Girl on the Net

Last week a transgender woman in Thornaby was sent to prison because someone she had been intimate with reported her, after the fact, for sexual assault, claiming that he would never have consented to what they did if he knew her trans status. In the UK, there are laws about consent and deception, and most often these laws are used to prosecute people who lied about things like STI status. Jenby is here to give her take on this case: did this woman ever actually lie? Is there a legal distinction between failing to disclose something and actively lying about it? And what impact will the judgment have for trans women in the UK?

No sex please, we’re bigots

Have you heard the one about the Thornaby woman sent down for sexual assault this week for not disclosing her trans status?

Of course you haven’t. Nobody else doomscrolls news stories specifically pertaining to trans folk like I do, not even in my intimate circle, all of whom are also trans.

But as much as the opening to this post sounds like a joke, the actual story itself is even more so.

And one even I’m finding hard to laugh at.

Several years ago this woman performed sex acts on a man without informing him she was trans. She slapped his hands away from her flat chest and told him she was on her period so didn’t want him touching her below the waist. He then finds out she’s assigned male at birth, and accuses her of sexual assault. A charge of which she’s now been convicted, behoving her to sign a sex offenders register within three days and potentially leading to a lengthy jail term. And all this happened a bare ten miles from my front door.

Now.

Leaving aside that trans women convicted of violent or sexual offences cannot be housed in women’s prisons irrespective of their legal or medical status (and let’s not forget, ‘violent or sexual’ is an umbrella which can quite easily include offences linked to stuff like ‘protests’ or ‘sex work’, things trans women are overrepresented in right now) and leaving aside that being on the sex offenders register is something this woman will have to disclose for the rest of her life and will cripple her ability to get jobs and housing (two things trans girls are positively swimming in), I’d like to talk about what this means for us as a country, and examine the precedent this sets for myself and everyone else in this community.

I first read about this story a couple of days ago and found it horrific in every regard. The rampant transphobia of the plaintiff, the stupidity of the accused to lie so baldly and fan the flames of hatred already burning down our doors. Everyone sucks here, I thought. It’s terrible, but I couldn’t help admitting that yes, she did deserve to be convicted, no matter how reprehensible the accuser’s lack of due diligence or insistence on prosecuting her knowing full well what a conviction could mean for her.

Then I started looking closer.

Because both the legal system and the news media in this country are rabidly transphobic and cissexist, it’s hard to decipher the actual facts of this case. Did this woman ever actually lie?

She eventually disclosed her trans status after the fact via text, which suggests that at no point was she ever asked a direct question about her gender to either confirm or deny.

Did she say she was on her period because she didn’t want him touching her penis, or because she was actually on her period? I know mine makes me crampy as fuck and the only thing I can bear having down there at times is a hot water bottle. Some articles claim she wasn’t on HRT, hence her flat chest. Did they administer a blood test? If she’d been acquiring meds on the grey market, that might not be something you’d admit to in court, and YMMV, even on the same dose as someone with the most magnificent knockers, you might experience little to no breast growth and be self-conscious of this fact.

What I’m saying is, she may well have lied to secure this sexual encounter, but if that’s the case, why would she deny having done so in court? Was this in fact a simple case of trans panic? And would you trust a randomly selected jury, a crusty cis judge and the great unwashed British media, vanishingly few of whom will believe trans women can get periods or know the first thing about HRT, to parse a solitary iota of this without getting it twisted?

And yet, incredibly, whether or not she lied is in fact, completely immaterial.

As I scrolled through the various outlets covering the story, a horrible pattern emerged, so stark it all but slapped me in the face.

The headlines were split practically down the middle, half claiming she’d lied, half saying she’d failed to disclose, every other outlet maintaining something different.

And of course, to you or me, that’s an important distinction. And one would hope that, post-conviction, there’d be some consistency.

But there wasn’t.

Because there doesn’t need to be.

Because in this country, in matters of sexual assault, the law sees no distinction between failing to disclose, and actively lying.

Read that sentence again.

NO distinction.

A trans woman who passes for cis can have perfectly pleasurable sex with someone without any suspicion she’s sleeping with a bad transphobe, only to have them turn around later and press charges for sexual assault.

Claiming, as this person did, that their ‘manhood’ had been taken from them.

So cis people’s identities are so fragile they can be stripped of them by one (1) encounter with a mighty transgender, but trans people can’t throw off the shackles of ours, no matter what? Sure babe, go off.

This betrays two important facts about our legal system: it places the supposed mental anguish of a transphobe on a par with the actual, material harms of having unprotected sex with someone who has an undisclosed STI, and it considers trans identities invalid enough to amount to deception as default, just because we appear to be who and what the fuck we are.

Again, cis people’s feelings over trans people’s lived realities.

Stories like this really highlight that while trans women are out here biohacking our bodies, rewriting our sex on a molecular level to bring it in line with our very biological sense of our own femaleness, to happy-clappy cis folk banging on about love and acceptance we’re still just dudes who feel like girls, and when it comes to something as viscerally emotive as sexual intercourse, all pretence of understanding us goes out the window.

And the potential for this legal minefield to be abused is not a new discovery, it’s something people have been pointing out for over a decade. Then last year, the CPS guidance was finally updated, but only to make it clearer that trans people absolutely had a duty to disclose their assigned gender at birth and that the onus absolutely isn’t on everyone else to ask.

Which is fucking. Arse. Backwards.

If you’re a transphobe, tell the people you’re dating. Even if they’re cis, I’m sure they’d also like to know so that they can make an informed decision about whether to sleep with you.

Incredibly, the UK is even more transphobic than we all thought, and has been this whole fucking time.

We just haven’t realised it, because up till now the only people getting fucked over by this law has been trans men.

And trans men rarely make the news.