Trans Crime UK collates media reports of crimes committed by transgender individuals in the UK.  We emphasize ‘individuals’ here, because we don’t think all males who identify as transgender are criminals in the same way as we don’t consider all men are criminals, despite the disparity in criminal convictions between men and women. For example, 98% of offenders convicted of rape in the UK are male.

The same disparity by sex exists in the cases we’ve collected here; the overwhelming majority of offences have been committed by biological males. We absolutely recognise that the majority of trans people live law-abiding lives and the individual crime reports documented on this site no more represent all trans people than Fred West or Harvey Weinstein represent all men. But crime is highly gendered, particularly sexual and violent offending, and some scientific studies indicate that a male pattern of criminality is retained among those males who transition to live as trans women. 

This is important for several reasons, including:

• • The UK government began consulting in 2018 on proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act 2004 which would have enabled any man to self-identify as a transgender woman and access protections designed to redress abuse, inequality & discrimination suffered by women. This proposal was eventually abandoned in 2020 after large numbers of women mobilised to outline the significant risks this could pose – especially to women needing female-only space, such as sexual and domestic violence survivors accessing a rape crisis centre or refuge
  • Under a self-ID policy, vulnerable women in prison would be unable to escape a male sexual predator who declared a trans identity in order to be transferred to a women’s prison – such as rapist Karen White. 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.”  The Times and the BBC reported in 2017 that around half of trans prisoners are sex offenders, based on this study and FOI requests. The number of trans prisoners in England & Wales has increased by 80% and in early 2022, The Times reported that male prisoners in Scottish prisons have ‘switch[ed] gender again’ once freed from women’s units. It should also be remembered that one of the architects of Scotland’s transgender prison policy, Gordon Pike, was subsequently revealed to be a sex offender; he was convicted in 2018 of possessing 22,000 indecent images of children.
  • Violent crimes perpetrated by males who identify as transgender are already being recorded and reported as being perpetrated by females. Given the asymmetry between male and female offending and the fact that crimes women rarely or cannot commit in the UK (such as rape) are being designated as ‘female’, there is huge potential for female crime statistics to be rendered meaningless if proposals to allow any man to self-identify as transgender are adopted. And how would any impact of self-declaration of gender be measured if we can’t reliably compare male and female offending before and after such a major change to the political, legal and societal classification of people?

Before eroding sex-based protections for women it would be incumbent on the government to demonstrate that UK males who identify as transgender do not retain male pattern violent and sexual offending rates. 

If we cannot trust our criminal justice system and media to name and record crimes committed by male people against female people as male violence against women and girls, then sites like this are necessary and will remain necessary until fair and equitable solutions can be found that balance both women’s and transgender people’s rights. 

UK organisations advocating for women and girls’ rights to sex-based protections

Women’s Place: an organisation campaigning to ensure women’s voices are heard in the debate around proposals to change the Gender Recognition Act (2004). Upcoming meetings listed here and videos of previous meetings are here

Fair Play for Women: a group of women concerned that in the rush to reform transgender laws that women’s voices will not be listened to

Sex Matters: a group of women whose singular aim is to re-establish that sex matters in rules, laws, policies, language and culture

Keep Prisons Single Sex: a campaign group advocating for the sex-based rights of women in prison to single-sex accommodation and same-sex searching

Mumsnet: Sex & gender discussion board

Women and Girls Scotland: a grassroots, feminist, women’s campaign group formed to campaign for the sex based rights of women and girls in Scotland

For Women Scotland:  is a group of women from all over Scotland who have come together to protect and strengthen women’s and children’s rights

MurrayBlackburnMackenzie: is an independent policy analysis collective scrutinising proposed gender self-ID legislation in Scotland

Scottish Women: is the website run by Susan Sinclair, an independent researcher and campaigner on Women’s Sex Based Rights

The Sex and Gender Ethics Society (SAGES): exists to promote evidence-based approaches to sex and gender in the UK

We Need To Talk UK and Ireland Tour: feminist organisation facilitating meetings and discussions among UK women. Recent talk by Sheila Jeffreys here 

Transgender Trend: a group of parents based in the UK, who are concerned about the current trend to diagnose ‘gender non-conforming’ children as transgender. Shortlisted for the 2018 John Maddox Prize which “recognises the work of individuals who promote sound science and evidence on a matter of public interest, facing difficulty or hostility in doing so.”

Fourth Wave Now: A community of parents & others concerned about the medicalization of gender-atypical youth and rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)

Acknowledgments

We wish to acknowledge that this site builds on work done by many women who have documented offending by male transgender individuals all over the world. You can access some of their work via links below.

• Fair Play for Women
• This Never Happens Facebook group
• Gender Identity Watch
• Out of My Panties Now
• Women: Decide For Yourselves
• Decide For Yourself: Transgender Crimes
• Real Feminists
• Women Are Human
• Reduxx
• Ovarit

In November 2018, Automattic (the company behind the blogging site WordPress.com) enacted a new, unannounced, change to their Terms of Service that redefined “the malicious publication of private details” to include any reference to the legal or former name of any individual who declares a transgender identity. Automattic then retroactively applied these changes to their TOS and deleted long-standing feminist blogs detailing offending by male transgender individuals. This post on 4thWaveNow contains a statement on the circumstances from Gallus Mag, the founder of Gender Trender. We salute her tireless work to uphold sex-based protections for women and girls.

• Gender Trender – linked post archived here. Other archived posts available here, here and here
• Name The Problem: Male Violence was also removed
• Autogynephilia Truth was also removed
• Relevant data was also removed from The Politics of Gender
• They Say This Never Happens was removed

A subreddit collating examples of offending by male transgender individuals was removed from the platform in 2020, along with many other subreddits which hosted discussion by detransitioners or women discussing female health https://www.reddit.com/r/thisneverhappens/