How should we talk about Scarlet Blake? This week, Blake was convicted of murdering Jorge Martin Carreno in July 2021. Before attacking Carreno with a vodka bottle and then strangling him, Blake had skinned a cat and put it in a kitchen blender to impress Blake’s American lover. Summing up, the judge at Oxford crown court noted: “You said you killed because ‘your lover thought it would be hot’… I am sure you did derive pleasure from killing Jorge, as you did from killing the cat.”
This was a horrific case made still more lurid by the fact Blake is transgender. Which is where the problem of language enters the discourse. Convention, as dictated by the Independent Press Standards Organisation, recommends that newspapers, including The Times, refer to individuals, including criminals, in terms of their self-declared identity. As such Blake, who is biologically male, was referred to in the press, as in court, as “she”.
IPSO’s code, the press regulator says, “does not specify appropriate or acceptable terminology” but “it requires that any references to an individual’s sex or gender identity are accurate and not prejudicial or pejorative”.
The confusion between sex, which is immutable, and gender identity, which evidently is not, is most unhelpful. Bearing that in mind, it is wholly accurate to observe, without prejudice, that Scarlet Blake is a man (their sex) who identifies as a woman (Blake’s gender identity).
This appears to be more controversial than it should be. The Scottish government has argued in court that it no longer believes sex is, in fact, immutable but this merely demonstrates the extent to which literally impossible thinking has captured institutions, requiring them to parrot gibberish because doing so is “being kind”.
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But this has consequences too. If crimes — especially violent or sex crimes — are to be classified by criminals’ self-proclaimed “gender identity” then we will very soon be surprised to discover that, officially at least, women have become markedly more violent than was previously the case. Statistics that were once accurate will be corrupted and facts will be muddied.
It is true that some biological women do commit sex crimes but the overwhelming majority of such criminals are men. The same is true of murder and other crimes of violence. This is a matter of empirical reality. Female murderers often become infamous precisely because they are so rare.
Transgender criminals are few in number — which is hardly a surprise because transgender people are themselves few in number — but the pattern of criminal behaviour exhibited by trans women is overwhelmingly a male pattern, not a female one. That is to say: they are vastly more likely to be convicted of sex offences or crimes of violence than is the case for biologically female criminals, including trans men. Sex matters.
It also seems significant that a suspiciously high proportion of trans women criminals only discover their new gender identity after they have been charged with a crime. This is not something unique to the UK. A survey of trans and gender diverse prisoners in Canada found that 31 of 33 trans prisoners with a history of sexual offences committed their crimes before they began identifying as trans or non-binary.
Either trans women are actually unusually likely to be criminals or some male criminals believe they may gain some advantage from suddenly discovering their new, true, identity which may, in certain jurisdictions, permit them to be housed in a female prison. I know which of these is the more probable reality.
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Writing in The Times last week, Vic Valentine, manager of Scottish Trans, asserted that “It is our view that anyone who has committed sexually violent crimes, and who poses a risk to women, should not be housed with women on the female estate”.
This is a welcome modification of the Scottish Trans previous position which was, in the words of Valentine’s predecessor, organised on the principle that “by working intensively with the Scottish Prison Service to support them to include women as women on a self-declaration basis within very challenging circumstances, we would be able to ensure that all other public services should be able to do likewise”. That is how you create a prison service that is happy to house a double rapist such as Isla Bryson, formerly known as Adam Graham, and a violent criminal such as Tiffany Scott, previously Andrew Burns, in a woman’s prison.
Now even Scottish Trans appears to accept that not everyone who calls themselves a woman should always and in all circumstances be treated as though they are actually a biological woman. This is the only explanation for their new view that there may be occasions in which trans women should be incarcerated in the male prison estate. At that point, of course, the entire rationale for self ID collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
The Scottish prison service’s latest guidelines for the housing of transgender prisoners begins from the presumption that biological males convicted of violent crimes will be housed in male prisons but it also allows that they may be transferred if “there is compelling evidence that they do not present an unacceptable risk of harm”. Unfortunately, no definition of “unacceptable risk” — or indeed its companion, “acceptable risk” — is provided.
Given that, we may understand why prisons have become an improbably contentious issue in the gender wars. But this is not, in the end, just a matter of prisons or prisoner safety. It is, fundamentally, an argument about language and about truth. If truths cannot be spoken, they swiftly become subversive. Which is why we need to be able to say that although Scarlet Blake identifies as a woman, Scarlet Blake is a man.
