emphatically not female pattern violence.

Predictably, however, the BBC managed to write bizarre and misleading headlines for their coverage of Rowland-Stuart’s trial such as “Wife killed husband with samurai sword” suggesting it was a woman who had perpetrated such extreme domestic violence. At least two BBC TV news reports (here and here) named Rowland-Stuart as a woman during the trial. A great number of people apparently complained to the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) who rejected the criticism, saying that if the court used she/her pronouns, then they should do the same, and that Rowland-Stuart is described as transgender later in the article. At the verdict, the BBC finally managed to describe Rowland-Stuart as a ‘Transgender woman’.

See Suzanne Moore’s a r t i c l e discussing the importance of understanding who perpetrators are in order to identify offending patterns and the erosion of public trust in the BBC for calling male trans offenders ‘women’

See Michael Deacon’s article discussing how even the BBC’s disinformation unit can’t be trusted to tell the truth about the sex of perpetrators of violent crime, somewhat defeating its purpose

*Civil partnership photo of Joanna & Andrew Rowland-Stuart from 2006* *(via Malcolm Clark)*

Following the verdict, photos emerged of the Rowland-Stuart’s civil partnership ceremony in 2006 (reportedly the first for two trans-identified males in the UK) indicating that at the time, the victim, Andrew Rowland-Stuart, also cross-dressed. Although Andrew Rowland-Stuart reportedly went by other names (Angela/Angie), it is unknown whether he actually identified as a transgender woman and then subsequently detransitioned, or just cross-dressed sometimes and called himself Angie. Regardless, individuals who cross-dress have been included under the UK government’s and LGBT organisations’ definition of the ‘trans umbrella‘ or people who are “gender incongruent to some degree” – so the victim would have been considered trans. Lately, some LGBT organisations (e.g Stonewall) have removed ‘crossdresser’ from their definition of ‘trans’ although, in Scotland, the misogynistic farce exists that hate crime legislation specifically protects men who dress in stereotypically female clothing, but not actual women.

See further examples of violent trans-identified men perpetrating ‘overkill’ murders here and perpetrating offences involving samurai swords here

Main image credit: Screengrab via @STILLTish Link to video