A whistleblower has revealed new guidance issued to police forces across the UK which could potentially lead to the criminalization of female detainees unwilling to validate a transgender police officer’s identity.
Cathy Larkman, a 30-year police veteran, has come out and stated that she was “gobsmacked” when she saw the new guidelines distributed amongst the Police Chiefs, ones which were quietly issued in December. Larkman told the Mail on Sunday that the guidelines would allow trans-identified male officers to participate in the strip-searches of female detainees.
The guidelines state that “Chief Officers are advised to [recognize] the status of Transgender colleagues from the moment they transition, considered to be, the point at which they present in the gender with which they identify,” continuing: “Thus, once a Transgender colleague has transitioned, they will search persons of the same gender as their own lived gender.”
Larkman, who rose to the post of Superintendent in the South Wales Police Force before retiring in 2021, says she had become increasingly concerned with the declining level of trust between civilian women and the police. In October of last year, she began writing letters to the College of Policing, National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC), and Police Federation seeking information on what was being done to address that decline.
Last week, Larkman received the new guidance from the NPCC, and says “the more I read it, the more shocked I became … They claim they are trying to be inclusive. But this isn’t inclusive of women and it doesn’t respect their sex.”
But most disturbingly, the guidelines suggest that female detainees who object to strip searches by biological male officers may be cited with a “hate incident” in the event the objection is deemed to be on discriminatory grounds.
“If the refusal is based on discriminatory views, consideration should be given for the incident [to] be recorded as a non-crime hate incident unless the circumstances amount to a recordable crime,” the guidelines state.
According to the College of Police, non-crime hate incidents are defined as an incident that is not a criminal offense, but may have been motivated “wholly or partially by hostility.” The incidents may be utilized to constitute an actual criminal charge. Alleged victims of non-crime hate incidents are often referred to victims services.
Larkman says that the guidelines put a burden on vulnerable detainees who might already be overwhelmed by the circumstances of arrest.
“To top it off, if I as a woman was being strip-searched and I said ‘no, I’m not being searched by that officer, that’s a man’ I could be written up for committing a non-crime hate incident. The document then says that, if that does happen, they should consider giving support to the officer affected, not the member of the public. It is absolutely beyond belief.”
According to the Daily Mail, Larkman, who commanded over 500 officers in the South Wales Police Force, fears the new guidance will also put female police officers in a difficult position.
“If they are searching biological males who self-identify as women they will be under a lot of pressure to just go along with it and keep quiet because they could be disciplined for refusing,” she said.
The United Kingdom has long been seen as ground-zero for much of the gender ideology debate, with stories routinely emerging from the nation about women being arrested or criminalized for not adequately validating a trans-identified male’s identity.
In 2019, a mother in Hertfordshire was arrested in front of her children and held for over 7 hours after being reported for “misgendering” a man who identified as a woman on Twitter. Kate Scottow’s conviction was ultimately overturned on appeal the next year, but was just one of many similar cases that would emerge.
Scottish feminist Marion Miller was charged with a hate crime after posting a photo of a suffragette ribbon on her social media. She ultimately won her case, with all charges against her being dropped. That same year, Maya Forstater, a think-tank researcher, won her years-long battle at an Employment Tribunal after losing her job over allegedly “transphobic” tweets.
Despite ample laws protecting transgender people in the UK, as well as experiencing a lower-than-average murder rate, trans activists often claim the country is “unsafe” for transgender people.
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